Amadinejad Is Nothing

At Pacific Views Natasha was talking about the Iran Freedom Support Act in Congress.

She provided a link to a BBC site on the Iran government. If you look at the graphic and follow the links you will discover that the capo di tutti capi of Iran is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. He controls the military.

At number two is Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who was defeated in the 2005 presidential elections by Mahmoud Amadinejad. Rafsanjani is deputy chairman Assembly of Experts and chairman of the Expediency Council. The Presidency would have been icing, but he already owns the cake.

The way the system works, Amadinejad has slightly less power in Iran than Queen Elizabeth has in Britain. He is essentially a contact person for all of those annoying people who want to say something to the government of Iran.

The Assembly of Experts gets to select the Supreme Leader, and the Expediency Council mediates disputes between the legislature and the Guardian Council.

Amadinejad isn’t a cleric, so he’s ineligible to even belong to the real power centers in Iran. This structure shows why the former reformer president, Mohammad Khatami, couldn’t institute any reforms.

Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was the titular head of the Soviet Union from 1919 until his death in 1946. After 1938 his job tile was changed to President. The name of the city of Koenigsburg on the Baltic was changed to Kaliningrad to honor him. He is buried in the Kremlin. Almost no one knows who he was. That’s the kind of power Amadinejad has, so let’s just ignore him and he’ll disappear into history.