TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s political tremors are leaving debris in all directions.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the nation’s intelligence chief remain in a cold war. A wave of reported detentions has included a prayer leader who angered clerics with a film about Judgment Day.
An influential Friday prayer leader lectured Ahmadinejad about the huge risks of defying Iran’s supreme leader, and websites claim that the president has an ultimatum to either fall in line or step down.
All the upheaval was ostensibly triggered by last month’s boomerang over the powerful intelligence minister, Heidar Moslehi. Ahmadinejad wanted him gone, yet Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered him to stay, which was a public slap to the president.
But to understand the current clash between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, a visit back to their first major collision in 2009 is needed. That battle — as this one — has a political lightening rod named Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei as a central figure.
In July 2009, just weeks after Ahmadinejad’s re-election, he picked his confidant Mashaei as the most senior of his many vice presidents. Mashaei is reviled by archconservatives for statements including his homage to Iran’s pre-Islamic values and suggesting that Iran might despise Israel’s government but can be friends with its people. Khamenei, the pinnacle of Iran’s ruling theocracy, stepped in and Mashaei was gone within the week in a stinging embarrassment to Ahmadinejad.
Move ahead to the current showdown. Ahmadinejad apparently has been testing the ground for Mashaei to run as his successor in 2013.
Any plan needs control of the intelligence ministry, whose files can potentially sink any political ambitions with facts or innuendo.
Now Ahmadinejad is stuck with an intelligence minister he rejects and tied to Mashaei who is apparently being pushed into political exile on the wishes of the supreme leader.
