a method to khamanei's madness?

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the events in Iran is the increasingly bizarre behavior of the Guardian Council and Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, beginning, of course, the decision to tamper with the election in the first place. The Iranian government is not typically in the habit of directly rigging elections (after all, the "republic" bit of the Islamic Republic of Iran conveniently grants the Guardian Council the "responsibility" of weeding potential candidates who are not sufficiently committed to the cause). Furthermore, Mir-Hossein Mousavi was more or less greeted as the poor man's version of the more charasmatic Khatami, the reformist former president of Iran from 1997 to 2005 who bowed out of the 2009 election. Evidently, however, the Green Wave appeared to have attracted sufficient fervor to transform the unlikely Mousavi into a symbol threatening to justify rigging the election.

Yet more surprising still is the decision to pair the increasingly violent crackdown on the opposition protests with the admission that there were substantial "irregularities" (to the tune of 3 million votes or so) in the voting process. While this appears to be an attempt to tow some sort of middle ground, it is impossible to imagine that the Iranian government actually believes that admitting to such widespread (and almost certainly intentional) fraud will do anything other than bolster the opposition's resolve by further delegitimizing the election.