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Any hope that the result of last week's presidential election in Iran might be overturned is now, more than likely, gone. More than 200 of the 290 members of Iran's parliament have endorsed the victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has declared that there were no irregularities in the vote. Protestors and opposition leaders have been warned that they will be held accountable for creating "chaos" if street protests against the government continue, and the Iranian government appears to be making good on that pledge. Truth be told, though, as far as U.S. interests are concerned, it didn't matter at all who won or even if, as many suspect, the election was stolen from former Prime Minister and opposition candidate Mir Hossain Mousavi.

Speaking to the cable news network CNBC shortly after the Iranian election, President Barack Obama said, "Either way, we are going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States, that has caused some problems in the neighborhood and is pursuing nuclear weapons. And so we've got long term interests in having them not weaponize nuclear power and stop funding organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas. And that would be true whoever came out on top in this election."

The President, who has been severely criticized for taking this position, is basically correct. The Iranian President is irrelevant as far as U.S. foreign policy is concerned. Ahmadinejad may have, with the help of the clerical regime that runs Iran, stolen the election. Then again he may not have. Ahmadinejad is very popular with large segments of Iran's population. The nearly two-thirds of the vote he received in the election mirrors the limited, although suspect, polling numbers available prior to votes being cast, and is very close to the 62 percent he received when first elected in 2005. There are, of course, legitimate reasons for concern about the integrity of the electoral process, but outright fraud on a scale large enough to steal the election by such a significant margin is tough to prove.

Either way it doesn't matter. Each of the four candidates running for president was hand-picked from a pool of nearly 500 applicants by the Guardian Council, an unelected body of clerics that, along with the Supreme Leader, wields the real power in Iran. Each of the candidates, including Mousavi, supported Iran's quest for nuclear technology. Mousavi may have proved to be less confrontational and less problematic than Ahmadinejad, but that, in the grand scheme of things, is unimportant. The president in Iran is subordinate to the Supreme Leader. It is Khamenei who is calling the shots and who has the final word on foreign policy, state support for terrorism, national security, and the nuclear program. The important thing to take away from Iran's presidential election is that the contest between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, or more precisely the response to Iranian citizens demonstrating against the regime, exposed Iran for what it is: a brutal, theocratic dictatorship that is more interested in maintaining an exclusive hold on power than it is in moving Iran forward.

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