Ahmadinejad’s Falling Star

The Washington Post’s Thomas Erdbrink reports on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s deepening trouble:

There has often been competition among Iran’s several power centers over the 32-year-old history of the Islamic republic. But the blunt personal attacks on Ahmadinejad and his team are extraordinary, and there are indications that the pressure might be mounting. Last week, semiofficial media in Iran reported that a planned state visit by Ahmadinejad to neighboring Armenia was canceled when two of his advisers were not allowed to leave the country.

Some Iranian politicians and analysts say that they believe the supreme leader has given the president a final chance to remove the aides, and that if Ahmadinejad does not do so, he could face impeachment. [...]

Working from the presidential complex in central Tehran, where old sycamore trees line the avenues, Ahmadinejad’s advisers have for years helped to draft the president’s aggressive foreign and nuclear policies, advised him to make a daring cut in state subsidies and shaped his image as a hardworking man of the people. Many members of his team met in the backward province where Ahmadinejad started his career as a deputy governor in the 1980s, and they stuck together as he became mayor of Tehran in 2003 and was the surprise winner of the 2005 presidential elections.

After taking the helm of Iran’s executive branch, they also called attention to a Shiite belief that the coming of Imam Mahdi, an apocalyptic figure, is near. Mashaei, a 51-year-old former intelligence official who heads the president’s office, made a series of highly publicized remarks in the past few years advocating an unusual interpretation of Shiite Islam that does not rely on clerics as intermediates between people and God.

It’s important to see Ahmadinejad’s interpretation of Islam here as of a piece with his populism. While he’s deeply religious (his belief in the imminent return of the Mahdi can be compared to some Christian evangelicals’ belief in the imminent return of Jesus), it’s a brand of religion that’s shot through with Iranian nationalism and references to Iran’s pre-Islamic past. This, combined with his flamboyant and provocative leadership style, has, unsurprisingly, not endeared him to Iran’s clerical establishment.

In the years since Ahmadinejad came to power, a number of American self-styled Iran experts have spent a lot of time warning that Ahmadinejad’s messianic nationalism was representative of the Iranian regime as a whole. More knowledgeable analysts, meanwhile, have consistently and correctly noted how out of step Ahmadinejad’s beliefs are with those of the ruling establishment. Now that Ahmadinejad’s star is falling, it will be interesting to see who takes his place as the conservative punditariat’s Iranian bete noir.