The Bush administration and its friends and admirers want to bomb Iran "as soon as possible" in the words of their leading intellect, Norman Podhoretz.  The problem?  Podhoretz, in addition to being a deluded old reprobate, is a man so dumb he not only thought invading Iraq was a good idea at the outset, he still thinks so.  If stupidity were a crime, he and the entire bomb Iran gang would have been in jail long ago.

Hey Kossacks,

First, a shameless plug for yours truly: I've been profiled in PC World's recent feature called "Meet the Whiz Kids: 10 Overachievers Under 21", which is also now available on ABC News' website. You can read the article here.

Now, onto the topic of this diary, which I have not seen mentioned here over the last 24 hours or so. Yesterday (Saturday in Iran, Friday in the USA) was Election Day in Iran for that country's Parliament.

Go below the fold for background on Iranian politics, what's at stake and things to look for in the election.

Iran holds its parliamentary elections today, March 14th, to fill the 290 seats of the Islamic Consultative Council.  It is also expected to be a referendum on Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is in the third year of a four-year term.  Currently the Iranian Parliament seats consist of 190 conservatives, 50 reformists, 43 independents (or centrists), 5 seats reserved for religous minorities, and 2 other seats.  Voting will conclude at 2:30 PM EDT today, and preliminary results can be expected Saturday and Sunday.  Official results will probably not be announced for a few days after that.

The topic below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal, as well as the Wild Wild Left, Independent Bloggers Alliance, The Peace Tree and Worldwide Sawdust.

A picture is worth a thousand words. This is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Iraqi counterpart Jalal Talabani together in Baghdad, today.

Few developments provide greater schadenfreude for liberals than division and conflict among the ranks of the American Taliban.  So watching the Catholic League's Bill Donahue burst a blood vessel over John McCain's embrace of the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee is must-see entertainment for Democrats.  But as I first wrote almost two years ago, when it comes to his End Times vision of conflict with Iran, John Hagee is no laughing matter.

This is just a quick post-debate diary.

I thought Hillary Clinton missed a huge opportunity tonight, one that would have hit Barack Obama on several issues at once.  

It arose when Obama was asked about the endorsement he received from Louis Farrakhan, when he clearly denounced leaders who had an anti-Semitic message.

(for the record, I thought Russert's questions here were awful)

There are some big things going on in Iran lately, and they don’t all involve ticking time bombs being set and sent over to Iraq, secret deals to help its enemies hop onto planes headed for the US so they can follow our troops home, pranks with short wave radio that are "proof" of instigating war in the Strait of Hormuz or selling nuclear secrets to Palestinian "terrorists" that can be used to wipe Israel off the map.

Now, all of the news is not great, as some of it will no doubt be used to trumpet the need to bomb Iran now, but that is really par for the course, regardless of what news comes out of Iran.   But there have been a number of developments lately that will be ignored for the most part (or when not totally ignored, buried as a small column on page 24), mainly because it doesn’t fit the frame of evil brown people threatening to kill everyone so we have to kill them all first.

The President has been ordered to comply with a new law providing fuel to people who have been hit hard by this bitter cold winter. OK, the President in this case is Ahmadinejad, not Bush, and the order came from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not the Supreme Court of the United States, but this news is instructive for us on several levels.

As reported by the Guardian,

At least 64 people are reported to have died after gas supplies were turned off in sub-zero temperatures. The cuts, belying Iran's status as possessor of the world's second biggest natural gas reserves, have provoked public outrage and threaten to turn a mood of rumbling unhappiness into a winter of discontent for Ahmadinejad.

In response to this crisis, Iran's Parliament passed a law, over Ahmadinejad's objection, that allocated almost a billion dollars to pay for the distribution of heating gas to the suffering people. When Ahmadinejad refused to comply with the law, Iran's Supreme Ruler intervened and ordered that the law be obeyed. In issuing the order Ali Khamenie stated,

Why am I not suprised how Iran oppresses ANY minority?

Iran's anti-Arab racism. Iran treats its Arab minority as second-class citizens. Now it is planning to hang six of them after rigged trials held in secret.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/...

Does anyone care?

These days, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has a big smile on his face. On Wednesday he declared victory over the United States.

Ahmadinejad declared George Bush the "biggest loser," since the US intelligence report confirmed that Iran's nuclear weapons program has been on hold since 2003.

If you want to find out more about Ahmadinejad's reaction to the news click on the following link: http://www.youtube.com/...

Apparently the way you pronounce Ahmadinejad's name is Ahmadi-Nejad (Ah-Ma-di Nay-jod); you know, like a first and a last name, not the run-on 5 syllable name (Ah-ma-din-e-jod) we've learned to wrap our tongues around.

When it comes time for Obama to debate Huckabee or Romney or whoever, when they start talking about Iran, he can just calmly mention the right way to say the guy's name. Of course he wouldn't be snooty about it - he might even make a joke out of it (like how people always call him "Yo Mama") - but it'd show he cared enough to get the supposed New Hitler's name right. He can say he called the Iranian consulate - and he could say he hoped it was OK with his opponent that he made direct contact with Iran. Plus, if the Republican doesn't even know how to pronounce the leader's name, how much can he really know about Iran?

It would also make a nice contrast with Bush, who, of course, would never bother to get the correct pronunciation of an adversary's name before bombing them.

I do not read or speak Farsi.  I have no idea what Iranian papers might be online, nor do I even know the frequency for Iranian shortwave broadcasting (is there in fact a Radio Tehran?).  And yet, in all the discussion since the story of the new NIE on Iran broke all of the discussion seems to be about this country, what Bush and Cheney might do next, whether or not it means they lied, manipulated intelligence (duh), now have their hands tied.

But there is another player in all of this, that we seem to be ignoring.  How has this news played in Iran, and what impact might it be having their, on their politics, on how their government might now act?

I have now read a piece that might help fill in that gaps.

This morning's Boston Globe has an op-ed entitled The view from Iran,  I will offer some selections from this piece, and a wee bit of my own musings.

Bush's statement at today's press conference that he heard about "new information" about Iran's nuclear designs in August but he wasn't told what that information was is an absolute whopper.  Why then did he subtly change his words, then, as early as October, from having to stop Iran's nuclear program to having to stop Iran's KNOWLEDGE of a nuclear weapon?

The information that will trickle out in the next couple weeks will be very important to establishing the record.

President Bush's amen corner in the conservative commentariat is apoplectic over the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran.  After all, the report's conclusion that Tehran suspended its nuclear weapons program inn 2003 knocked the legs out from their  "World War III" rhetoric.  And as you'd expect, the same people who helped bring you the war in Iraq are now quick to claim CIA incompetence and conspiracies are behind the new assessment.

The big news today is about the National Intelligence Estimate (PDF link) which asserts with "high confidence" that Iran abandoned a nuclear weapons program in 2003. The "intelligence" value of this "confidence" can be judged in light of the fact that in 2005, two years ago and two years after 2003, the same NIE claimed that Iran "was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb."

I am a fourth year college student from Tennessee, studying to be a constitutional law professor. I hate living in the Bible Belt. I was educated at a small parochial school in Nashville where I was force-fed Evangelical bullshit my entire life. I, like many of us here at DailyKos, consider myself to be a libertarian Democrat.

I am currently undecided regarding my upcoming vote in Tennessee’s Democratic primary. I believe foreign policy is a huge concern for all of us after the Bush administration’s debacle in Iraq. Therefore, I’ve decided to share some of the candidates’ views regarding our nation’s future on the global stage. I’ll start today with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D – NY). I read her article published in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs. I’d recommend it to anyone as some very interesting reading. Senator Clinton certainly surprised me with the tensions of policy she included in her piece.

I'll keep this short. An influensial Iranian Newspaper's allied with Hashemi Rafsanjani (a powerful figure in Iran's clerical leadership and Iran's former President) rebuked Iran's current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Iran's ex-nuke negotiator criticizes Ahmadinejad's accusations of treachery

Considering people as criminal before a verdict by court is a violation (of the law)," he said, according to a number of Iranian papers Thursday, including the independent Etemade Melli.

Rowhani also accused the government of a lack of tolerance of opponents. "It is not possible to eliminate all rivals. It is not possible to label rivals as enemies. One cannot manage the country with just a few people. We have to use all ideas and experts," he said.

"History advises us that societies always failed when they invent enemies among themselves," said Rowhani. "An imagined enemy causes confrontation between social forces and leads to splits."

This siginals a growing split among Iran's leadership. Ahmadinejad seems likely to suffer a crippling blow in the upcoming parliamentary elections in March.

If Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Hillary Clinton’s campaign told him that they had some dirt on Obama, would Obama’s staff react as they did to the Robert Novak column of November 17? And yes, I am putting Novak in the same category as the crazy Iranian leader. Novak has damaged U.S. national security as much as Ahmadinejad with his exposure of Valerie Plame and the subsequent destruction of her clandestine intelligence network.

Why has Senator Barack Obama kept the Novak story alive through repeated statements for days? Is he just naïve or is he misinformed? Is he really so unfamiliar with the journalistic incest of Washington and Novak’s status as a Republican hit man? Why would Obama focus his campaign on unfounded “smears” circulated by Novak? Why would Obama, the candidate of “hope,” pump up the claims of Novak, “the prince of darkness”?