Lee Harris från Tech Central Station bjuder på följande observationer:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a populist outsider, has won the election for the presidency of Iran by a landslide, and many in the West have expressed dismay and shock at this result. Both in the United States and in Europe, the general attitude toward Ahmadinejad has been that he is no friend of the West and, to use the words of Donald Rumfeld, ”no friend of democracy.”

That he is no friend of the West seems indisputable. But it is a bit misleading to say that Ahmadinejad is no friend of democracy.

True, he may not be a friend of democracy as we in the West have come to use this word. Certainly, he is not going to establish the kind of open and pluralist society that we modern Westerners have come to think of as being democratic.

[…]

Ahmadinejad emerged triumphant because he came across as a champion of those on the lower end of the socio-economic scale — the champion, in short, of the People — and this undisputed demographic fact should give us pause before we declare that the Ahmadinejad election was not ”democratic.” On the contrary, his landslide win is a classical illustration of a democratic revolution.

[…]

The true believers in the panacea of democracy in the Middle East are engaged in wishful thinking if they try to dismiss this latest Iranian revolution as bogus or insignificant.

What happened in Iran is that the excluded classes elected a man who represented their own point of view — and it is not the point of view that is favorable to America or to the West; indeed, it is one that is bitterly antagonistic. We can either try to explain away this result by denying the obvious, or we can begin the painful process of reconsidering America’s mission to bring democracy to a part of the world in which the Power to the People seems inevitably to put into power those people who hate us the most. (Min förstärkning.)
–Iran’s People’s President