Iran's Incredible Shrinking Ayatollah

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Interesting history of how the present Ayatollah came to power. It appears that you can be a nobody, but if you know the right people, eventually you can become the top man.


Iran's Incredible Shrinking Ayatollah

Ali Khamenei's base of support has been vanishing for decades.

Muhammad Sahimi
May 8, 2016

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Ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran was found in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, there has always been a fierce power struggle between hard-liners and conservatives, on the one hand, and various pragmatist, reformist and Islamic leftist factions that oppose them, on the other hand. In the 1980s, the struggle was between right-wing Islamists and Islamic leftists like former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters. From the mid-1990s to 2005, a fierce power struggle raged between the hard-liners and the reformists. After the fraudulent presidential election of 2009, the struggle was transformed to one between the democratic Green Movement and the hard-liners. And since President Hassan Rouhani was elected in June 2013, a coalition of reformists and moderate conservatives, led by Rouhani and former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, has taken on the hard-liners.

According to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, the supreme leader is the ultimate authority of the state, and is supposed to be an impartial arbiter between its various organs. That was more or less the case as long as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the supreme leader. Although the leftist clerics, most of them his former students, were close to him, and even though he was a firm supporter of Mousavi in the 1980s, he always remained above the fray and created a balance between the two main factions. His charismatic personality, unquestionable authority and religious credentials—he was a grand ayatollah for decades—enabled him to act as a more or less impartial arbiter.

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Iran's Incredible Shrinking Ayatollah

 

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Iran threatens Israel while Rouhani 'talks peace'...

Iran’s Military Threatens to Turn Israeli Cities to ‘Dust’
September 22, 2016 – On the eve of Iranian President Hasan Rouhani’s address to the United Nations, military parades back home Wednesday featured ballistic missiles on a truck draped with a banner threatening to turn a fellow U.N. member state’s cities to “dust.”

“If the leaders of the Zionist regime make a mistake then the Islamic Republic will turn Tel Aviv and Haifa to dust,” read the banner, according to Reuters. Iranian media outlets including state-run Al-Alam TV and Tehran Times published multiple images of the Zolfaqar missiles and the banner. The Fars news agency, affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), quoted IRGC aerospace force commander Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh as saying the Zolfaqar was capable of hitting targets up to 466 miles (750 kms) “with a zero margin of error.” Tel Aviv lies roughly 650 miles from the nearest Iranian territory.

Another ballistic missile on display in Wednesday’s parades, however, the liquid-fueled Qadr, boasts a range of up to 1,240 miles (2,000 kms), potentially threatening Israel, Saudi Arabia, U.S. forces in the Gulf, and south-eastern Europe. Also on display was the Russian-supplied S-300 surface-to-air missile defense system, which Iran recently deployed at a key underground nuclear facility. The parades – near the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran, and in other locations – were held to mark the beginning of “Sacred Defense Week,” commemorating the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Iran has used military displays before to send propaganda messages to its people and its foes. Last March it test-fired a Qadr missile, engraved with the words, in Hebrew, “Israel should be wiped from the earth.”

Zolfaqar missiles are displayed at one of several military parades in Iran on Wednesday, September 21, 2016. The slogan on the banner on the truck has been translated as 'If the leaders of the Zionist regime make a mistake then the Islamic Republic will turn Tel Aviv and Haifa to dust.'​

The unveiling earlier this month of a new IRGC Navy vessel was accompanied by a message advising the U.S. Navy to “go to the Bay of Pigs; the Persian Gulf is our home.” In a speech at the Tehran parade – delivered in the place of Rouhani, who is at the U.N. – armed forces chief of staff head Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Baqeri said Iran’s military capabilities are designed to give a “timely response to the enemy threats.” Baqeri said Iran’s enemies fear its power. The ultimate goal of the U.S., the “Zionist regime” and their supporters in launching proxy wars in the region, he said, “is to destroy the infrastructure of Muslim states.” Baqeri also said that “military tests and maneuvers will continue as scheduled, and will not be suspended or postponed under any circumstances,” possibility alluding to Western unhappiness about an escalation in missile tests since the nuclear agreement was concluded a year ago.

Meanwhile in New York, Rouhani has been holding a series of bilateral meetings with mostly European leaders on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly session. At several of the meetings, including one with French President Francois Hollande, the Iranian president pledged to cooperate with Europe in the fight against terrorism, describing Iran as one of the “main victims” of terrorism. Meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Rouhani described Iran as “the region’s defense line against terrorism and Daesh [ISIS].” The U.S. State Department says Iran remains the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism.

As Rouhani Prepares to Address UN, Iran’s Military Threatens to Turn Israeli Cities to ‘Dust’

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Granny says, "Dat's right - ya can't trust the Iranians - dey in cahoots with the commies an' Chinamens an' Fatboy Kim...

‘Iran Simply Is Not an Acceptable Partner in the War Against Terror’
September 21, 2016 – James Jeffrey, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq, argued Wednesday that “Iran simply is not an acceptable partner in the war against terror” in his testimony on Capitol Hill on the state of the fight against Islamic terrorism 15 years after 9/11.

“Iran simply is not an acceptable partner in the war against terror despite a recent article published in the United States by the Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif to that end,” Jeffrey said in reference to a recent New York Times editorial by Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in which Zarif argued that the international community should unite to combat extremist Sunni Wahhabism.

Jeffrey is the Philip Solondz distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute, where he focuses on U.S. diplomatic and military strategy in the Middle East, with emphasis on Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. He was a former ambassador in Baghdad, Ankara and Tirana, Albania, and served as assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration with a special focus on Iran. “The theocratic Iranian regime’s Islamic roots have much in common with Sunni Islamic extremism,” Jeffrey argued. “It has relation with al Qaeda and Taliban elements and undercuts international order and sovereignty and thus provides a breeding ground for terror of all sorts, but in particular - and we saw this in Iraq particularly - regional states generally view Iran as a greater existential threat than Sunni Islamic terror. “There is thus a real danger that if the Sunni-Shia conflict now seen in Syria emerges regionwide, our Sunni partners could see violent Sunni Islamic movements not as threats but as allies against Iran,” Jeffrey warned.

Jeffrey also testified that “only a few people in the Middle East really endorse this kind of extreme terrorist violence,” but “a much larger percent of the population, however, accept views of Islam that are orthodox, that are quite strong, that include sharia and basically challenge modernity in some ways.” “We have to be sensitive,” he emphasized, but added, “sensitivity can go too far. One of the things I’m concerned about is we seem to avoid speaking publicly of this threat as an Islamic terrorist threat. It is an Islamic terrorist threat. “If we try to hide this, people in the region, Muslims know what’s behind this. They know this is a struggle for the region and to play this down, frankly, doesn’t play very well in our own population or in a population in Europe, and it’s very important to keep those people behind us,” he concluded.

Former US Ambassador Warns Congress: ‘Iran Simply Is Not an Acceptable Partner in the War Against Terror’