Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast. I'm Anastasia Yglova and you're listening to the

podcast for Wednesday, December 20th. Today we talk to Cato Foreign Policy

analyst Justin Logan about the election in Iran last Friday.

Iran's Interior Ministry released the results

for the Assembly of Experts yesterday.

The results, a kind of popularity contest

for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,

were a victory for moderates such as former President Rapsanjani and the rebuke

of Ahmadinejad's policies.

What was the significance of the elections in Iran last Friday?

We don't have a full roster of official results yet, but I think the interesting thing and the thing

that the media certainly has highlighted has been the fact that the party slate associated with

President Ahmedinajad, which had the somewhat curious title,

The Sweet Sent of Service, did exceedingly poorly,

particularly relative to, for lack of a better term,

pragmatists or moderates allied with former President

Rofson Johnny, as well as moderates and reformists making something of a comeback, but I think that the underlying thing that it is important to recognize is that

Amadinajad is not a unitary center of power inside of Iran.

There are extremely complex political forces

that are afoot.

There are elections, admittedly deeply flawed elections

in which some candidates are precluded from competing, but there are these various

...