Now that I’ve lured you in with a misleading, typical MSM headline, read on. In Iran, motives are never so genuine and kind.

TEHRAN, Iran May 23, 2005 ???????? Iran’s supreme leader ordered the hard-line constitutional watchdog council to reconsider its decision to bar senior reformist candidates from running in next month’s presidential elections, state-run television reported Monday.

The Guardian Council, which vets the election candidates, on Sunday rejected all the reformists registered to run in next month’s presidential elections. The council rejected all but six of the 1,000 hopeful candidates. Among those rejected were all the female candidates.

“It’s appropriate that all individuals in the country be given the choice from various political tendencies,” supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in his decree addressed to Guardian Council chief Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati.

“Therefore, it seems that (the) qualification of Mr. Moin and Mr. Mehralizadeh be reconsidered,” the television quoted Khamenei’s decree as saying, referring to the two most prominent reformists disqualified, Mostafa Moin and Vice President Mohsen Mehralizadeh.

Khamenei made the statement after parliamentary speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, also a hard-liner, called on the supreme leader to intervene in the growing dispute over the disqualification of Moin and Mehralizadeh to encourage more Iranians to vote June 17.

To add, not a single reform candidate had been approved. This will not make much of a difference in the outcome, however, and the mullahs know this. The problem for the regime is not that they’ll lose the election, but that people may simply reject them by not showing up to vote. By allowing two reform candidates to run, they are hoping that it will draw larger crowds out than they otherwise would.

Perhaps one of the biggest phobias of a tyrannical regime is that they won’t get the legitimacy they need from both the domestic and international community. This is exactly why they go through the huge trouble of organizing sham elections every few years. What will happen if nearly nobody votes? Regardless of who wins, he will know that he is not the true choice of the Iranian people. The Iranian rulers have even acknowledged that they do not expect many people to turn out, and you know they’re worried about it. The revolution has been a long time brewing and this election could be a final nail in that coffin.