Word: ayatullah
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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...
...Mousavi, on the other hand, inspired little personal adoration. He was known as a tough and effective manager, and a favorite of Ayatullah Khomeini's during the early years of the Islamic republic - especially during the Iran-Iraq war - when he served as Prime Minister. But he had pretty much disappeared from public view for 20 years, living a quiet life as an artist and architect until he re-emerged as a polite prototype of the north Tehran élite. These were people - like the two former Presidents who backed his campaign, Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami - who seemed as concerned...
...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...
...Revolution 2.0? Despite the Twitter-enabled street scenes and revived slogans of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution, a repeat of that successful insurrection remains highly improbable. For one thing, the protest movement is being led by a faction of the Islamic Republic's political establishment, whose members stand to lose a great deal if the regime is brought down and thus have to calibrate their dissent. More important, an unarmed popular movement can topple an authoritarian regime only if the security forces switch sides or stay neutral. But Iran's key security forces - the élite Revolutionary Guards Corps...
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...