TEHRAN


Stalin observed that, “It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.”

When the votes got counted in Iran’s presidential election, something strange happened. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a crushing victory but then felt obliged to crush the opposition with killings, stabbings, beatings and a massive show of force.

Not what you normally feel the need to do when you win 63 percent of the vote - two-thirds of the voting public - in a national election.

To huge numbers of Iranians, Ahmadinejad’s victory is not credible. It’s not credible to me, either.

“They made us go out and vote, but there was no consequence to our vote,” a medical student told me at the opposition rally held three days after the election.

I don’t know how many people were in that crowd. Certainly there were hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million. Fear evaporates in a throng. Dignity becomes a shield. Force shifts from the gun to the spirit. Numbers become irresistible.

“Where is the 63 percent?” read one banner.

Ahmadinejad claims he has that number in his pocket, but this electoral farce has weakened him. In fact, the Iranian election is emerging as one measure of how moral authority has shifted on the world stage since President Barack Obama took office.

Two days after the vote, Ahmadinejad harangued foreign correspondents for several hours about the evils of liberal democracy, which he contrasted with the Islamic democracy of Iran “that emanates from ethics.”

Liberal democracy was a sham, he suggested, bereft of ethics and dominated by a “few cadres ruling over the people.” The arrogant powers practicing this form of democracy would soon be overcome.

“The system set up after World War II is shaking and should be put on the trash heap of history,” Ahamadinjed said. “We need a new system basis on justice and ethics, a new humanitarian system.”

That message has had some resonance in recent years, from Caracas to Jakarta. Ahmadinejad contrived to be the anti-Bush for many people.

But to hear talk of justice and ethics when the vote of the Iranian people had just been flaunted with a brutal arrogance was to gain a whole new understanding of the word Orwellian.

Obama should have condemned the post-election violence here with greater vigor, but he’s right to have noted that the poisoned history of American-Iranian relations makes any United States intervention difficult. Obama has gone a long way toward restoring American moral standing in the world.

Now the dignity and civility of the defrauded Iranian people who voted for the reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi confront the might of a regime revealed in all its ruthlessness. It’s impossible to know what the outcome will be. But it’s certain that the power of the spirit cannot be measured in numbers.

The Iranian people have given the world a lesson in ethics while Ahmadinejad has stripped his global message of whatever meaning it ever had.


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