Iran Elections

Hands up everyone who likes Ahmadinejad. No, me neither. And apparently not a lot of people in Iran either if we are to believe the latest developments and protests in Teheran. But how are we to interpret the election results?
Even three weeks before the election, Ahmadinejad was clearly ahead in polls.
66% of votes casted for incumbent president Ahmadinejad is a lot compared to opposition leader Moussavi's 33%. That's 24 million against 13 million votes. Even with fraudulent votes, that's a lot of votes to fake.
What we saw of the election campaign in international media focused on Ahmadinejad's random nature, his inability to harness the country's riches properly, and his international status of relative isolation and rogue image. If the international community had a say in Iran Ahmadinejad wouldn't live long in politics. But the international community doesn't have a vote in Iran, only iranians do.
What if the election results really do reflect how the majority of people in Iran really have voted. Iran is an advanced nation that has even developed nuclear power despite international sanctions. Teheran is an immense modern city. There is a wealth of educated and progressive people in Iran. But Iran is big. Really big. As in most industrialized nations, most people don't live in the capital, most people don't have a higher education, and most people don't twitter because they don't have a computer and they don't care. We can count on them to be conservative, religious, nationalist or regionalist as opposed to internationalist, and to be quite susceptible to the kind of populism that Ahmadinejad has been guilty of throughout the campaign – including the stunt of distributing free potatoes and filling mass election rallies by closing schools and other state services.
You have to keep in mind that the election results are very class polarized, and Ahmadinjads followers have been quite good at picking up on what the poorest masses out in the country really need, such as securing health insurance for 3 million poor rural carpet-weaving women.
Just because a lot of secular minded, educated people in the big cities and in diaspora are shocked and angry by the election results doesn't mean the results are not representative of a majority of the people. If there were no people who were serious about defending the regime there would be no one ready to fill the ranks of the police and shoot at peaceful protesters.
The vote was possibly partly rigged, partly the result of a combination of populism and fear.
The fact is, without international independent observers, there is no way of knowing.
But one thing is clear: Iran must choose it's own leaders.
Unseating a regime through violent action can never be a solution as long as there are democratic infrastructures in place. It may be flawed and subject to religious selection of candidates, state propaganda and police scare tactics, but there is already a popular voting system in Iran, where ordinary citizens actually vote for representatives in an even more direct way than in the US.
Violence risks further polarizing the situation into even more serious violence, and this in a nation that has all the potential for a civilized and peaceful progress towards more freedom.
Note that unlike in many dictatorships, the regime as well as the opposition consists of educated people and not just thugs with guns, although mainly one side seems to have the support of the gun-toting thugs in the police and armed forces, and ordinary people in the countryside.
If the opposition was a truly democratic majority mass movement, the majority of the armed forces as well would be with them and they wouldn't need to fear the violence of the police or republican guards. In the face of protests, they would just lay down their arms and cede to the masses, as happened in Serbia or Georgia. The massive numbers of people we have seen in pro-government rallies in Iran wouldn't exist, because there wouldn't be enough people who actually believe in the regime enough to able to bully indifferent people into propaganda stunts. This, however, has not happened in Iran, suggesting that the opposition simply doesn't yet have enough support.
This may be tough for secular freedom loving westerners to swallow. But it is important not to leap to drastic action before the ground is prepared. You can't force western style democracy on people who don't want it. It just won't work. If you try, it will backfire and create more violence.
The political system we have in Europe is based on an entire system of values and references that takes half a lifetime to learn and even here are not homogenous geographically. If you go to the countryside in any larger peaceful democratic european country you will have no hard time finding people sceptic to quite a few universal human rights, embracing the death-penalty and being just as prejudiced against other ethnicities and religions as any islamic extremist can be.
I say it often: Education is the most important thing of all. And to be able to travel and have access to free information is of course not bad either. Just don't expect change to happen all at once. It takes many years to change the mind of an entire nation.