"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

- H. L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques (1920).

Washington’s corrupt Beltway political shenanigans don’t make the ideal advertisement for democratic governance. Neither can that labyrinthine system of Ayatollah-led ‘theocon’ rule be upheld as a shining example of "the world’s first and only religious democracy," as Iran’s Leader, Ayatatollah Ali Khamenei, himself publicly claimed, in an attempt to quell popular protest at what was seen to be audacious election fraud. The assertion implied the regime possessed a divine imprimatur for decision-making. [As a concept, ‘religious democracy’, seen through the prism of Christianity and Islam, represents a classic contradiction in terms, but we’ll let it pass as that does not concern us here].

It’s anyone’s guess how the next chapter in the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran will unfold. All that can be said with any degree of certainty as of now - the last week of June - is that a considerable number of young Iranian men and women are clearly outraged at what they see as Ahmadinejad doing to them, thanks to Iran’s all-powerful Guardian Council, what George W. Bush did to his countrymen back in 2000, thanks to the all-powerful Supreme Court, the guardian of the US Constitution.

Whether Ahmadinej ad, as the fundamentalist clique’s front-man, will be as successful as George was in being the Republican neocon hawks’ more-than-willing puppet for all of eight years, only time will tell. [We’ll know soon enough what clout the few ‘reformists’ among the Ayatollahs in the Guardian Council wield. The gut-feeling is that, after a few hiccups, the status quo will most likely prevail].

What seemed the clearest sign of a split among the Ayatollahs was when Iran’s state media announced the arrest by police of relatives of the former President Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, including his daughter Faezeh, a 46-year-old reformist politician pilloried by hard-liners for her open support of opposition leader Mousavi. [They were all released hours later without charge]. Rafsanjani too had openly backed Mousavi, so that the crackdown, however brief, signaled a major escalation in the confrontation.

A system of governance which claims to be a ‘religious democracy’ presumably derives its authority by divine sanction and would, like God, work in equally mysterious ways. How else explain this same Mousavi-backing Rafsanjani also being the Head of the cleric-run

Assembly of Experts, which exercises oversight authority over the Supreme Leader and can, theoretically, remove him from power? [As Alice said before I did, it gets curiouser and curiouser!]

That aside, President Obama’s restrained comments implied that America was, under his watch, maintaining a ‘hands off policy toward Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But he can hardly deny that up to January this year, the CIA’s ‘dirty tricks department’ hadn’t had much success in effecting regime-change in Iran, but not for lack of trying. Here’s what the Western mainstream media reported way back in 2007, so readers know I am not making this up:

On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: "The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilize the Iranian government."

On May 27, 2007, The Telegraph, London, independently reported: "Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs", having reported ten days earlier that Bush administration warmonger John Bolton told the newspaper that a US military attack on Iran would "be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed."

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: "Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership."

Neoconservative author and former Republican candidate Kenneth Timmerman wrote the day before the election of the possibility "of a ‘green revolution’ in Tehran." [Clairvoyance comes naturally to Republican hawks having hot-lines to the CIA which, incidentally, has loads of experience organizing ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine and Serbia].

On the power struggle within the ruling Ayatollahs, Robert Dreyfass, writing in The Nation, noted: "The pro-Ahmadinejad bloc is a typically fascist one. It includes, first of all, the 150,000-strong Revolutionary Guard, the paramilitary, millionstrong Basiji militia, thug- like, unofficial vigilante groups like Iranian Hizbullah (unrelated to Lebanon’s Hizbullah), the police, and other security forces. Important elements of the national security bureaucracy, who are on Ahmadinejad’s payroll and support him enthusiastically. My own view is that the traditional balance of power has been upended. According to conventional wisdom, Iran’s president is a figurehead with little or no power, while the Leader (often mistakenly called the ‘Supreme Leader’) is the all-powerful commander in chief and decision-maker. At the very least, that balance is tilting."

The smart money is on Ahmadinejad holding on, backed by outright force.

In his weekly column in TruthDig magazine, Chris Hedges told it like it is. "The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We have not brought freedom and democracy and enlightenment to the Muslim world. We have brought the opposite."

Iranians, he reminded readers, "do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught." Hedges added that it was Washington that forced Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life under house arrest, "giving the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the Shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away."

Having made the point that he was no friend of the Ayatollahs, Hedges wrote: "We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters, reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the region is submissive and cowed. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing ever greater portions of Palestinian land."

Ironic that President Obama’s historic admission in his June 4 speech in Cairo of American skullduggery in overthrowing the democratically elected government of Mossadegh in 1953 came back to haunt him so soon after. More significant is that his admission was made merely to equate, and neutralize, American devilry with Iran’s own. Said Obama: "Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against US troops and civilians", thereby implying the two countries were somehow quits and should now kiss and make up.