The Iranian voting system for Parliament is highly complicated so final and full results are unlikely to come in before Wednesday. It seemed that the hardliners were making ‘an unexpectedly strong showing’ – well, unexpectedly if you were a bog-standard Western journalist taking hand-outs from the embassies.

In fact, the assumption that pragmatic conservatives would weaken Ahmedinejad enough to change the international balance of power was always wishful thinking from the diplomatic corps.

Internal Iranian politics is now more nuanced. The President has to tread more carefully. But there is no reason to believe that Iran's foreign policy will change much between now and the next Presidential Election in 2009.

The wishful thinkers, who are driven far more by containing their own 'hawks' than Iran, are switching their timetable. They will use the possible candidacies of Larijani or Qalibaf (Mayor of Iran) in 2009 to continue to counsel caution on a US Presidency that might be tempted to endorse aggressive Israeli or even US Centcom action.

However, the White House must be getting more than a little irritated with promises of improvement coming from 'dove-like' diplomats. The fact that Cheney and not Rice has been called over for a chat in Riyadh indicates that something is up. Some 'hawks' must feel that the US has already played some its best cards in a wild goose chase to influence Iranian public opinion and ended up with nothing better than a confusing political soup.

Many reformist votes would have stayed at home so the anti-Ahmedinejad camp is still far from united. The 65% turn-out was not so very high (despite Iranian claims) but it was still respectable, so the low turn-out argument to imply mass discontent against the President that was being developed at the end of last week by the 'usual sources' just will not play.

Iranian politics is complex alive and well. Larijani, a not-so hot candidate for Presidency until now, won a landslide in his city of Qom and is developing a conservative base with support from elements in the religious establishment which may make him a serious contender against Ahmedinejad in 2009. He is the one the West wants to run the country because they think he will concede ground on nuclear proliferation and call off the Pasdarans.

Similarly, the speaker of the Parliament, Gholam-Ali Hadad-Adel also did well in Tehran and someone who can speak for the Tehran lower middle class and working class and the rural poor is always going to be a hot favourite - and anyone who can oust Ahmedinejad has got to be good news to the Foreign Office and the State Department.

But I have a complaint and it is a complaint from watching Western reportage from afar for some time - and it is a complaint not only about coverage of Iran but of many other emerging world centres where the West is trying to manipulate events in its own interest under cover of claiming 'superior liberal values'.

The complaint is that Western journalists are becoming part of the ideological war and not respecting liberal values by merely reporting on it. One can understand the engagement of journalists in the war against national socialism in the 1940s but we have a too-ready acceptance by the media today that the 'other side' requires to be reported through some sort of prism in which there are implicit good guys and bad guys.

Unless some secret cabal really does run the world, I do not recall a point where we declared war on Iran and I do recall that the media still retained its critical faculties when Parliament did, in fact, declare war on Saddam Hussein.

What seems to be happening is that relatively young journalists and older hands prepared to accept an agenda from London are not getting out and reporting questioning matters from long experience (like, say, Robert Fisk), but are taking hand-outs from Embassies, getting their news from individuals and groups introduced by Embassy officials and taking their opinion from the socially acceptable members of their own class.

The local educated and metropolitan bourgeoisie whose great ambition is to be free to disco and go to business school may have opinions but they rarely speak for the people in any democracy, let alone one as complex and poor as Iran's. Yet it is clear that some journalists are writing their stories on the basis of dinner party conversations.

The Iranian middle class young are as ambitious and alienated from their political class as any other but Western commentators rather depend on their talks with this limited metropolitan class in Tehran to the detriment of soundings in the rural and poorer urban areas.

Anti-Americanism and national-populism, associated with a dislike of the cosmopolitan elite, will naturally merge with economic suspicions and desires in any situation where the poor want and cannot get. As Brecht put it, 'first bread then ethics'. There seems to be little interest in modern Western liberal journalism in the 'conditions of life' and historical context.

Until very recently, and then only under highly controlled circumstances dictated by careful political consideration of the consequences by the BBC, there was a similar domestic conspiracy of silence about the appeal of the BNP to sections of the indigenous white working class in the UK.

It is as if the BNP and the legitimate discontents on which they fed did not exist if you agreed not to report them. It was a sign of the exceptional arrogance of the liberal mind that seeks to bend reality to what ought to be rather than what is - but I suppose that is what intellectuals do.

Middle class journalists, liberals and diplomats don't like the BNP or Ahmedinejad so they try and will them away instead of understanding why how and they acquire power - the same could be said of Hamas, Mugabe or the Sudanese.

Investigating what evils permit evil would be a more mature approach than simply a-historically condemning what is really just a natural growth of thwarted and legitimate concerns in the battle for cultural and physical resources.

The word is the deed to some extent but, in modern journalism, the deed is the political attempt to capture high ground by the international community (a rather unaccountable and opaque group).

What journalists should be doing is explaining to us why things are happening or just restrict themselves to facts that make clear their source and limited compass so that the public can make up its own mind.

To some extent, it is about that old bug-bear 'class'. Just as to understand faith-based groups, you have to engage with the concept of faith (even if you do not hold to one yourself) and do so with respect.

In the same way, you need reporters who, if they do not come from the classes below the usual one, are prepared to engage with their concerns even if the net result is still a critique.

In fact, we are getting to the point where (like Zimbabwe and Darfur) the ‘wishful thinking’ in otherwise serious journalistic reportage is reaching daft proportions. Acres of 'outrage' has merely created confusion and pointed out that Western power is limited and its liberalisms resented - 'outrage' has merely limited realist options and probably, if unprovenly, increased the murder rate.

But let us get back to Iran. Iranian democracy is seriously flawed but it is still a democracy in a region where the strongest Western allies (excluding Israel, of course, which may be volatile and aggressive but is a democracy) are not exactly models of accountability and transparency.

Although more democratic than Iran, the hidden controls within Western party structures still make Western countries much less democratic than we like to believe.

The pre-election diminishing by commentators of the populist support for Ahmedinejad has been ideological because the commentators have been led towards assumptions they have found difficult to question. We suspect that there are junior journalists in a few cases who cannot say boo to the editorial goose.

This ‘orientalism’ of class in which non-cosmopolitan traditionalist thinking and, at the other end of the political spectrum, grassroots radicalism (including street resistance to Ahmedinejad) are discounted as somehow less intelligent or rational than middle class pining for social and economic freedoms exists because these are the values of the reporters.

Indeed, to call them journalists rather than reporters is probably sensible because they have not been able to abstract themselves from their own value system in order to ask why people act as they do.

In Iran, it is probably true that the position of the President has weakened, though not dramatically. The message of this election is basically that crude national-populism can only take you so far if you do not deliver economic benefits.

The probability is that Ahmedinejad's prospects for election do not rise and fall on his 'goodness' or 'badness' but on the degree to which he delivers those economic benefits. Patience amongst the petit-bourgeoisie may be running out, but he has a year to deliver and he is no fool.

The role of the West in all this is interesting. On the one hand, its tub-thumping and implicit military threats distract Iranians from their economic worries and force rival conservatives within the country to keep their opinions on engagement with the West to themselves. This must be an own goal if you believe (and not all do) that Ahmedinejad will collapse under the weight of history.

On the other hand, it must inspire the US Administration and its European allies to press ever harder in ‘subverting’ the Iranian President through economic sanctions. This inability to decide between force and subversion, where each works against the purposes of the other, is a clear and present sign of Western confusion. Is this the tension that lay behind the resignation of Admiral Fallon, C-in-C Centcom?

Above all, are the threats by little Israel to raid Iranian airspace (as it did recently to Syria with impunity in an act of war) and the presence of the US Fleet strengthening Iranian resistance and dragging the US towards another Iraq or Afghanistan?

In his race against time, the Iranian President has one year in which to demonstrate either that the country is under such imminent threat that the voters have no choice but to rally round him or he has to find alternative means of ‘busting’ the sanctions.

The Gulf becomes the cockpit of this, partly psychological, war in which GCC concessions on sanctions support, especially in the Emirates, threaten to make an enemy of a troubled Iranian political elite making difficult political calculations in an exact political counterpart, only three months delayed, of the last nine months of the Bush administration.

US firepower may make an Iranian miltary attempt to break out of its containment fairly unlikely, but each economic sanctions success implies a counter-sanctioning of support for insurgent activity against the Western interest.

Eventually, this system will either reach stasis with Patriot missiles defensively guarding the GCC and the Mahdi Army becoming the political wing of containment of the US within Iraq - or someone will go over the edge in either direction.

No-one wants war in the region but the US (aka West) seems so determined to do away with one highly emotional party in an Iran whose national narrative is as much ‘proud Persian’ as it is Islamic that anything is possible.

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