The election of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad has upset most calculations about Iran's future course, especially its strained relations with the West. It was widely expected that veteran moderate politician Hashemi Rajsanjani would rally a reformist majority wanting to curb conservative dominance and improve relations with the West; instead a candidate was elected with the votes of the "have-nots" who had no confidence in the reformers or Rafsanjani.
Iran's poor relations with the West are rooted in US domestic politics, in part due to animosity to Iran from the hostage crisis but more importantly the power of the Zionist lobby which seeks to use American power to counter perceived threats to Israel from Tehran. It has obstructed normalization of relations with Iran even though Iran abandoned the “export of revolution” and reached good relations which most of its neighbors, excepting Saddamist Iraq and the Afghan Taliban. The more extremist Zionists are trying to demonize Iran to prepare the ground for a US military attack on it; moderates within the US establishment have been fighting back in an as yet unresolved struggle.
America charges that Iran seeks nuclear weapons. If so, this must be understood in the context of its experience in the Iran-Iraq war when Iraq’s illegal use of chemical weapons was ignored by the UN and the US falsely claimed Iran was also using such weapons; this taught Iranians that their security could not be secured by international law. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon it would be as a deterrent against the manifest threats it faces from a nuclear-armed Israel that has repeatedly threatened to attack its nuclear industry and from Washington whose forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia encircle it, and which is seeking to destabilize it by funding opposition and encouraging dissidence among its minorities. If Iran wanted to there is little doubt it could, in return, make the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan much more difficult, but it that has exercised a great deal of self-restraint inspite of overt US hostility. No Iranian leader would contemplate use of a nuclear weapon which would be sure to bring a holocaust on the country; but, in contributing to a regional balance of power, it could actually deter military adventures on the part of Washington or Israel.
The main other US grievance against Tehran is its funding and arming of Hizbollah, but the Israeli-Lebanese border is largely stabilized and Hizbollah is now engaged in merely token reactions to Israel's occupation and repression in the Palestinian territories (Hizbollah’s occasional attacks on Israel soldiers in the disputed Shebaa farms region of south Lebanon and its limited support to Islamic Palestinian fighters).
The West Europeans, seeking to avert a US-Iranian confrontation, have sought to bring Tehran to abandon a uranium enrichment program to which it is entitled under international law for the purposes of peaceful energy but which Washington charges is or could be used to support a nuclear weapons program. Iran has agreed to temporarily suspend enrichment while it negotiates the issue but wants its legal right to it recognized and wants security guarantees and trade agreements with Europe that would protect it from the US. The West has threatened to take the country to the UN Security council if Iran resumes enrichment. The more the UN allows itself to be an instrument of double standards used by big powers the less states such as Iran can afford to depend on it for their security.
Ahmadi-Nejad is said to oppose the establishment's combination of traditionalism at home and pragmatism abroad and to be supported by the military. His fight against corruption and call for social justice won the backing of the poor and the provinces against the preferences of the urban middle class. This suggests that he is a third force rather than an establishment conservative. Whether he would oppose accommodation with the West over nuclear weapons may not be decisive since the permanent establishment, in the person of National Security Council official Hasan Rohani, has managed Iran's negotiations.
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