Why Ahmadi-nejad set off on a confrontation with Kha-menehi—a confrontation the president could not possibly win—is one of many questions being posed.
Khamenehi is trying to return political life to normal, which means maintaining an appearance that the Islamic Republic is a smoothly functioning machine.
But that myth was exploded when the president went on a seven-day strike, refusing to appear in his office or attend cabinet meetings from Sunday April 24, through Saturday, April 30.
The spark for all the furor may have been a clandestine bug. Published news reports this past week have said Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi had authorized that the office of Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, the president’s chief aide, be bugged. (Some accounts asserted that Ahmadi-nejad’s office was also bugged.) When Ahmadi-nejad learned of the bug, he confronted Moslehi April 17 and demanded his immediate resignation.
There is no proof this is true. It has been repeated numerous times this past week in Tehran. No one has denied the report, however, which gives it a cachet. And it would explain Ahmadi-nejad’s extreme reaction as no other stories going the rounds can.
Just two hours after Ahmadi-nejad forced Moslehi out, Khamenehi announced that he had rejected Moslehi’s resignation and that Moslehi would remain in the cabinet.
If the bugging story is true, Ahmadi-nejad undoubtedly felt—quite reasonably and logically—that he had a basis for firing Moslehi. But Khamenehi stuck by Moslehi. Six days passed, during which Ahmadi-nejad was presumably trying to convince Khamenehi to change his mind, without success. One report said Khamenehi gave Ahmadi-nejad an ultimatum—accept Moslehi back in the cabinet or resign.
The president finally blew his cool and refused to come to his office starting April 24. What he hoped to accomplish by this act of open rebellion remains unclear. It appears he simply lost control, although that could have been an act.
During his strike, no one came to his defense publicly. In fact, it appears that the entire political establishment of the Islamic Republic closed ranks behind Khamenehi and against Ahmadi-nejad. Many in the regime have been waiting for just this kind of opportunity to cut Ahmadi-nejad down to size. Some think Khamenehi is among those.
The overwhelming majority of Majlis deputies signed a statement telling Ahmadi-nejad he must obey Khamenehi. Even Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, an arch right-winger widely viewed as the president’s spiritual mentor, told Ahmadi-nejad he must bow to the will of the Supreme Leader. Pasdar generals sounded the same theme.
Pasdar commander Moham-mad-Ali Jafari took a common line, focusing his key criticism on the widely despised Mashai, while slamming Ahmadi-nejad for having anything to do with Mashai, who is seen as advocating a deviant form of Islam. Jafari said, “Certain people within the regime [i.e., Mashai] have forgotten the values of the revolution and seek to misrepresent Islam,… but the people do not follow demons or djinns and will not tolerate such deviance.” Jafari said the key difference between the “sedition”—the Green opposition forces—and this new “deviance” is that “the new deviating current has hidden itself behind a legitimate and accepted figure who is popular [i.e., Ahmadi-nejad]. Why these popular figures allow themselves to be misused is by and of itself unnatural.”
Kazem Sediqi, one of the Friday prayer leaders in Tehran, told the congregation last week that Ahmadi-nejad’s words of support for the Supreme Leader sounded hollow in the absence of action. “We are waiting for him to act on his words,” Sediqi said.
In other words many of those commonly seen as closely linked to the president have been eagerly putting distance between themselves and the president.
The almost uniform refrain was that in the Islamic Republic the Supreme Leader was not simply at the top of a constitutional pyramid but was the only figure with the final say in any matter since he is God’s agent on earth. The impact was to deflate Ahmadi-nejad, a figure many in the Islamic Republic have long seen as having a highly inflated ego.
The clearest expression of this theme that Khamenehi cannot be questioned came from Hojatoleslam Ali Saeedi, the cleric who is Khamenehi’s representative to the Pasdaran. “Resisting the Supreme Leader’s orders is disobedience to God and the Hidden Imam,” Saeedi said.
The bugging story would explain why Ahmadi-nejad flew into a rage. It would not, however, explain why Khamenehi stuck by Moslehi. If Moslehi acted on his own initiative to bug Mashai, Khamenehi should certainly have fired him. The most logical reason for protecting Moslehi would be that Khamenehi told Moslehi to arrange the bugging. Another possible explanation is that Khamenehi simply wanted to squish Ahmadi-nejad and saw this as an opportunity.
Earlier news reports said Ahmadi-nejad fired Moslehi, who was never Ahmadi-nejad’s choice for the post of intelligence minister, after Moslehi fired Hassan Abdollahian, the deputy intelligence minister named by Ahmadi-nejad as his man inside the Intelligence Ministry. The latest version says it was Abdollahian who uncovered the bugging of Mashai’s office. Moslehi then fired Abdollahian and Ahmadi-nejad next fired Moslehi.
It is not known if Abdol-lahian will get his job back as the dust settles. If Abdollahian does not return, the president will be blind about what is going on inside the Intelligence Ministry—and he would logically anticipate that Moslehi would be planting time bombs under every chair Ahmadi-nejad might sit on.
Mehrdad Khonsari, a critic of the government living in exile in London, told the Christian Science Monitor that Ahmadi-nejad overplayed his hand, but isn’t yet crippled.
“Both Ahmadi-nejad and Khamenehi have been damaged,” Khonsari said, “because what has become evident [is] that Ahmadi-nejad was genuinely trying to encroach on the powers of the Supreme Leader,” a charge laid at the president’s feet by many for a half-dozen years. “Ahmadi-nejad couldn’t carry the day. And that’s why he backed down.
Khonsari said the two men became tightly bound together after the 2009 elections when Khamenehi went far out on a limb to protect Ahmadi-nejad. “The fact that they are feuding is a highly damaging matter,” he said, “because fighting is seen at the very top of the hierarchy.”
Ahmadi-nejad clearly realizes that he overplayed his hand with his strike. He has been effusive in his pledges of loyalty to Khamenehi, frequently repeating a line he has often used in the past, that Khamenehi is like a father to him. But everyone knows this a father who just thrashed his son.
Ahmadi-nejad first barred Moslehi from attending cabinet meetings. When Khamenehi then said Moslehi would attend, Ahmadi-nejad started his strike and boycotted two cabinet meetings. Both men are now back in their seats in the cabinet room. But Ahmadi-nejad has refused to publicly acknowledge Moslehi as the intelligence minister. The embers of the president’s anger are still smoldering; it remains to be seen if fire will break out again.
Ahmadi-nejad and others in the regime have now returned to their standard rhetoric, saying that foreigners interfering in Iran are trying to convey the false impression to the public that there are rifts among the ruling establishment figures. The president, for example, dammed “propaganda by our enemies over my absence.”
While on strike, people who visited him said he had told them he would give a full explanation of the causes of his strike after returning to his office. But, actually he has turned silent and is not talking about his absence, let alone explaining it. News reports say he asked to go on state television to talk about his absence, but was denied time. State broadcasting is controlled by an appointee of the Supreme Leader.
For the last several weeks, there has been much discussion about how Ahmadi-nejad has been trying to position Mashai to succeed him in the presidency in 2013. That probably fed the desire of many to cut down Ahmadi-nejad. It is one thing to put up with him for two more years; it is another to think that his personal choice would occupy the presidency for another four years after that.
The political elite is now laughing at the idea that Ahmadi-nejad will have any wands to work when he becomes an ex-president.
It is difficult to tell how much of the anger is generated by Ahmadi-nejad and how much by Mashai. It appears that the two have fused. Many conservatives have fumed for months over Mashai and his alleged odd forms of Islamic belief; now anger with Ahmadi-nejad has welled up over the president’s lack of obedience to the Supreme Leader.
There have been news reports that as many as 25 people linked to Mashai have been arrested in recent days. They have been described as holding deviationist religious views about the power of djinns, figures in the Qoran that are often viewed by villagers as a sort of Islamic leprechaun.
On a more substantive level, Mashai is believed to want to curb the role of the clergy in the government and see more power assigned to lay people.
There was briefly some talk about impeaching Ahmadi-nejad and dumping him from the presidency. But some Majlis deputies have quickly stifled that talk. It appears that Khamenehi has forbidden any such action.
Will Ahmadi-nejad now go quietly into the night? He is a renowned scrapper. He seems to love a fight. Moslehi is still sitting across the cabinet table from him. The turmoil of the last three weeks is not likely ended.
(Editor’s note: President Ahmadi-nejad did not go to his office for seven days from Sunday April 24, through Saturday, April 30. Many news reports have said his boycott lasted nine days, 11 days, even two weeks in the case of the National Post of Canada. Those are not correct.)