Word: khamenei
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...dally, Iran's electoral embarrassment will make it easier for Obama to rally other countries behind a tougher sanctions-and-deterrence plan that will further isolate Iran. But that may be exactly what the current regime wants. "Look, for the past 30 years, the Supreme Leader - first Khomeini, now Khamenei - has blamed all our problems on the Great Satan," a prominent conservative told me. "If you take away the Great Satan and we still have problems, how does he explain it? Almost everyone here is in favor of ending this war with America. But no one has less incentive...
...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...
Before the postelection protests, Iranians were no longer thought to be willing to publicly vent their anger because of alienation from politics or fear of repression. Now they're taking to the streets in defiance of Khamenei and his paramilitary forces, setting up a potentially dangerous collision course. Firing on crowds could stretch the regime's legitimacy to the breaking point, creating a "crisis of confidence which I don't know how they'd resolve," says Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council adviser on Iran to Ronald Reagan...
...recent surprising developments reaffirm the humbling nature of Iran analysis. But U.S. experts who are routinely forced to rethink their conclusions are in good company this time. "If Khamenei gets it wrong and doesn't really understand how the Iranian people are likely to see this, then we have some excuse for not always getting it right," says Sick...