Bombs, Israel and Iran

Isn’t Israel likely to agree your analysis that bombing Iran would be counter-productive? The general drift of Israeli opinion seems to be that any military action against Iran would at best postpone their nuclear capability a few years.

So given a choice between. say, a nuclear capable Iran five years hence, and a nuclear capable and very angry Iran in ten years time, with a causus belli … who really goes for the short term option?

And of course there is the point that if you take unilateral military action against a nation, you are giving them a very, very strong motive to acquire nukes

I find it very hard to credit the threats of any US/Israel action against Iran, at least until after the next Presidential election. The Republican party money men aren’t going to stand for any more avoidable foreign policy adventures until that is out the way

Which is not to say that sabre rattling isn’t dangerous in its own terms, particularly when directed at the present day Middle East

On a related point isn’t it at least possible that Iran’s objective is not to go directly nuclear, but to get itself in a position when it has the capability to put together a nuke at short notice? This would have be almost as good a deterrent as the thing itself, and they would argue this no breach of the non=proliferation treaty

I do not think that war is the answer in the case of Iran. Nor targetted assassinations or anything like that. I think that we should do everything we can to get the general population of Iran sick and tired of the whole “Fundamentalist” thing.

I have great faith in the Deadly Sin of Sloth if only we can leverage it to our advantage. Translate The Spice Girls into Urdu. Remake “Bend it like Beckham” and use only Persian actors and have the dad at the end realize that his daughter’s happiness is more important to him than his outdated ideas about how young women should act. Put some money into a Persian Soap Opera and have the protagonists be young and hip and sassy. Have them show a little leg. More than that, show them *HAVING FUN*.

Good God, Osama himself said why he was making war against the US. Fornication, intoxicants, homosexuality, gambling, and lending with interest.

All five of those pretty much describe any of my weekends. Let’s start exporting those things to Iran.

The apparent contradiction in Edwards’s positions is pretty clear to me: like with most things involving discussion of Israel and/or the Middle East, it has very little to do with the substantive underlying issues, and a lot more to do with which ‘side’ you’re perceived to be on. Telling people in Herzliya that Iran is a huge threat will be read as a strong ‘pro-Israel’ position. Saying that the possibility of an Israeli bombing of Iran would be a threat to world peace will be read as ‘anti-Israel’, simply because you’re saying Israel shouldn’t do something hawkish.

Even if you’re arguing that Israel shouldn’t bomb Iran because it’s bad for Israel, that little piece of nuance apparently doesn’t parse well in an extremely polarized discourse. Advocating Israeli aggressiveness (in this country, anyway) tends to be seen as pro-Israel (whether or not it winds up hurting Israel; see the summer 2006 war for details) and advocating Israeli restraint (even in the service of Israeli interests) tends to be parsed either as anti-Israel, or at least insufficiently pro-Israel. Make of that what you will.

I think homais gets it right. Its as though any foreign policy positions a politician takes have to go through a simplification filter to reduce them to the form that they will allegedly take in the heads of voters. Garance Franke-Ruta appears to be applying the filter before applying his analysis. He could be doing this because he thinks its what matters politically, because he’s not smart enough to avoid using the filter himself, or because he’s being dishonest. We really don’t know, but these are the standards that politicians are held to. Any foreign policy complicated enough to have any real world significance is too complicated to be understood by the public (or so the theory goes).

I think the Edwards view was implicit in Jacques Chirac’s “gaffe” (i.e. the truth) a couple of weeks ago, that a nuclear armed Iran could be handled within the system of deterrence, the goal being to keep them from getting many weapons, proliferating the technology, and using the one that they would then have. In her quieter moments, Condi Rice probably believes the same thing. All an Israeli attack would do is poke a stick in a beehive.

“How a serious presidential candidate could so rapidly go from taking a foreign policy position to saying that people who share that position are a grave threat to world peace is beyond me.”

Franke-Ruta using “people” there strikes me as odd. Is it just sloppy writing? Or does the “people who share that position” (that a nuclear Iran is the biggest threat to the world and Israel) mean the citizens of Israel? (Are they of one mind on that? And no one else in the world shares that view?)

And is Franke-Ruta then claiming that Edwards was claiming that these “people” (who – Jews, Israelis?) themselves are a “grave threat”?

Seems, ummm, creepy to slip that in there – if it was on purpose.

If that was directed to my comment – okay, you’re right. It was kind of a dumb semantic point for me to try to make, not worth the derailment potential.

The conduct of foreign policy always involves feints and maneuvers, which is one reason why we need an executive as well as a legislature. If we’re criticizing Edwards for not ruling out options in advance, it’s because our current executive has acted criminally. But the best way to balance the power of the Presidency is to make it responsible by punishing people like Bush who violate both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. We don’t need clumsy ad hoc schemes of prior restraint: Congress needs to restore accountability to the system by removing Bush and his allies from office.

Well, Jet, you’ll be missing the most important part: how all this is tied to polls and contributors. You’ll see the front panel with little flashing lights but not all the gear behind it.

Let’s step back a bit. From this side of the world, the likely consequences of a US attack on Iran are so obviously disastrous (closure of the Straits of Hommuz with $250 a barrel oil, a siege and surrender in Iraq similar to that faced by the British in 1915 but on a much larger scale, inability to find any ME friends outside Israel for a generation) that I reckon there are only two possibilities:

1) Without any hyperbole, people in US foreign policy circles are insane. That doesn’t bear thinking about in a country that has most of the world’s nukes.
2) It’s a clumsy bluff. Clumsy, because if it’s not credible to me it’s not credible to the Iranians.

As for the Israelis, the IDF simply doesn’t have the capacity for the sustained long range strategic bombing campaign needed. So I reckon they’re trying to play Bush for a sucker and get him to do it and bear the consequences (some of which, such as their becoming the US’ only ME friend for a generation, are actually good from their POV).

My only real concern here is that GWB is indeed a sucker.

Iranian resentment towards the U.S. dates back to the Eisenhower-Dulles era and the CIA plot that overthrew Mosedegh. One more misadventure against Iran would rally Iranians around their president and solidify anti-American anger for generations. If our government has the patience and wisdom to show restraint, in all likelihood, Almandine-Jihad becomes a one-term president. Iran’s population is young (50% under 30) and west-leaning. Restraint from Washington, and an apology for the Mosedegh overthrow, might go a long way towards restoring normal relations. Unfortunately, the only known accomplishment in Washington these days is how to further radicalize an already angry ME.

#21: yes, swampcracker, IOW: the problem with Iran, it’s danger to the ‘world’ (i.e. the US) and Israel is that Iran is a democracy. General sentiment of the population makes its way into the policies. That is unacceptable. The goal is to make it as manageable as Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia.

My key problem is that I’m not sure I agree with the premises of this argument: specifically

a: I am not sure I believe that sabre rattling is, in fact, the best way to get the Iranians to see sense and

b: I am not sure I believe the implied suggestion that the Israelis either would or in fact could act completely independently of the US.

As everyone has pointed out, Ahmadinejad is not doing well in the polls. Annoying the US is really all he has going for him. Don’t forget Saddam’s mistake: he thought he could win public support by defying the US, and he thought he could do it relatively painlessly because he couldn’t believe that Bush really was so insane/stupid as to invade Iraq (thinking, entirely correctly, that this would be a disaster for the US). Likewise, as a recent article in Salon makes clear, the ‘theocrats’ in Iran fundamentally live in the real world. They know, and you know, Henry, and I know, and we all know, that an attack on Iran would be a complete disaster for Iran, Iraq and the US. The false inference they make is to assume that Bush is

a: fundamentally sane and

b: that he cares about anything except himself.

So you therefore have a paradox. The more the US sabre rattles, the more the Iranians have an incentive to defy them and look tough. The more serious the US looks, the better the Iranians look by defying ‘us’. Because they don’t really believe that Bush will do it. What they don’t know (but I do) is that Bush is bugfuck crazy, and would do literally anything to flatter his own swollen ego.

The second point is much more simple: the Israeli ‘economy’ and ‘military’ (both words in inverted commas) are in fact propped by by the US. The Israelis can pull on their leash, and sometimes tweak the nose of their master, but, ultimately, the Israelis cannot and will not do anything that seriously offends the country that controls them.

If Israel attacks Iran, I guarantee you, the US will know about it beforehand.

Iran`s elections aren`t meaningless, let`s not exaggerate. Abb1 is right to point out that it is one of the more democratic nations in the region, and that the population does have some kind of say over policy. I wouldn`t go so far as to say that i approve of their democratic model; but I don`t know that there is a democratic model in the world (outside maybe of NZ, and a few Northern European countries about which I know nothing) which would get even a pass mark in my book. Unless choosing between two groups of corrupt capitalists counts as democracy. Does it?

paul:I don’t know anything about the relative ease of building bombs through reprocessing and enrichment, so I’m open to evidence that a nuclear reactor doesn’t help things along all that much, but I think that’s an important argument Betts doesn’t actually make in that paper.

It is an important part of the argument, but it was doubtless elided because it’s plain and straightforward physics. You can make nukes out of two things: uranium or plutonium. Either way you start with ordinary uranium.

If you’re going the plutonium route, you slightly enrich the uranium, and use that as fuel in nuclear power plants, which turn some of the uranium in to plutonium. You also need reprocessing plants to separate the plutonium out of the glowing mess you fish out of the reactor.

If you’re going the uranium route, you need to enrich the uranium even more than you do for fuel (roughly 3% vs 90% fissile uranium). Nuclear power plants are a hindrance rather than a help to this plan, since they consume the fissile isotope of uranium that you are so carefully trying to build up. (Except, I suppose, as cover for why you have some of the associated tech lying around.)

So if a country is going the enrichment route, bombing a nuclear power plant won’t slow them down at all. (Unless you get lucky and happen to take out most of their nuclear physicists as collateral damage.) It might even conceivably speed it up.

Paul writes:

Did [Iraq] have bomb-sized quantities of enriched plutonium or just the equipment to eventually do so?

“Enriched plutonium” is a misnomer. The two (Los Alamos era weapon) fissionables are U235, which occurs as a fraction of a percent of natural uranium and is “enriched” by isotope separation to a few percent (reactor fuel) or near purity (for weapons), and Pu239, which is created from U238 by neutron irradiation inside reactors and then separated chemically. The latter is vastly more scalable, barring advanced isotope separation technologies like AVLIS that so far no superpower has been imprudent enough to bring to engineering maturity.

So the significance of the Osirak and Yongbyon reactors lies in their ability to mass-produce nuclear weapons: a country that can make 5 kg of plutonium can do it again and again. France gave Israel just one reactor, but in fifty years it has produced hundreds of nukes. By contrast, an Oak Ridge sized isotope separation facility might eventually make the 50 kg or so of weapons-grade uranium needed for a Little Boy style bomb (note: ten times as much as you need for a Fat Man style Pu weapon), but South Africa took a very long time to make a few weapons this way.

In a different world, the US built Oak Ridge but not Los Alamos and Hanford, waited an extra six months until we had two U235 bombs, used them against Hiroshima and Kokura, and got into a slow arms race with the Soviet Union, leaving Kennedy and Khrushchev with a few dozen weapons apiece. Instead, we succeeded in the much more technologically demanding task of building a plutonium weapon, and raised the bar. This is why reactors scare us more than enrichment cascades; they earn you a seat at the grownup table, with us five official and three unofficial proliferators.

I’d like to cautiously put forward as a data point the widespread resentment I’ve encountered among Israeli friends (broadly across their political spectrum) toward American commentators, especially on the right, who are using Israel as a rhetorical decoy. Israel lacks the technical capability to set the Iranian nuclear program back, and every editorial in the Israeli press shows that they well know it. Israelis are rightly offended at the implication that their leaders are stupid enough to expect to succeed, or irresponsible enough to expect to fail and try anyway. They are also darkly suspicious of the motives of Cheney and others who use this empty second-hand threat for rhetorical purposes of their own.

Uncle Sam: “We don’t want a fight with you, Rostam, but if you don’t get off the seesaw we can’t stop little Srulik here from kicking your ass.” Given that little Srulik is already the target of half the bullies in the schoolyard, Sam isn’t being much of a friend by hiding behind him.

It’s not even clear that the US could stop the Iranian program militarily at this point: success would require the complete destruction of a couple of dozen widely dispersed facilities, some of which are buried deep. The DoD’s morbid continuing interest in the frankly crazy idea of bunker-buster nukes underlines the infeasibility of a conventional attack on this target.

For Israel, it’s even more of a nonstarter: no aircraft carriers, no safe route over the intervening countries, and an exponentially diminishing aerial refueling pipeline that let them bomb Tunis once as a tour de force but at Iran’s range wouldn’t even let them reprise the single-site Osirak mission. Note that Israel is the only nation on earth that launches satellites westward, sacrificing the earth’s rotational boost and half their payload to keep the fragile peace with Jordan.

There’s only been one leader who has successfully bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, and he had the advantage of a shared border, a war in progress, and a mad dictator’s disregard for consequences. We had him in a favorable negotiating position recently, and might perhaps have put him to the task again, but instead we had him executed.

Given the misguided adventure (to put it mildly) in Iraq, I perceive more danger from unilateral decision-making in Washington than from belligerent talk in Tehran. Of course, no American politician, including Edwards, can say that. To survive politically, one must goose-step on national security. Reason and rationality are out of the question. And if one tippy-toes around the subject, sunlight will shine through the holes soon enough. Of course, the neo-cons will exploit that.

Israel will not bomb Iran without prior approval from the U.S.

Israel also will not bomb North Korea without prior approval from Japan. But the Japanese Minister of Defense doesn’t often feel compelled to make it a talking point.

Michael at #29 – that’s genuinely interesting, and does a lot to advance my knowledge on the general subject, but I don’t think it addresses my specific question. By bombing Osirak, Israel forced Iraq to abandon the reprocessing route and to move to the enrichment route. The bombing might then be called successful if the enrichment route is “worse” (more difficult, time consuming or less productive) than reprocessing, or, alternatively, if Iraq was much closer to getting a bomb through reprocessing than they eventually got through enrichment.
I don’t think your description answers that question, though as I say I’m no expert and it may follow obviously from something in your post.

Joshua at #31, that’s likewise very enlightening, and appears to suggest that destroying the reactor did slow things down significantly, but it doesn’t answer the question you quote (though it does usefully correct it):

How many years away was Iraq from a nuclear weapon in 1992? Did they have any enriched uranium (I think I’ve got it right this time)? Did they have all the tools to make it?

In the aftermath of the war the right has claimed over and over that Iraq was “on the brink” of this or that chemical weapon, when all they mean is that given a few months and the right tools anyone could make Sarin or mustard gas or whatever. I want to know how Betts’ claim compares.

No one seems to be addressing the Saudi issue. They’ve allocated 10’s of billions if not hundreds to stopping and/or reversing Shia expansion. The Saudis are trying to influence things in Palestine, Syria, and most certainly in Iraq. Would the Sunni world be completely upset at a US attack on Iran? I think the response would most certainly be mixed.

“if nothing else, bombing is likely to be useless in achieving its express aims”
I like that. Screw moral principles, it’s all pragmatism all the time from here on out. Like torture – hey it doesn’t work, so why use it? Course if it did work, well…
Where does that go, eventually? What do we become when we abandon the risks of moral discipline for the shelter of compromise? Who cares! We’ve already jettisoned the dead weight of integrity, forget about nobility or any of that other romantic nonsense. Let’s get real.
Another pretty fascinating bit of this aspect of our collective nightmare is Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons, which everyone knows they have, but we’re forbidden to talk as if they do, in any detail. Like how that’s in total violation of at least the spirit of the same international agreements Iran would ostensibly be subject to, come to that pass. And this is because…well, it’s just because, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s work on what we can, while we can. Stopping the immediately visible symptoms of the murky ineluctable from destroying the world.
Pragmatism, baby – it’s the only way through.

Paul at 42, was there not an election earlier this year for the constitutional council which vets candidates for elections?

I think you’ll find that the council which vets candidates does not pray to god to get their advice on who to vet; they apply a legal framework. That you don’t like the legal framework is irrelevant to whether there is a democracy. To compare vetting candidates on teh basis of their wealth (which must be obscene in America) favourably to vetting people on their religious views is vacuous. In America, wealth and the acquisition of wealth is a hot issue; but only the rich can control teh process. In Iran religion and its effects on society are a hot issue; but only the religious can control the process. What’s the difference? The fact that you don’t like religion? Makes no difference to the objective facts. If America is a democracy so is Iran. You may not like it but it’s true.

By the way sg, here’s the constitution of the Council of Guardians which vets all political candidacies:

“The council has 12 members: six clerics, conscious of the present needs and the issues of the day, appointed by the supreme leader and six jurists, specializing in different areas of law, to be elected by the Majlis from among the Muslim jurists nominated by the Head of the Judicial Power (who, in turn, is also appointed by the supreme leader).”

Or, to summarise, six clerics, and six people elected by the candidates authorised by those clerics, chosen from a list picked by the head of the clerics. Hurrah for Iranian democracy which, I’m certain, is the true reason the US fears them. I suspect it also hates their freedom.

Paul

The Assembly of Experts, which meets for at least two days, twice annually,[11] comprises 86 “virtuous and learned” clerics elected by adult suffrage for eight-year terms. Based on the laws approved by the first Assembly, the Council of Guardians has to determine candidates’ ijtihad eligibility using written examination. The Assembly elects the Supreme Leader and has the constitutional authority to remove the Supreme Leader from power at any time. As all of their meeting note are kept secret, the Assembly has never been known to challenge any of the Supreme Leader’s decisions.

So, the people vote for a council of 86 people who then choose the supreme leader; the supreme leader chooses half of a supreme court (Council of Guardians) which in subsequent elections vets the candidates (the other half is chosen by the elected representatives of the people). The original supreme leader was chosen “by the people” in a revolution.

As for your claim that elections in the US are not rigged in favour of the rich – history provides evidence to the contrary. Also, even when non-rich people “gather the money”, they always do so from those who run the machinery of power (wealth) in America, so they can only achive power by sucking up to the rich. Replace “rich” with “religious” and where is the dispute? Similarly, in the UK and Australia only those who toady up to the two main parties (and through them to their various financial backers) can win elections.

Pretend it’s democracy all you like, but it isn’t. Which makes criticisms of Iran’s “democracy” seem a little hypocritical.

Derida derider,

regarding this prediction:

… siege and surrender in Iraq similar to that faced by the British in 1915 but on a much larger scale…

I have heard thsi prediction before but I have also read a lot of opinion suggesting it won’t happen. To force this surrender the Iranians would have to be adept at manoeuvre war, since they would have to be able to cut off the US force in Baghdad in a blitzkrieg style assault. They have previously shown themselves to be focussed on human-wave style attacks which would never achieve this, though obviously they could have changed since the war with Iraq. Also, they would need to at least be able to maintain a contested air space over their forces and supply lines, which is highly unlikely to happen given US air power. So the only way they could fight their manoeuvre war successfully would be to storm around Baghdad, destroy the US troops and/or capture them, and get out again before the US air force could destroy them. This is pretty unlikely to happen without their suffering massive casualties, unless their air force is a lot better than they have been given credit for or they are capable of outfighting the US Navy and destroying 2 or 3 carrier battle groups (of which ability they have been giving hints, but I doubt the US war planners are too concerned about this).

So I would say that the upshot of a concerted US attack on Iran’s nuclear plants is likely to be strategic rather than military.

Oh come on sg, we’ve talked about distinguishing between what processes are called and what they do. That description of Khamenei’s twice-yearly reelection reads like one of the less well-thought-out lionisations of soviet Russia. I guess he, and for that matter Khomenei before him just got lucky each of the last 52 times. The fact that formal power to remove the head of state rests with an otherwise irrelevant body just isn’t that relevant in characterising the power structure of that state – neither England nor Australia nor New Zealand, where the leaders formally govern only at the Queen’s pleasure, are absolute monarchies.

But let’s end the theory debate by pointing to the constraints that bind Khamenei in practice – he recently and unconstitutionally overruled the council of guardians and reinstated a presidential candidate they had overruled. So don’t bother providing any further descriptions of a constitution that is, in practice, irrelevant whenever the actual head of state chooses to ignore it. Iran is a theocracy with some potempkin pantomime window dressing designed to make those who actually rather like theocracy provided it hates America too feel slightly less dirty.

As for the role of wealth in the American political system – obviously I accept that it’s something that negatively influences outcomes. But a critique of media power is quite different from demonstrating that all choices presented to the electorate must first be approved by a single individual (and not some vague notion of religious acceptability as you suggest). It’s the worst kind of lazy cultural relativism to suggest that being troubled campaign finance in America equates to recognising the democratic pedigree of a parliament hand-picked and campaigned for by the actual head of state.

I’ve given you an analogy for that process, and it’s Saudi Arabia. And in the spirit of relativism, who are we to say that its town councils are any less important than the roles reserved for the royal family?

“Not everyone who supports Iran’s right to independence and freedom from invasion and foreign bombardment hates America.”
Indeed not, but anyone who announces “they hate Iran because it’s a democracy, they wish it was repressive like Jordan” is, I’d suggest, reflexively anti-US in an unhelpful way. That may not capture your view, in which case we may not be as far apart as I’d thought, but it’s certainly stupid and it’s what I’m responding to.

Let’s look at the money problem again – I’ll repeat that I see it as a problem, and add that we can find flaws in almost any alleged democracy, just as you suggest. But is the system more or less democratic than one where final authority rests, in practice, with a single, unelected individual?
I’ll suggest it’s a great deal more democratic, both because money is neither necessary to compete in nor sufficient to win an election, but more importantly because the interests of those capable of making political donations, even if we ignore the increasing role of small donations from individuals, aren’t monolithic.
Candidates in the US must, in practice, ingratiate themselves sufficiently with a sufficient number of people who are willing to give them funds. Often that means corporations, though not any one corporation, sometimes it means unions, sometimes it means movie stars, sometimes it means “the netroots”. The policies one runs on (though not necessarily those one actually pursues in government) will be modified by this process, but the process does not, of itself, dictate any particular set of policies. One can tack towards Spielberg, move on, the AFLCIO or Exxon, or any combination thereof on a combination of issues. Makers of donations are not a monolithic entity.

Al Khamenei is, on the other hand, a monolithic entity, because there is only one of him, and he know what he wants. This puts him in a position to precisely dictate the content of any policy he cares about, before, during and after an election campaign. Neither Exxon, the AFLCIO, nor Stephen Speilburg can be characterised as a head of state. Al Khamenei can, and therein lies the important distinction.

sg, neither this:
“a mechanism exists to prevent communists, anarchists, greenies…from running”
(See the green party)
Nor this:
“clerics prevent anyone who is not Islamic from running”
(being islamic is not a sufficient condition, rather anyone who disagrees with a significant policy espoused by the head of state is prevented from running and/or holding their position)
Is an accurate summary of the situation. Whether or not that’s deliberate, I think the distortions required to draw your analogy are revealing.

To repeat – it would be impossible to win election in America by espousing certain beliefs even were those beliefs favoured by a narrow majority. That is clearly a problem with US democracy. It is however, possible to win elections by espousing any one of hundreds of possible combinations of policies, depending on the strength of their support from the people and which backers one courts.

It is no longer possible to win, or indeed contest elections in Iran unless one supports a precise set of policies covering the key areas of government, as authorised from time to time by Iran’s actual head of state, as whose figurehead elected officials serve.

These two states are relevantly different. In one, the decision of the people is circumscribed, in the other it is irrelevant.

The rest of your post is either irrelevant to my argument (that saying “America hates Iran because it is a democracy unlike Saudi Arabia” is stupid) or odd. If we conclude that abb1’s statement is stupid (to which my argument above is devoted) then diagnosing its source as anti-americanism rather than stupidity on his part seems polite, and has the virtue of being consistent with most of his statements on this board.
Asking me to show “why America would not hate Iran if it were a democracy” is a bit like asking me to show why America would not eat Iran if it were made out of cheese, in that it is an irrelevant and deeply odd counter-factual. Though not, for the record, necessarily an anti-american one.

I think you’ve started to wander off the reservation a little sg. To take the second part first – if abb1 says “the US hates Iran because it is a democracy” then it is sufficient for me, in proving him wrong, to show either that Iran is not a democracy or that the US doesn’t hate it, or, if I’m feeling frisky, both.

Once we have concluded Iran is not a democracy, as you and I (though not, I suspect abb1) have, it is irrelevant what the US would think of it if it were. Does the US hate some democracies because of their democratic status? Maybe, though I don’t really buy it. Would that make abb1’s original claim accurate? No. Case closed.

As to the first part, I do not “condescendingly conclude that the existence of the Green Party is somehow proof that greenies get a say in government”, rather, I address you actual claim that: “a mechanism exists to prevent greenies…from running”. I appear to have been correct. Nor do I claim that “[Communists and the Islamic community hate America]”. It is not clear why I would want or need to do so, or which part of my post you misread so as to draw that impression.
Similarly, I never “calmly advocate that opponents of the Iranian regime should be given a voice by Khomeini.” Rather, I suggest that implicit in the definition of democracy is the ideal that policies held by the government ought not to be completely circumscribed by a body, let alone an individual, other than the people. If Iran’s electoral system simply included a religious qualification it would make it a bad democracy, probably a much worse one that the US, but I’d accept its democratic credentials. As I’ve pointed out a number of times above, the restrictions on the electoral lists, campaigning and holding office are far more thoroughgoing than that, and it’s an insult to islam to suggest that sharia dictates a system like Iran’s.

To repeat: money politics in the US restricts the set of positions which governments hold, subject to their level of support in the electorate, but money comes from a variety of sources and wants a variety of things, such that a broad range of outcomes are possible. None of these claims is true of Iran. Marxism, for the record, fails to flourish in America (and in electoral systems elsewhere) not because of restrictions on its free speech but due to much earlier restrictions on the amount of sensible thought devoted to creating it.

So abb1, you suggest that the council of guardians (all 16 of them) initially found that 3,500 candidates were not islamic, but then, on further consideration, realised that 1,500 of those were Islamic, but the remaining 2,000 still weren’t. And more recently, they secretly delegated their authority to determine who was islamic to Khamenei, who was able to determine that a presidential candidate was islamic, even the the council had determined that he wasn’t. Just like the supreme court…

(You forgot to mention which sura though…)

You see where I’m coming from with this “knee-jerk anti-americanism” thing right?

Oh Paul, am I to infer that providing the benefit of the doubt to procedures in another country on the other side of the world is “knee-jerk anti-Americanism”? I should point out that American courts change their minds about little things like, oh, say, habeus corpus. Should we assume that there was interference from a higher power? No? A dispute?

If you want to start from the assumption that the US is always right and everyone else is always wrong, you can draw whatever conclusions you want, can`t you?

“am I to infer that providing the benefit of the doubt to procedures in another country on the other side of the world is “knee-jerk anti-Americanism”?”

If you wouldn’t provide that same benefit to the American system then hell yes. And neither I, nor anyone else posting here would. We’ve gone nuts about habeus corpus. Hell, abb1 has suggested elsewhere that the decision in Bush v Gore is enough to invalidate the US’ claim to be a democracy. And yet he appears completely unworried by Khatami v the Council of Guardians. That’s clear, transparent hypocrisy, in fact I believe we call it a “double standard”.
Iranian democracy doesn’t come close to meeting the standards we’d set for US democracy, and anyone who’s prepared to sign off on it is either, as I suggest above, an idiot or a hypocrite,

Paul, your claim that the interests presiding over the US system are not monolithic seems a little absurd to me. They clearly are, which is why you have the current lunatics in power. This gets back to my previous point that you are defining “opposition” in your terms, since the hidden banning of representation in the US system is not particularly inconvenient to you, but the open banning of representation in a foreign system is inconvenient to you.

Would it please you anymore if the Iranian system did a religious simulacrum of what the US does? I.e. allowed a bunch of anti-religious or anti-Iranian people (of a sort diametrically opposed to Khomeini) to run but then guaranteed them failure? Would you then claim it was fair? For example, if the Iranians had set up a system where anyone could run for parliament, but the only source of money for their election campaign was from the Council of Guardians? Or from a fund administered by the Iranian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation? It would be just as much of a sham as the US system, but I can`t imagine that you would give it the same benefit of the doubt as the US System. I doubt you would be saying that you were merely “troubled by campaign financing” in what was otherwise a halfway decent democratic system. I suppose then I should conclude that you are anti-Iranian.

In any case this business of democracy is irrelevant. The Iranians had a revolution and installed a system of government that they like, and they aren`t showing any inclination to revolutionise it again (unless you believe the Bush administration, whose record of accuracy is 100% on middle east issues). The Bushies hate Iran for that reason and that reason alone, and it wouldn`t matter if that system was the purest democracy in the world. Witness Palestine for proof.

Bush vs. Gore does invalidate the US claim to be a democracy. In order to be a democracy, the people have to choose their leaders through an election. In this case, one of the candidates who did not win the popular vote appealed to an unelected body appointed by his brother to prevent the votes of a proportion of the populace from being counted. How is that a democracy?

I think representative democracy is any society where legislative and executive branches of government are elected by the general population. It certainly can starve people and start wars and do pretty much anything. For one thing, those elected are usually difficult or impossible to remove for a period of time (years, usually). It’s not usually too hard for a demagogue to fool a majority of the electorate. Finally, a majority of the electorate can be quite barbaric itself and often is.

As Winston Churchill said, democracy is a very lousy form of government. It’s just that all the other forms that have been tried so far are usually even worse.