By Jeremy Gillick What will change if Mirhossein Mousavi, a former Iranian Prime Minister, a "moderate," and the primary challenger to reigning Iranian president and rabble-rouser Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wins this Friday's much-hyped Iranian election? Will Iran abandon it's nuclear program or change its position vis-a-vis Israel or the United States? Will the country undergo a "velvet revolution," as Saeed Laylaz, editor of an Iranian business daily, told Ha'aretz it would? Or might Ahmadinejad's cult-like supporters, backed by the Basij paramilitary and the Revolutionary Guard, revolt, a possibility considered by Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation? The answer, of course, is that we don't know. In addition to knowing very little about how Iranian politics actually work--even many of the foremost American experts on Iran concede this unfortunate deficiency--Mousavi himself is a mysterious candidate. Writing in The New...

Continue reading