Mauritania is not Iran; the presidential elections there were required to overcome the country's political crisis, while the Iranian presidential elections detonated the crisis, whose ramifications continue to appear. It is likely that the path of each experience differs, due to the divergence in the regional and international roles, positions and deadlines. At the least, the opposition in Mauritania wants no more than a normalization that imposes compliance with a democratic formula for this country of a million poets, while the opponents of President Ahmadinejad in Iran want to shake the regime of one million clerics. The two countries do share the official name “Islamic Republic,” but this does not mean that they are under control. There are the mullahs in Qom and Tehran, and the military in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou. However, the democratic formula that has taken shape to end the political crisis in Mauritania, under the Dakar Agreement and international sponsorship that is concerned with seeing power not usurped by the putschists has immediately come to a crossroads in the Iranian case. Regional and international attention to conditions in Mauritania helped rival groups arrive at an option that would limit the damage, while international attention to what is taking place in Iran has cemented the dangers. Hence, the comparison that is only sound in form reflects the confusion vis-à-vis the consequences that do not correspond to the calculations of all sides. The democratic solution for the crises of some regimes remains palatable, to a certain extent, even if the experience has been incomplete and awkward. If opponents of the regime of General Mohammed Ould Abdel-Aziz had not taken to the streets and formed a political opposition front, there would have not be a move toward organizing presidential elections in the manner they were. Also, if the opponents of President Ahmadinejad had not called on their supporters to challenge the results of the elections, the domestic developments in Iran would not have taken on the dimensions that they did. There is an insistence on the idea that what was permitted in the past, justified by the need for unity and the need to face foreign pressure, is no longer acceptable; this is a striking development, reflecting the growth of awareness and an incrementally higher wager on change. The types of pressure to which Mauritania and Iran have been subjected differ in terms of the experience, political clout and roles of each. International sanctions that were imposed on Mauritania after the August 2008 coup were limited in duration, mechanisms and punishments, and resulted from a violation of democratic legitimacy in order to avoid the coup-makers and rebels in other countries to have the same objective. In fact, the sanctions against Iran came against a backdrop of the regime's policy of acquiring a nuclear arsenal and the emergence of more regional ambitions. This means that using the sword of sanctions depended on the move toward policies that did not enjoy international approval, which did not appear to operate on a single set of standards in terms of justifications and ways to deal with all regimes and crises. However, it produced transformations that cannot be put in the context of the equations of regional and international struggles. The irony is the management of some details of the reactions, namely that General Ould Abdel-Aziz realized that he could benefit from the defects in the former regime; he hurried to suspend the Israeli embassy in Nouakchott, in line with rising Arab anger about the normalization with Israel issue. Meanwhile, President Ahmadinejad did not succeed in containing the anger of leading clerical authorities with regard to the statements by his first vice president Rahim Mashai, about the Jewish people. The significance here does not lie in only bad timing, but also in the hierarchical structure of decision- and policy-making. It is nothing more than opening a hole to release an anger that has multiple causes. Don't the experiences of Mauritania and Iran symbolize one thing, despite all of the differences?
