On Dec 11, 2006, at 4:43 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Far more interesting is the faction fight in Iran's power elite, which
> generally goes unnoticed among Western leftists except Iranian
> leftists and Iran Studies scholars in the West. The way you look at
> Iran is the same as the way most Western liberals look at Russia.
I'm not going to say any more on this topic after this post, but I'm aware of that faction fight, and your boy is on the right-wing of it. As the Le Monde Diplomatique piece you cited makes clear, Ahmadinejad has increased the level of repression while failing to deliver on his economic agenda, and it was the economic agenda that was he was elected on and which was supposed to set him apart from the moralizing mullahs. Russians enjoy a higher level of civil liberties than Iranians do.