The ayatollah's new reign

[mom cat]

Jun 28, 2005

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF28Ak02.html

The ayatollah's new reign
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

Tehran's populist mayor, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, became Iran's new president by upstaging his rivals through a shrewd sleeper campaign that exploited the limelight being away from him, yet the real winner of this tumultuous contest was Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.

After eight years of a fractious dual leadership, with outgoing President Mohammad Khatami's two liberalist administrations challenging the fundamentalist regime at nearly every turn, Iran will now experience a unified leadership with only one man at the top navigating the ship of state, at least for the next four years, until the next round of presidential elections in 2009.

The new president, 49-year-old son of a blacksmith turned university professor turned provincial governor before becoming Tehran's mayor, is by all indications a Khamenei loyalist who will not recycle any of the fissures and tensions of his predecessor, who more often than not was on the defensive for his staunch defense of individual liberties and liberal reforms. Instead, Ahmadinejad will faithfully serve the commands from above dictated by Supreme Leader Khamenei, both in the domestic - and especially - in the foreign realms. In defeating his competitor, former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadinejad has effectively forestalled the possibility that the era of dual leadership would continue after Khatami.

This was, of course, not what most people expected, including Rafsanjani and his top aids, who on the eve of the run-off election last Friday complained bitterly about the interference of military personnel in the electoral process, forbidden by the Islamic constitution. A letter sent to the Interior Ministry by Rafsanjani's chief of campaign singled out several top-ranking officers, including a few who are representatives of the leader. It is absolutely inconceivable that those officers would intervene without a prior green light from the Supreme Leader, and their input in favor of Ahmadinejad was most likely a significant contributing factor in the election's outcome.