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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be only 5'2" tall, but he looms large as the embodiment of U.S., Israeli and European fears about Iran and its state ideology of religion-laced nationalism.
Seemingly on any given day, if the Iranian president isn't questioning whether the Holocaust occurred, he's accusing the United States of deliberately keeping Iraq unstable to justify the war or defying international nuclear watchdogs.
"Nations and countries don't have to obey the injustice of certain powers," Ahmadinejad told the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 26, unmistakably referring above all to the United States. "These powers . . . have lost the competence to lead the world because of their hideous acts." And, he went on: "I officially declare that the age of relations arising from the Second World War, as well as materialistic thoughts based on arrogance and domination, is well over now. Humanity has passed a perilous precipice, and the age of monotheism, purity, affinity, respecting others, justice and true peace loving has commenced."
Ahmadinejad's bill of particulars against the United States and its Western allies includes the creation of Israel, their responsibility for poverty and disease in poor countries and the global arms race.
To be sure, any number of developing-nation leaders — including other Iranian presidents — have leveled similar accusations. But Ahmadinejad's talent for provocative oratory, coupled with his position — albeit largely symbolic — as head of a major oil power, has amplified his voice.
Yet, by all accounts, the former mayor of Tehran owes his 2005 election to the presidency less to his international stands than to the political identity he carved out as the voice of the little man hammered by economic problems. Born in 1956, Ahmadinejad is the son of a blacksmith and a veteran of the horrific eight-year war with Iraq. Afterwards, overcoming many hardships, he earned a doctorate in civil engineering.
"Most people voted for Ahmadinejad because he promised they would never have to feel sad again on New Year's Eve in front of their children," Farshid Bakhtieri, a young computer salesman, said in February.
But those promises haven't been fulfilled, Bakhtieri added. Iranians complain they aren't getting the benefits of Iran's status as a major oil power, as the 11.5 percent official jobless rate indicates. And in June, government-imposed gasoline rationing ignited rioting in Tehran and other cities. Although it has the world's third-largest reserves of oil, Iran has built an insufficient number of refineries to produce enough gasoline — which it provides at low, subsidized rates — to meet growing domestic demand. Thus, the country depends heavily on imports, which require cash outlays. Rationing was designed to reduce Iran's gasoline import payments if international sanctions over the country's disputed nuclear-development activities restrict access to cash.
But average Iranians had little sympathy for the government's rationing strategy. "We live on an ocean of oil," said Kambiz Rahmati, 25, an electronics engineer. "Why should we pay a high price for gasoline or suffer rationing?"
Some Iranian pro-democracy activists tie Ahmadinejad's economic failures to his aggressiveness in the international arena. Indeed, says an exiled dissident, the president might see it in his interest to bait the United States into military action over Iran's insistence on building nuclear facilities. "Limited war would give a good excuse to accuse the foreign states — 'it's their fault that the Iranian economy has problems,' " says Ali Afshari, an exiled student leader who spent nearly three years in prison. "Second, he would use this for a complete militarization of the country, and suppress all dissident activities."
But Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, doubts even a limited U.S. strike against Iran's nuclear facilities would be strategically advantageous, Afshari theorizes. And Khamenei's opinion counts: Only he can declare war or command the military.
But Khamenei makes few public comments these days. Ahmadinejad has come to be seen as the man in charge because he issues a steady stream of commentary on hot-button issues. About the Holocaust, for instance, he shocked listeners when he said last year: "I will only accept something as truth if I am actually convinced of it." In 2001, Khamenei got only sparse attention when he said Zionists had been "fabricating figures related to the Holocaust."
Such statements don't surprise Shaul Bakhash, an Iranian-born historian at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. "These statements are not as new as people seem to imagine," he says.
In fact, points out Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Iran's nuclear program has been around much longer than Ahmadinejad. "The presidency in Iran is about style, not substance."
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