Supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi march through Valiasr Street after he was defeated in the country's presidential election. Photograph: Olivier Laban-mattei/AFP/Getty ImagesFrom Slate:
Given the connections between Iraq and Iran, it's not as unlikely as it sounds.
The most exciting and underreported news of the past few weeks in Iran has been that the emerging challenger to the increasingly frantic and isolated "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. And Rafsanjani has recently made a visit to the city of Najaf in Iraq to confer with Ayatollah Ali Husaini Sistani, a long-standing opponent of the Khamenei doctrines, as well as meeting in the city of Qum with Jawad al-Shahristani, who is Sistani's representative in Iran. It is this dialectic between Iraqi and Iranian Shiites that underlies the flabbergasting statement issued from Qum last weekend to the effect that the Ahmadinejad government has no claim to be the representative of the Iranian people.
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My Comment: My first answer was no. The unrest in Iran has been there for a long time (even before Saddam was overthrown), and what lit the fuse last month were the election results. If it was not for the election results .... it would have been something else.
But Christopher Hitchens makes a compelling case to ask some pertinent questions .... and while the answers will still need to be found, the debate that it has generated makes one realize that after what has happened in Iran this month .... the clergy and the Government of Iran will never be the same.
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