Campaign season gets testy in Iran

For many, it was the first time seeing an American flag in public that was not being burned. Crowds formed. Video crews filmed. Enthusiastic passersby peppered an American journalist at the booth with questions.

Tomorrow, Iranian voters head to the polls for their own high-stakes election, which US officials hope will mark another step forward for US-Iranian relations. The election, which pits incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has built his reputation on antagonizing the West, against moderate former prime minister Mir Hussein Mousavi and two other rivals, comes in the midst of a public tug-of-war over Iran's future and the bitterest political contest in the history of the Islamic Republic.

At televised debates and campaign rallies, Mousavi, Ahmadinejad's main challenger, has openly accused the incumbent president of being a dictator, of ruining Iran's economy, and of lowering Iran's standing in the world with his aggressive posture toward the West, topics once considered taboo.

"Shame has been brought on Iran," Mousavi said last week during a televised debate. "You have created tension with other countries. Heavy costs have been brought on the nation in these four years."

Ahmadinejad responded by saying that he has defended Iran from bullying world powers. In his own defiance of long-held political taboos, Ahmadinejad also accused a powerful clique of clerics of massive corruption, stunning the public.

"What is remarkable about this election is that the candidates are really at each other's throats, and they are making allegations, naming names, alleging large-scale corruption, arbitrary rules, dictatorship," said Ali Banuazizi, political science professor at Boston College. "These are things that have never been said out loud before."

Ahmad Sadri, a sociology professor at Lake Forest College in Illinois who is also a columnist for a reformist newspaper in Iran, said that the recent rhetoric means that the political system, controlled by clerics and held up as "divine" for three decades, is no longer sacred.

"This is a great shock both to the people and for the system," he said.

But one taboo that has not been crossed is the authority of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the ability to disqualify any candidate. Key foreign policy decisions fall under Khamenei, as do decisions about the country's nuclear program, which Iran insists is for peaceful purposes, but which the United States believes is geared toward producing a nuclear weapon.

Still, US officials and analysts believe that a victory for one of Ahmadinejad's opponents would increase Obama's chances of building a new relationship with Iran. Mark Gasiorowski, a professor of political Science at Louisiana State University who has taught at the University of Tehran, said Khamenei would view a strong vote for a reformist candidate as "a clear public opinion signal, and would be reluctant to go against that."

At the same time, a victory for Ahmadinejad would give him a mandate to continue his tough stance toward the West. Although even Ahmadinejad has made overtures to the United States - sending a rare congratulatory note to Obama after his election - many of his supporters are hard-liners who see anti-Americanism a pillar of the Islamic regime that took power in 1979, after revolutionaries toppled the US-backed shah and took American embassy officials hostage.

"They are like the die-hard anti-communists in the US during the Cold War, who could never tolerate negotiating with the communists," Gasiorowski said of Ahmadinejad's supporters.

Former President George W. Bush's war in Iraq and his inclusion of Iran in the "axis of evil" made it politically impossible for any Iranian leader to advocate friendship with United States. But the victory of Obama, who openly campaigned on improving relations with Iran, helped remove the taboo on talking positively about the United States.

"Obama's election has energized the people of Iran in that they see an opportunity to have good relations with the United States, and they want the candidates who will seize this opportunity," said Meir Javedanfar, a Middle East analyst who wrote a biography of Ahmadinejad.

After the US election in November, larger-than-life posters of Obama and McCain decked a swarming exhibition hall for Iran's annual media festival. A visitor's book at the America booth filled with words of optimism. "I love you Obama!" wrote one Iranian student. Another anonymous well-wisher wrote: "I hope the closed door will open between the two big international powers."

Meanwhile, cafés were filled with young people discussing whether Obama could open a new chapter of friendship with Iran. And even then, six months before the official start of campaigning in Iran, some conservatives were joining liberals to coordinate a strategy to topple Ahmadinejad.

It was a level of optimism about change not seen since 1997, when voters swept reformist Mohammad Khatami into office. Khatami's eight years loosened restrictions on speech and dress but were marred by massive crackdowns on activists and newspapers ordered by Khamenei. Khatami also failed to restore ties with the United States, which maintained a near universal trade embargo during his time in office. Disillusioned, many Iranian liberals boycotted the polls in 2005, the year Ahmadinejad won.

Khatami, still beloved by millions, is now campaigning for Mousavi. After Khatami threw a green shawl over Mousavi to endorse him, supporters took to the streets in green face paint and green head scarves, forming a human chain roughly 10 miles long along a Tehran boulevard on Monday in an exuberant display of their numbers.

Mousavi, an architect who served as Iran's prime minister during its devastating war with Iraq in the 1980s, has few credentials as a reformer. But young people have been drawn to him because he is seen as an intellectual and because he hit the campaign trail with his wife, a no-nonsense university dean who has been compared to Michelle Obama. The pair have said they would end the punishment of women who don't wear Islamic head-covering, a key demand of liberal voters.

Ahmadinejad also faces two other challengers: Mehdi Karrubi, the liberal former speaker of parliament, and Mohsen Rezai, the conservative former commander of the Revolutionary Guard. Ahmadinejad has lost support from some key conservatives, who say he spurred inflation by handing out too much money to the poor, and who are angered by his widespread allegations of corruption.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, a run-off between the top two will be held June 19.

For now, Mousavi appears to have momentum, at least among young voters. Although the Iranian government blocked Facebook briefly, Mousavi's page, now restored, has more than 36,000 fans, while Ahmadinejad's has just over 8,000 fans.

"We are smelling the morning of freedom everywhere," Mousavi told supporters in a recent post.

Ahmadinejad has fought back on his own blog.

"Whatever people have said against me, I don't mind," he wrote 10 days ago in his most recent post. "I just want to be a servant to the people."