Thank you Professor Cole. You are the only American Public Intellectual that seems to know what is going on with the Iranian election. Nothing has changed. Ahmadinejah is a figurehead and and Mir-Hossein was backed too closely by the West. In fact reaction to his loss looks too much like 1953 and the work of the Dallus brothers. I am sure that MEK, the CIA, and Masaad have a lot to do with the "public" demonstrations in Teran.

Obama's plans have not changed. He said they would not in his Cairo Speech. People ignor Obama's speeches at their own peril. As for a nuclear race in the Middle East, I think that more attention should be paid to France than to Iran. Sarcozy tracked Bush on his final visit to the Middle East selling the Arab nations nuclear reactors and secured a permanant military base in the Emerates.

As Isreal is entiled to plan for its own defense, so is Iran. The propaganda that the Neocons and Netanyahu spread of eminent attack is just that. However, like Bush said, Isreal is a soverign nation, so it should decide for itself if it wants to preempt Iran and attack its reactors. But it should not expect to drag the US into the conflict. We are allies, but we are not fools. There are enough fires going on in the Middle East that we cannot put out right now. But to each his or her own causes.

We must cease to be hypocrites. Admadinejad reelection is no more an attack on democracy than George W. Bush's elections in 2000 and 2004. But we Americans, if we acted like the people rioting in Teran would have saved about 4 thousand military lives and about a million Iraqi lives, by preventing Bush from taking office, therefore preventing the Invasion of Iraq.

First we need to clean our own houses. And as Jesus was said to say, The House Servant of another country does not concern US.

yet you hear about people flying in from somewhere else to vote. The public relations ego trip feels good to little big mouth Ahmadinejad, however, and makes the election worth stealing.

Almost all comments I've seen here and elsewhere tend to be hijacked by attempts to paint the results as either "Ahmadinejad won, so get over it" and back and forth about whether to intervene and who this helps, and so on.

That's not the point.

The point that I got from Prof. Cole's article is that if the current leadership staged a coup as suspected, then there exists a possibility that the protesters might not back down this time. By extension, if this is truly a coup we have reason to fear another Tienanmen Square-style massacre yet there's nothing anyone can do to prevent it.

It's also important to note that though there are clues that this might be the case, there is no hard evidence. I got no impression in the article that Prof. Cole was claiming any different, and those commenters crowing about Ahmadinejad's victory seem to be doing so merely out of spite, not from any true position of information. After all, we Salon readers aren't the ones protesting in the streets, risking confrontation with police and paramilitaries.

Right now, Iran is in flux, and all we can do is watch. Which direction this goes lies in the hands of the Iranians.

Just because an autocrat is trying to make nuclear or chemical weapons doesn't make him part of an "Axis of Evil" or anything.

You keep saying 30 years ago, as if bad things happened only once upon a time. Well, maybe 30 years from now you'll open your eyes to what's happening right now. You won't see it on CNN and it seems that you believe it therefore does not exist. But it does if only you dig a little a deeper.

History's a bitch.

- The SCOTUS disgraced itself and our country in 2000, by intervening to end the election count in Florida, thus assuring the election of GWB. That GWB might have been elected if the counts had continued, even if true, is beside the point. The election was conducted in Florida with massive voter exclusions by the then Republican Florida Sec'y of State. We shall never know what the result of a fair election would have been.

- In 1988, the League of Women Voters which used to conduct the presidential debates withdrew from that role. Its President Newman said, "It has become clear to us that the candidates' organizations [Demo and Repub Parties] aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and honest answers to tough questions," Neuman said. "The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public."

- Since then and earlier, third party and independent candidates have been excluded from the debates and the two majors have been able to continue the phony debates unchallenged by any serious discussion of major issues.

- The funding of elections in the US has traditionally been a private matter. Major corporations and special interest groups like the NRA, the oil industry, AIPAC, insurance, finance determine which candidates will get the money to conduct campaigns. On the local level, the same effective bribery prevails, with real estate interests, construction, utilities and the professioanl groups (lawyers, doctors, accountants) buying their favorite candidates.

- With the advent of the internet, there was some hope that candidates could win elections without having to prostitute themselves as in the past. The candidacy of Barack Obama was such a hope. He had no scruples, however, about breaking his word and selling himself to the same pimps of the financial world and all the others named above plus the military industry.

- Other candidates have won elections by means of dirty tricks, rumor mongering and false accusations. One may say that if Americans are stupid, then that is not the fault of the elections system. One may say that but one may ask, who is to make Americans smart; the media? They are owned by the corporate world and prefer to have us stupid. They go a long way towards making us stupid if they can.

Are our elections superior to Iran's? I don't think so.