Elections coming up

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

From, what else, Stratfor sources: Rafsanjani will win, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing - he's about the only person in Iran with the power and desire to open relations with the U.S. While he's no democrat - ruthless ambitious political pragmatist fits Raf the best - he's better than anyone else the mullahs will allow to win. That's why the vote will go his way - the other candidates will be worse!

So much for Stratfor.  What are they saying to explain their errant guess prediction?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I still think that they pursue an overly Amero-centric interpretation of events.  Ahmadinejad's victory can be explained largely in terms of Iran's internal politics.  Clearly, his policies resonated enough for him to become the most popular of the anti-Rafsanjani candidates, and the mullahs were canny enough to offer the voters a choice of which style of hard liner would be president.  Given that the mullahs have made it abudantly clear that in certain areas they aren't going to let the President decide things, I think that the Iranian voters made the perfectly logical decision to base their votes upon the issues that the mullahs would let the next presidemt handle.  It's hard to say how much monkeying around the mullahs did in the electoral process, but Bush with his foot-in-mouth comment about the validity of Iranian elections certainly gave the mullahs added incentive to work against the most pro-Western of the candidates they allowed to run.