Heartbreak in Iran

I’ll admit it: I had real hopes that Iran’s election would be, well, an election.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Islamic republic. I grew up in the shadow of the hostage crisis.

It was an event that served as a kind of preamble to the growing tensions between the Muslim world and the West.

(Or maybe it was just the first time that those tensions pushed their way onto our TV screens?)

After the overthrow of the Shah, the country stumbled from bad to worse.

As a young man, I knew two boys in Germany — little boys — who had been smuggled out of the country to avoid fighting on the front lines against Iraq.

The fundamentalism of the clerics shattered a half-century of progress for Iranian women. And the slow, toxic rise of anti-Semitism has been stomach churning.

But through it all, there seemed to be a vein of real democracy in Iran, a sense that that this was a society struggling toward some kind of self-determination.

This election offered a realization — or at least a much-needed affirmation — of that spirit.

Purple fingers were held high in celebration; and a peaceful transition of power was apparently accomplished without the pressure of American military might.

Not a bad day’s work for a country in the Middle East.

But then, tragically, the hard-liners in Teheran moved to steal the election. Riot police fanned out across the country, opposition politicians were arrested.

This from the New York Times:

Those resisting the election results gained a potentially important new ally on Sunday when a moderate clerical body, the Association of Combatant Clergy, issued a statement posted on reformist Web sites saying that the vote was rigged and calling for it to be annulled.

The statement warned that “if this process becomes the norm, the republican aspect of the regime will be damaged and people will lose confidence in the system.”

Damaged, indeed.

My prayer is that this election won’t be remembered as another Tianmen Square: a brief, beautiful glimpse of the yearning of a people, followed by the iron fist.