The results of Friday's election for Iran's parliament, the Majlis, generate a political climate in Tehran that augurs well for the commencement of talks over the nuclear issue. The US administration senses this. The big issue is whether President Barack Obama can carry the United States' two key allies - Saudi Arabia and Israel - in the quest of finding a "permanent" solution to the US-Iran standoff.
Yet this has been a season of fables. Iranian politics arouses great curiosity, and election time becomes a carnival of fables. Four years ago Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was usurping political power and the country was becoming a military dictatorship. This year's hot pick (so far) is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dispatching President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to political exile and the Majlis is their arena of contestation. It's all forgotten how Khamenei fought off single-handedly the reformists' challenge in 2009 and preserved Ahmedinejad's presidency.
True, Iran's politics, like politics anywhere, is complex. The Shi'ite religious establishment is known in history as fractious. Party politics as is known in Western liberal democracies does not exist in Iran. But factions and cliques and interest groups realign incessantly, and that gives much verve to Iranian politics.
Friday's election has been no exception. An added factor is how the newly elected Majlis will affect the country's power structure - and what impact that will have on policies - at a juncture when Iran is at crossroads against the backdrop of the epochal upheaval in the region.
From the results, the composition of the Majlis may shift in a direction that can have positive fallout for regional security. The factions and cliques that can be called "conservative" - in the Iranian context - bonded together as "Principalists" and fought the election as an identifiable grouping, and they have done exceedingly well.
