The Guardian: Tuesday January 16 2007 President's future in doubt as MPs rebel and economic crisis grows By Robert Tait in Tehran
Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has suffered a potentially fatal blow to his authority after the country's supreme leader gave an apparent green light for MPs to attack his economic policies. In an unprecedented rebuke, 150 parliamentarians signed a letter blaming Mr Ahmadinejad for raging inflation and high unemployment and criticising his government's failure to deliver the budget on time. They also condemned him for embarking on a tour of Latin America - from which he returns tomorrow - at a time of mounting crisis. The signatories included a majority of the president's former fundamentalist allies, now apparently seeking to distance themselves as his prestige wanes. MPs also criticised Mr Ahmadinejad's role in the UN security council dispute over Iran's nuclear programme amid growing evidence that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has ordered him to stay silent on the issue. The supreme leader, who was hitherto loyal to the president, is said to blame Mr Ahmadinejad for last month's UN resolution imposing sanctions over Iran's refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment. Ayatollah Khamenei has ultimate authority on foreign policy, and is rumoured to be so disillusioned with Mr Ahmadinejad's performance that he has refused to meet him on occasion. In a further indicator, Mohammad Reza Bahonar, the leader of parliament's fundamentalists and a former lieutenant who helped the president choose his cabinet, denounced Mr Ahmadinejad's economic policies as "wrong" and told him to stop blaming others. Impeached The mounting criticism is fuelling speculation that Mr Ahmadinejad is politically doomed. Observers have even suggested he might be impeached and removed from office. "Ahmadinejad's golden era is over and his honeymoon with the supreme leader is finished. He has problems even meeting the supreme leader," said an Iranian political commentator, Eesa Saharkhiz. "The countdown to his dismissal has already begun. There is a probability that he cannot even finish his current four-year period." Signs of Mr Ahmadinejad's declining stock have emerged less than a month after a crushing defeat in local authority elections, when only a fifth of his supporters won seats. His most powerful political rival, Hashemi Rafsanjani, also topped the poll in elections to the expert's assembly, a body empowered to appoint and supervise the supreme leader. Mr Rafsanjani has been a vocal critic of the president's strident anti-western rhetoric and has urged compromise on the nuclear issue. Pragmatists within the Islamic leadership claim that Mr Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric, including a declaration that Iran would not suspend uranium enrichment for "even one day", sank any chance of a deal. Two recent newspaper articles suggested that this is now the official view. Jomhouri Islami, which has previously carried unsigned articles by the ayatollah, accused Mr Ahmadinejad of endangering public support for the nuclear programme by hijacking it as a personal cause to disguise his government's economic failings. "Turning the nuclear issue into a propaganda slogan gives the impression that you, to cover up flaws in the government, are exaggerating its importance. If people get the impression that the government is exaggerating the nuclear case to divert attentio n from their demands, you will cause this national issue to lose public support," the newspaper wrote. The newspaper, Hamshari, whose director, Hossein Entezami, is a member of Iran's nuclear negotiating team, was more blunt: "At the very moment when the nuclear issue was about to move away from the UN security council, the fiery speeches of the presiden t have resulted in the adoption of two resolutions [against Iran]." Reminder "Jomhouri Islami is the affirming voice of Iran's political system and of the wishes of the supreme leader and high-ranking officials, so its criticism of Ahmadinejad's political behaviour smacks of a serious reminder to him," said Mohammad Atrianfar, d irector of the recently banned reformist newspaper Shargh. An uncharacteristically subdued response by the president to last Thursday's seizure by US forces of five Iranian citizens in Iraq - described by the Tehran government as "diplomats" - is being seen as a sign that warnings are being heeded. But Iran's deepening economic woes, which prompted Sunday's letter from MPs, suggest that the worst may have yet to come for a man elected on promises to raise living standards and distribute the nation's oil wealth more evenly. Those pledges jar with increasingly grim realities. Inflation is higher than when Mr Ahmadinejad took office 17 months ago, while unemployment, officially estimated at 12% but probably much higher, has not improved. Uncontrolled inflation has resulted in soaring food prices and has had a drastic effect on the housing market. Anecdotal evidence suggests house prices and rents in Tehran have risen 50% in six months. In a poignant development, the government plans to ration petrol to cut rising import costs incurred by Iran's lack of refinery capacity. The proposal gives an ironic twist to Mr Ahmadinejad's election promise to put the country's oil wealth "on people' s tables". The president's growing army of opponents blame the situation on the government's chaotic approach. The failure to deliver a budget bill on time is being attributed to Mr Ahmadinejad's decision to disband the management and planning organisation, a gove rnment agency responsible for setting spending priorities but which upset the president by opposing some of his costlier proposals. Critics believe the economic situation is urgent and that Mr Ahmadinejad's place is at home and not in Latin America. Backstory One hundred and fifty of Iran's 290 MPs signed the letter condemning President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's economic policies. Government figures put the inflation rate at 10-15%. Anecdotal experience suggests that the figure is higher. More than 17 million Ir anians voted for the president in his election victory over Hashemi Rafsanjani in June 2005. However, the country's supreme leader - the most powerful figure in its theocratic system - is chosen by clerics. The supreme leader has the final say on foreig n affairs, military matters and a range of other areas. Mr Ahmadinejad's four-day tour of Latin America took him to Venezuela, to meet President Hugo Chávez, to Nicaragua, where he met President Daniel Ortega, and to Ecuador, where he attended Pr esident Rafael Correa's inauguration. All three men share the Iranian president's hostility to Washington and President George Bush. Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited *** Attempts at Marginalizing Carter Intensify by Juan Cole @ 1/14/2007 06:08:00 AM http://www.juancole.com/2007/01/attempts-at-marginalizing-carter.html Fourteen members of the Carter Center have resigned in protest over former president Jimmy Carter's book,"Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." AP hints that they were mostly themselves Jewish Americans. The Jerusalem Post says all were. This is only 7% of his board, which has 200 members. The lobby is drawing wagons around this one, even though Carter's book is actually very biased toward Israel and makes historical errors in Israel's favor. AP reports: ' "You have clearly abandoned your historic role of broker in favor of becoming an advocate for one side," the departing members of the center's Board of Councilors told Carter in their letter of resignation. ' What is really being demanded by the Zionist expansionists is that Carter ignore the creeping Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, ignore the way in which Israel makes Palestinians' lives miserable, ignore the datum that under Israeli occupation 15 percent of Palestinian children are malnourished. If he ignored all that, then he'd be being even-handed. The invocation of even-handedness is ironic. We all know what happened to Howard Dean when he even so much as suggested that the US play the role of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conditions under which Palestinians beyond the green line under Israeli occupation live are actually much worse than what most black South Africans suffered under Apartheid. Within Israel proper, Arabs with Israeli citizenship suffer discrimination. A frankly racist law prevents family unification for Israeli Arabs married to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, singling them out on racial grounds for discriminatory treatment not visited on Jewish Israelis. Amazon.com isn't being fair to Carter's book, either. <http://www.petitiononline.com/Amazon07/petition.html> ========== Tell Amazon to Treat Carter's Book Fairly http://www.petitiononline.com/Amazon07/petition.html To: Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com As longtime Amazon customers, we are deeply disturbed by your treatment of Jimmy Carter's important new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Under the "Editorial Reviews" heading - a space normally used either for the publisher's own description of a book, or for short, even-handed summaries from listing services such as Booklist and Publishers Weekly - you insist on running the complete, 20-paragraph, 1,636-word text of a review unabashedly hostile to Carter's viewpoint. You have refused to add information shoppers should have in evaluating this review: the fact that the reviewer, Jeffrey Goldberg, is a citizen of Israel as well as the United States, and that he volunteered to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, for which he worked as a guard at a prison for Palestinian detainees. And you have refused to balance his negative review by giving comparable space to a favorable assessment of the book, even though positive reviews by qualified experts have appeared in many reputable publications. Because giving so much space in this location to such a negative review is so unusual - if not unprecedented - for Amazon, and because you have refused requests from many customers that you take a more balanced approach, we can only conclude that you are deliberately trying to discourage shoppers from ordering the former President's book. This is contrary to Amazon's own interests as a bookseller. More important, it's also contrary to the interests of understanding, peace, and justice for all parties to the Israel/Palestine conflict We are not interested in supporting a corporation that uses its power in the marketplace in such a biased and unconstructive way on such an important issue. Accordingly, if you do not, by Jan. 22, remove the Goldberg review, move it to the more appropriate "See all Editorial Reviews" page, or restore a semblance of balance by giving comparable space and prominence to a more positive evaluation of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, we the undersigned pledge to: 1. Stop shopping at Amazon.com; 2. Completely close our accounts on your service; and 3. Encourage our friends, family, and associates to do likewise. Sincerely, to sign, go to: http://www.petitiononline.com/Amazon07/petition.html ========== _____________________________________________ Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it. 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