Iran: A Model Nation?

Who said the following?

“Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami (in 1997). (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.”

Michael Moore? Tim Robbins? Sean Penn? Wrong - the above statement was spoken by none other than Former President Clinton in a recent interview with Charlie Rose at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. I think President Clinton forgot that Iran is the country that seized the U.S. embassy in 1979 and took 70 hostages, has proven to be a major violator of human rights, is a key sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East and is the country that recently called upon the world to convert to Islam.
As Amir Taheri points out in today's Arab News,

Didn’t anyone tell Clinton, when he was in the White House, that elections in the Islamic Republic were as meaningless as those held in the Soviet Union? Did he not know that all candidates had to be approved by the “Supreme Guide”, and that no one from opposition is allowed to stand? Did he not know that all parties are banned in the Islamic Republic, and that such terms as “progressive” and “liberal” are used by the mullas as synonyms for “apostate”, a charge that carries a death sentence?

In addition, Clinton told Charlie Rose that as president, he apologized to Iran for crimes of America against Iran. He states that the removal of Mossadegh in the 1950s and bringing the Shah to power, thus removing Iran's parliamentary democracy, was the crime for which the U.S. is responsible.
Taheri corrects the record again,

Duped by a myth spread by the Blame-America-First coalition, Clinton appears to have done little homework on Iran. The truth is that Iran in the 1950s was not a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy in which the Shah appointed, and dismissed, the prime minister....In what way that meant that the US “got rid of parliamentary democracy” that did not exist is not clear.

I can't understand why this hasn't gotten more play, except that the popularity of the former President has insulated him against saying anything outrageous.

Regime Change Iran also weighs in with an interesting note:

Apologizing to the mullas for a wrong supposedly done to Mossadegh is like begging Josef Stalin’s pardon for a discourtesy toward Alexander Kerensky. Clinton does not know that it was President Harry S. Truman’s energetic intervention in 1946 that forced Stalin to withdraw his armies from northwestern Iran thus foiling a Communist attempt to dismember the Iranian state.