stolen or democracy ? depends whos having the election...

taken from Barry Grey
World Socialist Web Site
Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:03 UTC

The attitude of the US government to rampant electoral fraud was summed up by Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to Afghanistan, who said it was too soon to question the legitimacy of the vote. "We have disputed elections in the United States," he quipped. "There may be some questions here...But let's not get out ahead of the situation." The US, he added, "will respect the process set up by Afghanistan itself."

In fact, Washington has intervened massively in the elections, seeking to manipulate the outcome so as to force a runoff between Karzai and Abdullah. Despite Karzai's service as a US puppet, Washington has become increasingly critical of his regime, which it sees as hopelessly corrupt, ineffective and unpopular. The American military has also complained of Karzai's occasional criticisms of US bombings of Afghan civilians.

The Obama administration is openly discussing installing an unelected "chief executive officer" to oversee the daily functioning of the government, regardless the final outcome of the vote.

The contrast between the US response to the Afghan election and the Iranian election two months ago is stark. In Afghanistan, Washington is downplaying pervasive evidence of fraud and charges by numerous candidates of massive vote-rigging. In Iran, the US government and media immediately embraced charges of a "stolen election" by the pro-Western opposition to incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, without presenting any substantive evidence of fraud.

The difference is to be explained by the foreign policy interests of the United States. In both cases, the overriding aim is to establish US imperialist domination of Central Asia, a region rich in energy resources and occupying a strategically critical position at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and East and South Asia. But the US considers the Ahmadinejad regime an obstacle to this goal and has sought to use the disputed Iranian election to destabilize or remove the incumbent president, while it has a vested interest in shoring up a puppet "democratic" government in Kabul.