US strategy and Iranian elections

Kaveh Afrasiabi discusses the upcoming Iranian elections and US foreign policy in the Middle East, which he neatly summarizes when he says that the US divides Middle East countries into "moderates" and "radicals". Those terms have nothing to do with a regime being progressive or radical, but rather radical = opposes Washington, and moderate = Washington allied.
That's why radicals include Hamas, Syria, Hezbollah and Iran; moderates include Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt.

But the reality is different. For instance, Iran has a much more open political system than Saudia Arabia and the Gulf monarchies.

What some Arab countries fear with Iran is Tehran's brand of Islamist democracy, which could give ideas to their own repressed populations to ask for more liberties, etc.

In Afrasiabi's words:

"Rhetoric aside, the Barack Obama administration has shown a great deal of continuity with the George W Bush administration, by pursuing, in part via its Iran point man, Dennis Ross, the diplomatic track of bifurcating the region into "moderate" and "radical" camps. The former includes Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, with Iran, Syria, Hamas in Palestine and Lebanon's Hezbollah in the other camp.

The election for the 10th president of Islamic Republic exposes the hypocrisy and double standards of putting the considerably more democratic Iran below authoritarian Arab monarchies, as there is nothing "moderate" about the repression of women or Shi'ite minorities in Saudi Arabia, no matter how Washington spins it.

More than the nuclear issue, what the conservative oil sheikdoms in the Persian Gulf fear is Iran's brand of Islamist democracy that has mobilized masses of Iranians. The long-demobilized and politically docile populations in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) could use Iran as a reference society and question the legitimacy of their archaic and tribal political systems that are perpetuated by the US for the sake of geo-economic and geostrategic interests."