Word: alis
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...entirely possible that Ahmadinejad would have won anyway, but narrowly, perhaps with less than 50% of the vote, setting up a runoff election he might have lost as the other candidates united against him. It is possible that his government, perhaps acting in concert with Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, decided to take no chances. (Read "The Man Who Could Beat Ahmadinejad: Mousavi Talks to TIME...
...people thought. His statistics were heavily massaged and challenged by his opponents, but he had muddied his greatest vulnerability - the stagflating Iranian economy. The real jaw dropper, however, was Ahmadinejad's willingness to attack in the most personal terms. He attacked Mousavi for being supported by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whom he flatly called corrupt (a widespread belief among reformers and conservatives alike); he attacked Mousavi's wife Zahra Rahnavard, a famous artist and activist, for allegedly getting into college without taking the entrance exam; he attacked Karroubi for taking money from a convicted scam artist...
...situation is all the more dangerous and unpredictable because the election and its aftermath appear to have surprised all the major players, forcing them to improvise their responses to a fast-changing situation. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei appear to have been taken aback by the surge in support for the pragmatic conservative candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The decision to hastily announce what many say was an improbable landslide victory for Ahmadinejad touched off an unprecedented wave of protests that have rocked Khamenei, who has since backtracked by ordering an investigation into claims of voter fraud...
...Tiananmen Square-style crackdown would be a potentially fatal injury to the regime's sources of legitimacy: its limited but lively democracy and the backing of Shi'ite clergy. Discord among the mullahs is growing, with some senior clerics, like the esteemed house-arrested dissident Ayatullah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, publicly condemning Khamenei's handling of the election and warning ordinary soldiers and police officers that they would "answer to God" for any violence against the people. A crackdown would risk reducing a regime built on clerical authority and "managed" democracy to a tyranny on par with the Shah's. Khamenei...
According to Maloney, the election controversy provided considerable new insight into the cleric believed to hold absolute power, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Everyone expected voting irregularities, she said, but not "this degree of blatant, in-your-face fraud." That Khamenei almost instantly certified the victory of his candidate, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dashed a central assumption about his regime: that its survival and social stability are intertwined with the legitimacy of Iran's democratic institutions. "He was willing to jettison the democratic institutions and effectively cede whatever remaining legitimacy there was in a popular vote in favor of maintaining total control...