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Iran's president promotes controversial confidant
By Yahoo News and Antiwar.com
Iran's president appointed his divisive confidant to a high-profile post Saturday in a
move widely viewed as an attempt to boost the close aide's profile ahead
of his expected candidacy in next year's presidential elections.
(Elections are fixed by the mullahs, for better or for worse Mashaei won't win. We must not forget that Ahmedinejad himself was chosen by Ayatollah Khamenei with his son actively backing him in 2005, as a controllable puppet of the mullahs. After 7 years in power, Ahmedinejad has gained valuable experience, confidence, knowledge to see the UTTER STUPIDITY of the mullah rule, and his OBVIOUS frustration AS elected President, not being able to implement revolutionary reform that would make Iran more successful as a modern country.
AHMEDINEJAD'S self-respect, perhaps even conscience impels him now in this twilight hour, at the end of his second term to symbolically once again challenge the ruling mullah clique. Though obviously given that the puppet mullahs installed by the UK/USA in 1979, are now highly unpopular....5 million educated Iranians have left the country, taking with them $1.5 trillion of assets.....the mullahs own candidate in the 2013 Presidential election will not be a beard/turban mullah........more likely it will be a technocrat with FAKE Ph.D's, with a beard and like Ahmedinejad in 2005, a hardline yes man of the mullahs.....from the Revolutionary Guard, the SS of the mullahs)
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad named Esfandiar Rahim
Mashaei the head of the secretariat of the Non-Aligned Movement,
the bloc of developing nations that Iran took over the leadership of
this year. The post raises Mashaei's political clout and gives him
much-needed international experience.
Ahmadinejad cannot run in Iran's presidential elections in June because of term limits, and he is widely believed to be grooming Mashaei, whose daughter is married to the president's son, as his successor when he steps down in 2013.
(In English this is known as Nepotism)
The decision to promote Mashaei is seen as a challenge to Iran's powerful hardliners, and is likely to inflame the simmering political dispute with presidential elections on the horizon. The hardliners denounce Mashaei as the head of a "deviant current" that they say is trying to undermine the country's ruling Islamic system and elevate the values of pre-Islamic Persia and promote nationalism at the expense of clerical rule.
(Promoting nationalism is good, as long as it is not rampant nationalism of the Nazi kind. To deny Persia's past is to deny the very existence of Iran-----"Land of the Aryans". From the days of provocative empty speeches against Israel and USA, which only aided the right-wing in those countries...."the Zionist state's greatest PR blessing" ..., Ahmedinejad has mellowed and matured. Ahmedinejad is a secret Jew, however I do not say that all secret Jews are disloyal to their country of birth, and it is possible that Ahmedinejad like Ataturk could actually be batting for his country in a genuine sense, and not planning his escape route via Turkey to the West, or Venezuela in South America in traditional Jewish clandestine fashion.
"If Ahmadinejad is indeed of Jewish descent, his family's story represents a classic pattern for religious converts: Adopt Islam, leave the hometown where people might know you as a Jew, move to a new location where blending into the Muslim population is easier, take up different occupations, and, just in case anyone were to question their confessional fidelity, demonstrate zeal for Islam by attacking their former religion and other minority faiths." Does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Have Jewish Roots? ByJAMSHEED K. CHOKSY at Foreign Policy)
Mashaei is believed to have been at
the root of a bitter political battle between Ahmadinejad and Iran's
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over the choice of
intelligence chief in 2011. The president boycotted Cabinet meetings for
11 days — an unprecedented show of disrespect to Iran's leader, who
hardliners believe is answerable only to God — but finally backed down.
The challenge prompted many of Ahmadinejad's erstwhile conservative supporters to switch sides and join his opponents, thus weakening the powerbase of hardliners that the president depended on to secure his disputed re-election in 2009.
Ahmadinejad has paid dearly for challenging the ruling system. Dozens of the president's aides have been arrested or driven into the political margins. Hardline media also began to smear Mashaei, the president's protege, with some critics even claiming that Mashaei conjured black magic spells to fog Ahmadinejad's mind.
In his unusually long decree Saturday announcing Mashaei's appointment, Ahmadinejad employed an unusually flattering prose to praise his aide, calling him a "pious, patient man with a pure heart and crystal thoughts."
"I consider your excellency a competent, wise, honest man," Ahmadinejad said in a statement posted on his office's website. "Knowing and working with you is a divine gift and a great honor for me."
In contrast, Ahmadinejad released a very short separate statement to appoint Hasan Mousavi as Mashaei's successor to the post of the president's chief of staff.
Mashaei was at the heart of the dispute from the first day of Ahmadinejad's re-election in 2009 when the president appointed him as his first vice president. Khamenei quickly stepped in and pressured Ahmadinejad to drop the appointment, and Mashaei was gone within the week in a stinging embarrassment to the president.
Ahmadinejad has widely been quoted
in Iranian media as privately saying that it would be an honor for him
to serve as first vice president under Mashaei.
Even with the president's support, it is unclear whether Mashaei, if he chooses to run, will make it onto the presidential ballot. All candidates in the elections must be approved by the hardline Guardian Council, a body whose key members are handpicked by Khamenei.
Many conservatives say Mashaei will likely be barred from running but others believe it could be a tough challenge for the ruling system to disqualify him from the vote.
