Iran; Ahmadinejad the Madman and Mousavi the Butcher.

In the sham "elections" being held this Friday in Iran, the choice is between the lunatic Ahmadinejad and the smiling rather avuncular looking Mousavi. If the Iranians have any sense they will stay at home.
Mousavi is portrayed as a reformer. This could in fact hardly be further from the truth. Mousavi is a hard liner with a blood soaked track record. For, amongst other demonstrations of loyalty, his support of the execution of several thousand of the regime's political opponents in 1981, Khomeni made him Prime Minister. Mousavi went on to be a founding member of Hizbollah in 1983. Most importantly, he is the creator of the Ministry of Intelligence and Information. MOIS is modelled on the KGB and is the Ayatollahs principle organ of repression. It is responsible for the detention, torture and killing of dissidents at home and terrorism and the liquidation of opponents abroad. At the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, on his watch as Prime Minister, several tens of thousands more of the opposition were executed. More than six thousand according to a conservative Amnesty reckoning. Most of those killed were students. After a 20 year absence from political office spent as a "painter and architect", Mir Hossein Mousavi is back.

Mousavi, of course, wants the bomb as badly as Ahmadinejad. For the poor Iranians who do decide to "vote" the choice is not great; the Madman or the Butcher.