Who was who in the Iranian presidential election? (UPDATE: And the winner is . . .)

Was Saeed Jalili, described in a February Reuters head as "rigid ideologue close to Khamenei," the Supreme Leader's guy in today's Iranian presidential election? Nobody seems to know.

"Where the Supreme Leader is concerned, [Mohammad Baqer] Qalibaf and [Hassan] Rowhani have got to be the two least attractive candidates. Neither has the profile of an ideological true believer or an unquestioningly faithful lieutenant. Khamenei has had enough of Presidents who challenge him from bases of power of their own. But to sideline these two relatively popular figures in favor of a dour foreign-policy bureaucrat would be a hard sell to the Iranian people. Iranian elections may not be transparent exercises in popular sovereignty, but neither are they decided by naked diktat. It will be interesting to see how this election reconciles the drives for legitimacy and for unity at the top."

-- Laura Secor, in a newyorker.com blogpost,
"Iran's Choice on Election Day"

by Ken

Possibly there are readers who, like me, have been sitting out the Iranian presidential election. It's not as if there's anything we can do about it, or for that matter any great likelihood that the winner, whoever he is, stands much chance of changing anything, with overall control of the country's affairs still pretty much at the mercy of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. But as Laura Secor, who has been covering Iran for The New Yorker, having visited since 2004, writes in her newyorker.com blogpost "Iran's Choice on Election Day":

There really is no such thing as a dull election in Iran. This alone is testament to the incurable persistence of dissent, or of fractiousness, within Iran's inner circle of power; to the relentless optimism of its voting public; to an irreducible flexibility at the core of the Islamic system, which bedevils those who would close its ranks.

About as much as I had gleaned about the election before reading Secor's piece was that the four candidates are mostly foreign-policy guys, and are all hard-liners. Well, that appears to be serious oversimplification. There are, it appears, two candidates who, as suggested in the quote above (the conclusion of the piece), aren't likely to ease the Supreme Leader's digestion. One of them, Hassan Rowhani, even has the support of two former presidents who are not at all favorites of Khamenei: the famously reformist Mohammad Khatami and the more distantly remembered Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was chairman of Iran's parliament from 1980 to 1989 and then succeeded (the not-yet-supreme) Khamenei as president. Khamenei is presumed to have been involved in the disqualification of Rafsanjani from running in this election.

HASSAN ROWHANI

Rowhani happens to have occupied the position now occupied by one of the front-runners, Saeed Jalili, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council ("the country's foreign-policy-making body"), from 1989 through 2005, and could hardly have approached the job more differently.

[H]is flexible approach was the one that Jalili reversed. Under Rowhani's stewardship, Iran had suspended uranium enrichment, a concession that was roundly criticized by hard-liners. Rowhani is a pragmatic figure, associated, above all, with former President Rafsanjani, who was himself disqualified for running in this election. Now Rafsanjani and another former President, the reformist Mohammad Khatami, have united behind Rowhani, throwing him the support of disaffected urban youth, and persuading another reformist candidate to withdraw in Rowhani's favor. Although his record on civil liberties is thin, Rowhani now carries that agenda into the race, along with the frustrated hopes of the vanquished Green Movement, whose leaders, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, remain under house arrest.

MOHAMMAD BAQER QALIBAF

"The candidate to watch for my money," Secor writes, "is the one nobody is talking about."

Unlike the others, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf does not come out of the foreign-policy establishment but out of the military; he served in the Iran-Iraq War and, later, as commander of the Revolutionary Guard's Air Force. Since 2005, he has been the mayor of Tehran. It is no accident that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held the same job. Ever since 1999, when the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami instituted popular elections for city and provincial councils, the municipality of Tehran has been a semi-independent political machine. The reformists, who held the city from 1999 to 2003, never managed to harness it to their ambitions. But the previously unknown faction of conservatives who succeeded them propelled their mayor, Ahmadinejad, to the Presidency, peopled his government, and gave the more traditional conservative establishment a run for its money.

Qalibaf has now had eight years at the capital's helm. He is a hard-liner with a security background, he's proud of his role in violently suppressing street demonstrations, and he's credited by his allies with efficiency. He has executive experience and close ties to the Revolutionary Guard. As a result, unlike Jalili or Velayati, Qalibaf brings his own money, popular appeal, and institutional support, most significantly from within the Revolutionary Guard. Unlike Rowhani, he does not carry the baggage of two former Presidents whom the Supreme Leader has worked tirelessly, and at cost, to exclude from the scene.

AS FOR THE FRONT-RUNNERS . . .

The curious thing is that no one seems to know which of the two, Jalili and Ali Akbar Velayati (who was minister of foreign affairs for 16 years, under both Khamenei and Rafsanjani, and "has been a close foreign-policy adviser to the Supreme Leader"), is favored by Khamenei. In a country where the leader has that much power, naturally a lot of people have wanted to know.

JALILI, Secor writes,

is the most rigid and ideological candidate in this Presidential race. Years ago, a European diplomat based in Tehran confided to me that he and his colleagues found Jalili impossible. You couldn't have a conversation with the guy, the diplomat said; he just recited positions as though he were reading from a script. This was no accident. Jalili, who is forty-seven, assumed the nuclear portfolio in 2007, and presided over a retrenchment of Iranian foreign policy under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Conciliatory gestures toward the West had availed Iran little, proponents of the new strategy argued, with some justification. Iran would do better to adopt a tougher stance. Kayhan, a newspaper associated with the office of the Supreme Leader, has praised Jalili, calling him a "super Hezbollahi," which is something many read as an endorsement. Curiously, though, Kayhan's repeated calls for conservatives to drop out of the race and unite behind a single candidate have gone unheeded.

VELAYATI, however, had been "pegged as the Leader's pick and as the odds-on favorite to carry the election," which left many observers puzzled by Kayhan's virtual endorsement of Jalili. As foreign minister, Velayati negotiated the end of the war with Iraq, and in his recent incarnation as a foreign-policy adviser to Khamenei, he has been --

so trusted, in fact, that for decades journalists leaned in closely when he spoke, hoping to read the Leader's intentions. In a debate this week, Velayati pounced on Jalili, accusing him of lecturing his European counterparts as though he were teaching a philosophy class and failing to move the ball even an inch. What, exactly, had Jalili accomplished in the past eight years, apart from bringing sanctions down on Iranians' heads? How could he hope to wring anything from the Americans without showing the slightest flexibility himself?

If this suggests some indecision about foreign policy at the higher policy-making levels, this is in fact what Secor herself divined when she covered the Iranian parliamentary elections last year. "A question I brought with me was whether there was a debate over the direction of Iranian foreign policy within the Islamic Republic's inner circle." And now here was an open rift between the two leading candidates in a presidential debate.

Of course, even with major foreign-policy issues confronting Iran (e.g., its nuclear policy and how to deal with the Syrian crisis), the president has very little say, since foreign-policy is exclusively the Supreme Leader's preserve. However, as Secor writes, "The choice of President is, at the very least, an indicator of the direction policy will take."

I don't know whether we'll know the election result by the time this appears. But whenever we do, at least now I will have some idea of what just happened.


UPDATE: AND THE WINNER IS . . . ROWHANI

From washingtonpost.com:

Moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani wins Iran’s presidential vote

By Jason Rezaian

TEHRAN — Hassan Rouhani, a moderate Shiite cleric known as one of Iran’s leading foreign policy experts, has won the election to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Islamic Republic’s next president, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar announced Saturday evening.

With results from all the precincts in, Rouhani had won 50.7 percent of the votes, avoiding a runoff, Mohammad-Najjar said.

The mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, came a distant second, with 16.6 percent of the vote. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s hard-line nuclear negotiator, came third with 11.4 percent. A handful of other conservative candidates fared poorly.

After a surge of support in the final week of campaigning from Iranians who did not plan to vote, Rouhani won a surprising decisive majority in a field of six candidates considered loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. . . .

#

Mike Pence Is No Charlie Wilson And Iran's Internal Politics May Not Be What They Seem Through The Prism Of CNN, Let Alone Fox News

M and M

The immutable law of unintended consequences, in this case, short-sighted American meddling in Afghanistan, brought us Osama bin-Laden and 9/11 and, worst of all, the Bush-Cheney assault on American democracy. On one of the plane rides I took recently I watched Charlie Wilson's War for the first time. Wilson, a colorful Texas Democrat had flare and verve but he was as utterly clueless about Afghanistan as the prohibitively uncolorful Mike Pence-- who has neither verve nor flare-- is about Iran.

With GOP potential presidential contenders dropping off the face of the map weekly, the narrow-minded, priggish and extraordinarily churlish Pence has tossed his unlikely hat into the ring. He's #3 in the House Republican hierarchy and he embodies the GOP strategy of obstructionism and the "Just Say No" mentality. He's even less in tune with what America is looking for in a national leader than John McCain was and his presence in the race will only serve to make a bland and visionless Mitt Romney appear to be a political giant by comparison. He may appear to have more intellectual heft than Sarah Palin but... appearances can be very deceptive.

Most Americans have never heard of Mike Pence and they're not missing much. But in the last few weeks he made himself a champion of his own disconnected definition of Iranian "freedom," irresponsibly decrying President Obama's unwillingness to put an American imprinteur on the dangerous political upheaval in Tehran. Other than being a thorn in the side of Obama, Pence didn't seen to know quite what he wanted-- unless it was the blood of innocent Iranians flowing in the streets. A friend of mine stationed in Baghdad turned me on the Stratfor's Global Intelligence Report. It may occasionally get things wrong but it speaks with a lot more authority than a clown like Mike Pence and a recent edition explained how the real struggle in Iran is very different from what fools like Pence thought they were seeing. That struggle was never really about us and never really about the liberalization of the detestable theocratic/military dictatorship there. "Rather, it has been about the role of the clergy-- particularly the old-guard clergy-- in Iranian life, and the future of particular personalities among this clergy." It's ground Mike Pence knows nothing about and has no feel for-- not that that would ever cause him to think before he speaks.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ran his re-election campaign against the old clerical elite, charging them with corruption, luxurious living and running the state for their own benefit rather than that of the people. He particularly targeted Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, an extremely senior leader, and his family. Indeed, during the demonstrations, Rafsanjani’s daughter and four other relatives were arrested, held and then released a day later.

Rafsanjani represents the class of clergy that came to power in 1979. He served as president from 1989-1997, but Ahmadinejad defeated him in 2005. Rafsanjani carries enormous clout within the system as head of the regime’s two most powerful institutions-- the Expediency Council, which arbitrates between the Guardian Council and parliament, and the Assembly of Experts, whose powers include oversight of the supreme leader. Forbes has called him one of the wealthiest men in the world. Rafsanjani, in other words, remains at the heart of the post-1979 Iranian establishment.

Ahmadinejad expressly ran his recent presidential campaign against Rafsanjani, using the latter’s family’s vast wealth to discredit Rafsanjani along with many of the senior clerics who dominate the Iranian political scene. It was not the regime as such that he opposed, but the individuals who currently dominate it. Ahmadinejad wants to retain the regime, but he wants to repopulate the leadership councils with clerics who share his populist values and want to revive the ascetic foundations of the regime. The Iranian president constantly contrasts his own modest lifestyle with the opulence of the current religious leadership.

Recognizing the threat Ahmadinejad represented to him personally and to the clerical class he belongs to, Rafsanjani fired back at Ahmadinejad, accusing him of having wrecked the economy. At his side were other powerful members of the regime, including Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, who has made no secret of his antipathy toward Ahmadinejad and whose family links to the Shiite holy city of Qom give him substantial leverage. The underlying issue was about the kind of people who ought to be leading the clerical establishment. The battlefield was economic: Ahmadinejad’s charges of financial corruption versus charges of economic mismanagement leveled by Rafsanjani and others.

When Ahmadinejad defeated Mir Hossein Mousavi on the night of the election, the clerical elite saw themselves in serious danger. The margin of victory Ahmadinejad claimed might have given him the political clout to challenge their position. Mousavi immediately claimed fraud, and Rafsanjani backed him up. Whatever the motives of those in the streets, the real action was a knife fight between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani. By the end of the week, Khamenei decided to end the situation. In essence, he tried to hold things together by ordering the demonstrations to halt while throwing a bone to Rafsanjani and Mousavi by extending a probe into the election irregularities and postponing a partial recount by five days.

The key to understanding the situation in Iran is realizing that the past weeks have seen not an uprising against the regime, but a struggle within the regime. Ahmadinejad is not part of the establishment, but rather has been struggling against it, accusing it of having betrayed the principles of the Islamic Revolution. The post-election unrest in Iran therefore was not a matter of a repressive regime suppressing liberals (as in Prague in 1989), but a struggle between two Islamist factions that are each committed to the regime, but opposed to each other.

The demonstrators certainly included Western-style liberalizing elements, but they also included adherents of senior clerics who wanted to block Ahmadinejad’s re-election. And while Ahmadinejad undoubtedly committed electoral fraud to bulk up his numbers, his ability to commit unlimited fraud was blocked, because very powerful people looking for a chance to bring him down were arrayed against him.

The situation is even more complex because it is not simply a fight between Ahmadinejad and the clerics, but also a fight among the clerical elite regarding perks and privileges-- and Ahmadinejad is himself being used within this infighting. The Iranian president’s populism suits the interests of clerics who oppose Rafsanjani; Ahmadinejad is their battering ram. But as Ahmadinejad increases his power, he could turn on his patrons very quickly. In short, the political situation in Iran is extremely volatile, just not for the reason that the media portrayed.

Rafsanjani is an extraordinarily powerful figure in the establishment who clearly sees Ahmadinejad and his faction as a mortal threat. Ahmadinejad’s ability to survive the unified opposition of the clergy, election or not, is not at all certain. But the problem is that there is no unified clergy. The supreme leader is clearly trying to find a new political balance while making it clear that public unrest will not be tolerated. Removing “public unrest” (i.e., demonstrations) from the tool kits of both sides may take away one of Rafsanjani’s more effective tools. But ultimately, it actually could benefit him. Should the internal politics move against the Iranian president, it would be Ahmadinejad-- who has a substantial public following-- who would not be able to have his supporters take to the streets.

The question for the rest of the world is simple: Does it matter who wins this fight? We would argue that the policy differences between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani are minimal and probably would not affect Iran’s foreign relations. This fight simply isn’t about foreign policy.

Rafsanjani has frequently been held up in the West as a pragmatist who opposes Ahmadinejad’s radicalism. Rafsanjani certainly opposes Ahmadinejad and is happy to portray the Iranian president as harmful to Iran, but it is hard to imagine significant shifts in foreign policy if Rafsanjani’s faction came out on top. Khamenei has approved Iran’s foreign policy under Ahmadinejad, and Khamenei works to maintain broad consensus on policies. Ahmadinejad’s policies were vetted by Khamenei and the system that Rafsanjani is part of. It is possible that Rafsanjani secretly harbors different views, but if he does, anyone predicting what these might be is guessing.

Rafsanjani is a pragmatist in the sense that he systematically has accumulated power and wealth. He seems concerned about the Iranian economy, which is reasonable because he owns a lot of it. Ahmadinejad’s entire charge against him is that Rafsanjani is only interested in his own economic well-being. These political charges notwithstanding, Rafsanjani was part of the 1979 revolution, as were Ahmadinejad and the rest of the political and clerical elite. It would be a massive mistake to think that any leadership elements have abandoned those principles.

Sounds like just the kind of character someone like Pence, who probably wasn't even aware that Rafasanjani was president nor that Mousavi, as prime minister, was no friend of the U.S. by any stretch of the imagination, would get behind-- at least in domestic Indiana politics. Nor would someone like Pence care. He's just a Party of No hack-- in it to make some trouble and to let the chips fall where they may.

Reuters-- as well as other western mass media outlets-- seems to arbitrarily assign political positions to members of the regime. Ex-President Khatami criticizes the election and, in their world, it makes him a "moderate" and "pro-reform," just like Hezbollah's best friend Mousavi. I don't expect our dumbed down media to go into any really serious analysis but at least they can just try remembering for a few seconds while they turn out this drivel that the world really isn't as U.S.-centric as they seem to believe it is.

Meanwhile, Stratfor makes 3 overall points: "there was no democratic uprising of any significance in Iran... there is a major political crisis within the Iranian political elite, the outcome of which probably tilts toward Ahmadinejad but remains uncertain... there will be no change in the substance of Iran’s foreign policy, regardless of the outcome of this fight. The fantasy of a democratic revolution overthrowing the Islamic Republic-- and thus solving everyone’s foreign policy problems a la the 1991 Soviet collapse-- has passed," regardless of what bozos like Mike Pence, John McCain and Marco Rubio think.

That means that Obama, as the primary player in Iranian foreign affairs, must now define an Iran policy-- particularly given Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s meeting in Washington with U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell this Monday. Obama has said that nothing that has happened in Iran makes dialogue impossible, but opening dialogue is easier said than done. The Republicans consistently have opposed an opening to Iran; now they are joined by Democrats, who oppose dialogue with nations they regard as human rights violators. Obama still has room for maneuver, but it is not clear where he thinks he is maneuvering. The Iranians have consistently rejected dialogue if it involves any preconditions. But given the events of the past weeks, and the perceptions about them that have now been locked into the public mind, Obama isn’t going to be able to make many concessions.

Who Is Winning The Behind The Scenes Power Struggle in Iran?

Khamenei certainly has the power to crush the street demonstrations in Tehran-- as he appears to have done yesterday by letting the Revolutionary Guards off their leashes. But he may be more worried about Qom, the Iranian Vatican City and home of the Assembly of Experts, which hires and fires Supreme Leaders and is headed by Khamenei's arch-rival-- pistachio baron (and one of Iran's richest men) Ayatollah Hashemi Rasfanjani.

To recap yesterday, there is now no doubt that the election was stolen. although this morning the Guardian Council-- headed by the Ann Coulter of Iran-- announced that they would not annul the results of the tainted balloting. Mousavi, in the face of more violence, is calling on Iranian patriots to keep up the pressure and Ali Shahrokhi, head of parliament's judiciary committee, said Mousavi should be prosecuted for "illegal protests and issuing provocative statements." There is talk of a general strike, probably the only way to bring down the regime. (Thanks to the shameful partisan opportunism of McCain, Graham, Lieberman, Pence, and other mini-presidents in Congress, the Khamenei regime is accusing the protesters of being duped by the U.S., the same way the U.S. staged a coup in Tehran 55 years ago.)

Iran Monday accused the West of supporting "rioters" in widespread street unrest that has rocked the Islamic Republic since a disputed June 12 presidential election.

"The promotion of anarchy and vandalism by Western powers and media is by no means acceptable," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi told a news conference. He did not rule out the possible expulsion of some European ambassadors in Tehran.

...Referring to the tight race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and other U.S. Presidential elections, Qashqavi said:

"No one in that race encouraged the American people to stage a riot or anything like that and it was actually the (U.S. Supreme Court) that solved the issue."

Back to the goings on behind the curtain, the paranoid coterie around Khamenei is fairly certain that "Rafsanjani has been in the holy city of Qom, working to assemble a religious and political coalition to topple the supreme leader and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." Khamenei is no longer seen a the father of the country and a spiritual leader above the fray, but as a grubby political operative and a bloody dictator. He was a real image problem with the clergy and many are offended that he has repeatedly characterized the election as a "divine assessment" of Ahmadinejad’s popularity.

Now that Ayatollah Khamenei has become inexorably connected to Ahmadinejad’s power grab, many clerics are coming around to the idea that the current system needs to be changed. Among those who are now believed to be arrayed against Ayatollah Khamenei is Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shi’a cleric in neighboring Iraq. Rafsanjani is known to have met with Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani’s representative in Iran, Javad Shahrestani.

A reformist website, Rooyeh, reported that Rafsanjani already had the support of nearly a majority of the Assembly of Experts, a body that constitutionally has the power to remove Ayatollah Khamenei. The report also indicated that Rafsanjani’s lobbying efforts were continuing to bring more clerics over to his side. Rafsanjani’s aim, the website added, is the establishment of a leadership council, comprising of three or more top religious leaders, to replace the institution of supreme leader. Shortly after it posted the report on Rafsanjani’s efforts to establish a new collective leadership, government officials pulled the plug on Rooyeh.

Meanwhile, the Al-Arabiya satellite television news channel reported that a "high-ranking" source in Qom confirmed that Rafsanjani has garnered enough support to remove Ayatollah Khamenei, but an announcement is being delayed amid differences on what or who should replace the supreme leader. Some top clerics reportedly want to maintain the post of supreme leader, albeit with someone other than Ayatollah Khamenei occupying the post, while others support the collective leadership approach.

To a certain degree, hardliners now find themselves caught in a cycle of doom: they must crack down on protesters if they are to have any chance of retaining power, but doing so only causes more and more clerics to align against them... [A] showdown could come later this week. One of the country’s highest-ranking clerics, Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri has declared three days of mourning for those who have died in street protests. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s declaration could bring thousands of Tehran residents back out into the streets starting on June 24.

Power Politics In Washington And Tehran

Although neo-con con artists and right-wing opportunists in this country are doing their best to pour fire on, to mix a couple of metaphors, the Iranian powder keg-- positively gleeful at the prospects of spilling innocent blood, of whomever, and of embarrassing President Obama for his cautious, diplomatic reaction-- even solid conservatives like George Will and Dick Lugar were repulsed yesterday when extremists in the GOP started howling for "regime change." Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was especially flaming inflammatory and sure to cause grief to the Iranian patriots struggling against a brutal and paranoid regime increasingly prepared to shoot down its own citizens. Florida's extreme right Senate candidate, Marco Rubio, looked at the troubles there as an opportunity to endear himself to the NRA and to suggest that Iranians ignore Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King and turn to violence (something all hard right Republicans love), exactly the kind of excuse that could save the tottering fascist regime.

[UPDATE: Looks like Politico picked up on Rubio's barbaric twittery indescretion.]

Yesterday as the rift within the ruling elite grew even wider, 5 members of ex-President Hashemi Rafsanjani's family, including his 46 year old daughter Faezeh, were arrested and taken into custody (and then released), a clear warning to the senior ayatollah and Chairman of the Assembly of Experts to not make a move against the Supreme Leader, which the Iranian Constitution empowers the Assembly of Experts to do.

The protests, which started out as a demand for new elections by middle class Iranians in North Tehran has started spreading to labor unions and has split the political and religious elites. Yesterday Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament and no reformer, urged the Guardian Council to "thoroughly" investigate complaints about the election and said that "a majority of people are of the opinion that the actual election result is different from what was officially announced." At the same time he denounced interference in domestic Iranian politics by the U.S., Britain, France and Germany. The military appears firmly behind the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad clique. The acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Gholam Ali Rashid, came down on Mousavi like a ton of bricks yesterday: "We are determined to confront plots by enemies aimed at creating a rift in the nation."

This week, Time Magazine has a good analysis of the Iranian political system and a who's who for beginners. They make the point that "the conflict in Iran thus far has been not so much a wholesale revolt of the masses against the system, as it is a complex struggle for power within Iran's ruling establishment, and a battle over the country's direction." Here's how they rate 'em:

1- Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader for the last 2 decades. "Lacking the charisma, religious rank and founding-father prestige of his predecessor, he sought to bolster his authority by supporting radical Islamic causes and appearing as the avuncular head of the Iranian family."

2- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a radical right populist-- their version of a teabagger-- who won the presidency in 2005, "styling himself as a populist champion of the little guy against a corrupt establishment, and as a nationalist who flexes Iran's muscle on the world stage... close to the powerful, shadowy political factions and security organizations behind Iran's Supreme Leader."

3- Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who has never shown much inclination towards reform until now. He's "promising greater democracy and sober economic management in Iran, and improved relations with the West. Having mounted a remarkable challenge to Ahmadinejad's re-election, his accusation of election fraud and denunciation of 'dictatorship' represents an unprecedented challenge to the status quo by the forces of reform."

4- Mohammed Khatami, a two term president who won a landslide victory in 1997 as a reformer. The Supreme Leader cracked down on his reforms big time and that is probably why he decided to steal the election for Ahmadinejad this time.

5- Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of Iran's richest men, former speaker of parliament and two-term president, current head of the Assembly of Experts, which-- at least theoretically-- could depose Khamenei.

6- Mehdi Karroubi, a former parliament speaker and the only real reformist in the presidential race.

7- Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, has greater religious authority than Khamenei. He was one of the first in the elite to denounce the election results as fraudulent and he's a believer in separation of church and state.

8- Ali Larijani is the current parliament speaker, close to Khamenei but at odds with Ahmadinejad.

9- Major General Mohammed Ali Jafari, head of the 300,000 strong Revolutionary Guard, "the most powerful element in the regime's security forces, running everything from the country's missile systems to the basij militia, whose hundreds of thousands of young men enforce domestic order and have been at the forefront off attacks against those protesting the election result. Reporting to the Supreme Leader, the IRGC, is listed by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization-- and also maintains an extensive business empire in Iran.

10- Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, is the radical right extremist head of the Guardian Council and a close ally of Ahmadinejad. He's in charge of looking into election fraud; he's to Iranian politics as Ann Coulter is to American politics-- except he wields power (and never had a sex change operation).