On Friday, Iranians lined up outside polling places to vote in the first national elections since Iran reached a nuclear agreement with the U.S. and other world powers last year. At stake are all 290 seats in parliament and 88 seats in the Assembly of Experts, the body of clerics that picks the supreme leader and may well pick the successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 76 and has dealt with health problems. Both bodies are currently controlled by conservatives.
Khamenei, a hardliner opposed to Western influence, urged Iranians to vote, saying "turnout in the elections should be so high to disappoint our enemies." The moderates and reformists led by President Hassan Rouhani would like to use the diplomatic thaw of the nuclear deal to attract Western investment and create jobs. Iran's system of government invests a lot of power in the supreme leader and the Guardian Council, which approves all laws and has already put its stamp on the election by rejecting most of the moderate and nearly all of the reformist candidates who registered to run.
There are more than 6,200 candidates approved to run for the 290 seats in parliament, including about 450 women, but with an average of 17 candidates running for each seat, runoff elections are likely in many races — a candidate needs 25 percent of the vote to win outright. Peter Weber
The second and final presidential debate was supposed to have a section devoted to national security, and perhaps that's what a few unilluminating questions about North Korea and foreign election meddling were intended to be. Or perhaps, as I first assumed given the topical order, that section was cut for time. Either way, this bare minimum of attention to foreign policy is inexcusable for an examination of the two candidates running to be commander-in-chief in a country addicted to perpetual war.
Our Constitution assigns power to initiate military conflict to Congress, and Congress, as a matter of habit, does its best to abdicate that responsibility in favor of unaccountable executive war-making. The Constitution also gives the president authority to prosecute wars already underway. As it happens, we have several.
The war in Afghanistan is our nation's longest ever, now in its 19th year and long since lost to any sort of American "victory." It was given no substantive attention tonight, nor was it discussed in the first debate.
The war in Iraq was also not addressed. That failed regime change project has cost us about $2 trillion, created the power vacuum that led to the rise of the Islamic State, and has a civilian death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands. Too boring for a debate, perhaps?
Yemen, where the United States is enabling the world's worst humanitarian crisis, was ignored. So too recent (and in some cases ongoing) U.S. military interventions in Syria, Libya, Somalia, and more than two dozen locations in North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
These are literally matters of war and peace, life and death. They are also matters in which one of these men soon will have considerable discretion to leave or stay the course of two decades of inhumane and counterproductive foreign policy. That discretion requires interrogation. It didn't get it tonight. Bonnie Kristian