Ahmadinejad win actually preferable for Israel
ANALYSIS / By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent Any early bets about the results of Iran's presidential elections bordered on stupidity. Israeli intelligence can predict with certainty only the results of election campaigns in the pseudo-democracies of the Arab world, such as Egypt and Syria, in which the ruler will never drop below a threshold of 99 percent of the voters. When it comes to countries or entities in which the process is closer to genuine democracy, there is a greater chance for forecasts to fail. That is what happened under Israel's nose during the Palestinian Authority parliamentary election three and a half years ago, when the intelligence community did not foresee the victory of Hamas (the Shin Bet security service cunningly covered itself in advance with a prediction of "both this and that"). That is probably what happened at the beginning of last week, when Israeli intelligence - like every other pundit in the region - did ...