At The New Republic, Robert Baer says President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s attacks on former President (and ayatollah) Akbar Rafsanjani were certainly at the instigation of Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. That said, I think Baer overstates another item when he claims Iran is a military dictatorship and not a theocracy.
Yes, Khamenei may be a Cracker Jack or mail-order ayatollah, but he is one, and he heads a council of ayatollahs and other religious jurists that are Iran’s ultimate power source. It also seems to me that he’s trying to put lipstick on the pigs (non-halal bad pun warning!) of both Rafsanjani and opposition presidential candidate Mir Mousavi (indirectly).
So, while I critiqued Obama’s press statement yesterday as “blah, blah, blah,” nonetheless he’s probably right not to prematurely commit to one side in an internecine and even Byzantine power struggle inside Iran. (That said, his noncommittal yesterday WAS “blah, blah, blah.”
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