Is Ahmadinejad's importance being exaggerated to inflame hatred of Iran?

[Junkdrawer]

[William769]

1. No.

[leftchick]

2. it worked like a charm with Saddam and Iraq

of course they will use it again for Iran. "Ahmadinejad is a bad bad man" Never mind that the Mullahs have the power in Iran. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain.

:eyes:

[Junkdrawer]

3. Juan Cole on Ahmadinejad: (from DemocracyNow)...

JUAN COLE: Yes, Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier. He has a thing about Jews and Israel and the Holocaust that comes across very clearly when he talks about it. It's a kind of paranoia or fixation. And, you know, Ahmadinejad is not a really educated man. He's got an engineering degree. He's from what we call the bazaari class. This is people who, from a shopkeeping background or hung around at mosques, and kind of self-educated, and so forth. So he’s not a man of the world.

His predecessor, President Mohammad Khatami, lived in Germany for seven years and has written, using the German sociologist Jurgen Habermas’s theories of civil society. Khatami has written on dialogue of civilizations and open society, and so forth, and has reprimanded Ahmadinejad for his bizarre statements about the Holocaust. So this is not, you know, an Iranian government stance or an Iranian stance. This is something that’s peculiar to Ahmadinejad.

And remember, the Iranian president is powerless, virtually. The commander-in-chief of the armed forces is Khamenei, the Supreme Juridprudent. Ahmadinejad can consult on the appointment of cabinet ministers and ambassadors, but there are very few orders that he could give of any significance in the Iranian system. He's kind of like our Secretary of the Interior or something. So what he thinks about things isn't that important.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/25/1318238

[Donald Ian Rankin]

5. Comparing Ahmadinejad and Khatami is slightly misleading.

Khatami was - by Iranian standards - a moderate; he made some attempts to stand up to the Council of Guardians and liberalise Iran a little, without much success.

Ahmadinejad was a strong opponent of his - he was the ultrahardline candidate who had considerable backing from the Council of Guardians (i.e. many of his opponents were jailed or harrassed by the police to hinder their campaigns), but he did have considerable public support too, alas.

There was an entire regime change between the two men, which was to some extend indicative of the tides of Iranian society, I think. Under Khatami, holocaust denial wasn't an Iranian government stance, but there's very little continuity between those parts of the regime answerable to the president between the two men, I think. Note, of course, that the real Iranian government is the Guardians, not the president, and what they think of the holocaust I don't know.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

4. It's an odd way of doing so if so.

My understanding is that a)Ahmadinejad's power in Iran is fairly limited, although by no means negligable and b) the people who wield actual power are the "Council of Guardians" - a group of (unelected) ultraconservative and hardline clerics who are even more evil and detatched from reality than he is.

Drawing attention to him rather than them to inflame hatred of Iran strikes me as odd.

[Lilith Velkor]

6. Yes, because bin Laden got away.

Duh.