The Ahmadinejad Gambit

It makes sense, as many sources are reporting now, that the Ahmadinejad government is imploding. Hope this is true. He may just succeed in uniting Iran -- against him.

But AN is a weaselly guy, so I can't help wondering how much of this is deliberate maneuver.

I couldn’t figure out the Ahmadinejad moves with Mashaie at first. For those just tuning in, Mashaie's daughter is married to Ahmadinejad's son, and AN had named him to be his first vice president, angering hardliners who thought Mashaie was soft on Israel, Islam, and dancing girls.

Why would AN want to anger hardliners right now, when he’s got most of the country seething at him? But then, he withdrew Mashaie’s name as vice-president, and made him a personal advisor, and "gatekeeper," instead. This smells like a familiar AN trick, something Mousavi brought up in a debate during the campaign. Ahmadinejad compiles dossiers on people who aren't completely subservient to him. If his security services can’t find real dirt on people, they just make it up. These dossiers are used to humiliate, break and often destroy his enemies. But if these people are useful to him, he “rehabilitates” them and makes them his advisers.

Another tactic of AN’s is to humiliate a rival in order to provoke an angry response in order to justify a crackdown. There are numerous reports that he sent someone from his camp to inform Mousavi that he had won on the night of the election, but that he’d mever get to be president. The scale of the fraud may have been deliberately designed to anger the people so he could crackdown and destroy the opposition in the streets. (It hasn’t worked out that way, however.)

Both strategies could be at work with Mashaie.

Mashaie was put out there to take a beating, instead of Ahmadi, and then rewarded for taking a pounding for his boss by being named an advisor.

Mashaie was also a lure to provoke and identify hardliner oppositon, such as the intelligence minister, who was fired this week.

The intelligence minister was officially in charge of the crackdown on protesters. Ahmadinejad used him to initiate his bloody repression.

Now AN has fired the intelligence minister, no doubt so Ahmadinejad can place blame for the crackdown on him and distance his own sorry self from it.

It doesn’t look like his old games are working as well these days though. He has alienated too many factions, including that of his champion Ayatollah Khamenei and Khamenei's son, Mojtaba.

One of the best non-Iranian blogs for cutting through the byzantine politics is Enduring America, a blog dedicated to:

"alternatives to a foreign policy based on conflict rather than co-operation, force rather than law, and caricature rather than understanding."

UPDATE, again from Enduring America - Will Supreme Leader sacrifice Ahmadinejad?

Especially interesting are the blips about Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larjani. Larjani is the canniest, cold-blooded tightrope walker in Iranian politics, and people speculated for weeks which way he would go on the election. For weeks he dithered, watching, waiting to see how the post-election played out, before, recently, affirming his support for AN. But now, as the tide turns against Ahmadinejad, Larjani is suddenly very concerned about the detainees and their treatment and sending a few sympathetic signals to the Opposition.

The crackdown has been so outrageous and unpopular in Iran, strengthening the opposition instead of weakening it, that all the hardline scoundrels are scrambling to distance themselves from it now.

The protests haven’t stopped, they’ve just become stronger and more creative. They didn’t count on Iranians reporting their own revolt to the world, and they haven’t been able to completely block them. They thought they could use the old Soviet Era trick of the Big Lie to cover their deeds. But the Big Lie doesn’t work against a million phone cams.

They thought the world would lose interest and turn away. Instead, there is a galvanized community of committed supporters worldwide.

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad and their fair and foul-weather friends really misread the Iranian people.