Let’s go back and start with a grain of truth. On the eve of Iran’s 2005 election, fought between the then relatively unknown Ahmadinejad and the more palatable Ayatollah Akbar Rafsanjani, we were advised by a chattering swarm of experts, mostly self-appointed, that we were witness to a pointless charade, and that whoever was proclaimed the winner of this puppet show would not be the one with the final say on policies, be they foreign (i.e. terrorism) or domestic (i.e. oppression). That privilege, as ever, stayed with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In truth, the president does have a limited degree of domestic power, but the point still stood - the scary stuff like nuclear weapons and the armed forces stayed out of his hands. Over in America, another president who could sympathise with only nominally being in charge condemned the Iranian electoral process. Bush, more accurately Bush’s speechwriters, ignored Saudi Arabia and Egypt to more or less correctly state that in Iran "power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy." His soulmates agreed. One of the American Enterprise Institute’s top Spartan warriors (well, distant observers) Michael Ledeen, whose personal list of ‘100 things to do before you die’ seems to consist of a list of outlandish plans to grind designated enemy nations into dust, also spelt it out:

"There is no real power struggle, because all effective power is in the hands of the two main thugs: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his henchman Akhbar Rafsanjani. The others, most decidedly including the esteemed president, do not matter at all. They hold no power."

And as the election drew nearer he repeated these assertions that the Presidency of Iran was a role with no power, labelling it an "Iranian farce".

If one filters out the flagrant ignorance of these men about Iranian affairs, overlooks how cold-blooded they were in their invasion of neighbouring Iraq, and discards the hypocrisy and fabrications that accompany these above quotes when they are placed in the greater context of their originators’ scheming then we can tentatively accept this very basic analysis. But the problem is that we can‘t discard the scheming. Throughout his articles on the 2005 election and the preceding years Ledeen had never sought to provide a constructive angle on Iran, instead favouring shrill warnings geared towards precluding all the electoral candidates from any American diplomacy and underming Iranian politicians that had sought reform or reached out to America. All candidates, reformist, extremist, religious, those opposed to child executions, were not only subservient to the Supreme Leader, but had no discernable difference from each other.

The mainstream media also concurred with this analysis, albeit generally in more sober terms. The lowest common denominator among most analysts, from the most bellicose to the most conciliatory was reflected in a New York Times editorial that correctly portrayed Khamenei as “Iran's real ruler”, overseeing elections that were a “sham exercise” due to restrictions on which candidates could run. So far so unspectacular. After all, Khamenei was simply filling the seat of power that his predecessor, Ayatollah Khomeini, had occupied from the Islamic Revolution until his death.

The utility of this explanation clearly began to peter out after the elections because it lasted for a matter of months before belligerent analysts became fully aware of the opportunity that the result had furnished them with. The newly elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s erratic behaviour and ridiculous rhetoric were perfect bogeyman material, a “godsend” according to one analyst. Khamenei may have oversaw this oppressive regime that Washington wanted rid of, but was essentially useless for propaganda purposes, skulking around in the shadows and occasionally explaining his position with dull, pragmatic statements. Take his stated view on resolving the Israel Palestine conflict:

“We hold a fair and logical stance on the issue of Palestine. Several decades ago, Egyptian statesman Gamal Abdel Nasser stated in his slogans that the Egyptians would throw the Jewish usurpers of Palestine into the sea. Some years later, Saddam Hussein, the most hated Arab figure, said that he would set half of the Palestinian land on fire. We believe, according to our Islamic principles, that neither throwing the Jews into the sea nor setting the Palestinian land on fire is logical and reasonable. Our position is that the Palestinian people should regain their rights. Palestine belongs to Palestinians, and the fate of Palestine should also be determined by the Palestinian people.”

He claimed that he supported the position of the Arab League on Israel and Palestine, a tacit acceptance of the Beirut initiative that Obama shown interest in.

The opportunities for propaganda based on nuclear Armageddon coming from the Supreme Leader were no better. Khamenei’s promises may be worth little, but still contrast significantly with the traditional narrative of Iranian policy being driven by mad mullahs, such as his appeal that "I've said it repeatedly that we are not seeking nuclear weapons" or claims that nuclear weapons are incompatible with Islam. Given that the statements made by enemy leaders are only taken at face value if they are sufficiently incriminating, these claims were hardly seen as worth reporting or considering.

President Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, was moved to the forefront as a new Hitler, and in his crazy way, the obvious successor to the first Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. That is provided that one put aside his lack of executive power, which experts had rushed to exaggerate to us only months earlier. Khameini effectively vanished behind references to Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions and his baiting of Israel. Now AEI ‘scholars’ were pumping out now or never propaganda that speculated on what would happen “if Ahmadinejad [got] his finger on a nuclear trigger.” The Bush administration repeatedly referred to Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitic remarks and activities as proof that his country posed an existential threat to Israel. Binyamin Netanyahu, whose lack of direct connection to the Holocaust strangely has given him the authority and ability to invoke it with a complacent regularity that might be insulting to those actually involved, added Ahmadinejad to his list of new Hitlers, along with other two-bit operators like Saddam and Yasser Arafat, who could at least claim they had a decisive degree of power over their armed legions. Dore Gold, former ambassador to a United Nations that he vocally despised and now at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, invoked the Genocide Convention against Ahmadinejad, who he claimed was threatening “mass murder” in Israel with “nuclear tipped missiles“.

Having been force fed lies about Iraq not long before it was disheartening to see rational analysis once again taking such a heavy spanking as the same craven opinion leaders reached for their panic buttons. Neville Chamberlain may as well have been dug up and stuffed like a scarecrow to warn dissenters against ‘appeasement‘, for which most of us would read ‘searching for facts behind the rhetoric‘. So never mind that Ahmadinejad never actually claimed Israel should be wiped off the map, let alone threatened to do so. This mangled translation was seized upon and crowbarred into pro-war advocacy by people unconcerned that Farsi is one of the world‘s most common languages, that anyone who wanted to know what was actually said only needed to read it and that no amount of insistence on the part of stubborn pundits would force its words to take on different translations. Never mind that Iran’s attempts to gain regional influence would have been ruined if nuclear weapons were launched upon the Holy Land, which in Jerusalem has sites of the highest importance to every Muslim and in the Palestinians has the useful victims that can make or break a Middle Eastern ruler’s credentials. No, Ahmadinejad was crazed, zealous, fanatical, irrational, part of a “messianic apocalyptic cult” according to Netanyahu, and thus any motives could be imputed to him with little requirement of proof , incentive or precedent for them, such as Bernard Lewis’ risible prediction about what day the apocalypse would fall on or the bottomfeeders who unquestioningly swallowed and publicised the Star of David hoax. On the other hand, those with a disposition towards empirical evidence, who would have pointed out that Iran has the largest Jewish community in the region outside of Israel, and one which is reasonably well-integrated considering this is an Islamic theocracy, could be brushed aside because they failed to understand the fanatical nature of the regime.

Predictably the other big beneficiary of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric (the jewel in the crown being the thing he didn't say) being hooked up to Khamenei's nuclear programme (the jewel in the crown being the nuclear weapons he didn't have), along with Bush, was Israel’s military-political establishment. Israeli officials have long wanted the sponsor of Hamas and Hezbollah toppled and have desired a coordinated US-Israeli strike on military installations to further the work of the western-backed terrorist groups wreaking havoc in Iran. Unbelievably, the American National Intelligence Estimate at the end of 2007 that stated that Tehran had abandoned efforts to pursue nuclear weapons caused consternation in the Israeli Knesset, with numerous members electing to panic and to warn of an impending war. As Norman Finkelstein pointed out, all over the world people breathed a sigh of relief over the announcement, with the exception of those Israeli hawks who saw another pretext for war thwarted. Whatever their stated fear, Israel’s hawks needed Ahmadinejad, and it appears he is their favoured candidate for the election due to his exemplary impersonation of a paper tiger.

Four years of feckless journalism and fear-mongering over Ahmadinejad’s regime was put on hiatus for the period around yesterday’s election, and once again we were reminded that it was Khamenei that had executive control and was the director of foreign, military, and nuclear policy, a handy piece of insurance just in case the more moderate Mousavi toppled Ahmadinejad and things started picking up for the Iranians. Dore Gold now claimed that 'the key decisions in the nuclear field are taken by the spiritual leader Khamenei, so it doesn’t matter who is elected president,’ raising the question about why he was so desperate to prevent Ahmadinejad committing genocide all this time. Meanwhile, the still babbling experts at AEI reverted to type and told us that “regardless of who wins the election, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will be the true victor because the president is subservient to him.” In the run up to the election Israeli activists coordinated protests with mock executions of gays and women staged outside Iranian embassies to show what a horrible place Iran is, that it is no “western democracy”, as if anyone was claiming this. Yet their reported desire to keep hold of Ahmadinejad, whose domestic regime would almost certainly continue to be worse than the vision offered by the reformist advocate Mousavi of greater parity between the sexes, shows just how little interest the Israeli government has in ameliorating the conditions of these individuals. Mousavi was useless for propaganda. Mousavi, like Ahmadinejad’s reformist successor Khatami, accepts that the Holocaust happened.

Those with experience of fighting for change will tell you that you that there are factors you can control, factors you can influence and factors you can understand. With this in mind it pays to consider that while this election will not change Khamenei’s ability to coordinate nuclear and foreign policy, in short, the issues the west cares about, these elections do matter to the Iranians for several reasons. Iran’s economic and social situation under Ahmadinejad has deteriorated and could be rectified by a change of president, a message by the people can be sent to those blocking reform if it is seen that there is mass, quantifiable dissatisfaction with the way things are going. And if there are opportunities for a change in Iranian policy towards women over child executions, which was also a hot topic of debate, then these should not be sneered at or sabotaged.

Lectures on Iranian oppression from people who blatantly care little about its victims and on Nazi atrocities 70 years ago from people whose memory seemingly doesn’t stretch back two years are a bit hard to take and do Iranians struggling for greater freedom little good. Four torturous years of us banging our heads against the wall has proven once again the fact that speaking truth to power is no use. They knew all along, and if Ahmadinejad does win the most votes, I imagine than in less than a week we will be told to start quaking over his rhetoric and his nuclear weapons again.