Ahmadinejad Offers to Safeguard US Elections

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday offered to oversee the 2008 US presidential elections, saying he’s convinced that, given a free poll, Americans won’t re-elect George W. Bush. That Bush isn’t constitutionally allowed to run seemed lost on the Iranian president—as was the irony that his own government opposes independent observation of elections, the Guardian reports.

Bush has challenged Ahmadinejad’s 2005 election, which saw more than 1,000 candidates disqualified by the guardian council, a powerful body of clerics and judges. Controversy swirls, too, around upcoming parliamentary polls—two former presidents warn that they will be rigged, but the interior ministry, controlled by hard-line Ahmadinejad allies, has rejected calls for opposition party oversight.