"Rafsanjani poised to outflank Khamenei"

Billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute-New York promotes the development of open societies around the world by supporting educational, social, and legal reform, and by encouraging alternative approaches to complex and controversial issues. Through its Eurasia.net project, it reports the following analysis at:
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insightb/articles/eav062209.shtml

"Rafsanjani poised to outflank Khamenei":

A source familiar with the thinking of decision-makers in state agencies that have strong ties to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said there is a sense among hardliners that a shoe is about to drop. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- Iran’s savviest political operator and an arch-enemy of Ayatollah Khamenei’s -- has kept out of the public spotlight since the rigged June 12 presidential election triggered the political crisis. The widespread belief is 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.

"There is great apprehension among people in the supreme leader’s [camp] about what Rafsanjani may pull," said a source in Tehran who is familiar with hardliner thinking. "They [the supreme leader and his supporters] are much more concerned about Rafsanjani than the mass movement on the streets."

Ayatollah Khamenei now has a very big image problem among influential Shi’a clergymen. Over the course of the political crisis, stretching back to the days leading up to the election, Rafsanjani has succeeded in knocking the supreme leader off his pedestal by revealing Ayatollah Khamenei to be a political partisan rather than an above-the-fray spiritual leader. In other words, the supreme leader has become a divider, not a uniter.

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.

Now this begins to get really fascinating. The courageous street protests of the people are inspiring and touching -- and may provide the impetus for this kind of maneuvering. It takes nothing away from that importance to say that it is also a useful distraction from what is going on at the highest levels of government. It sounds like Rafsanjani may be able to pull this off.

I would think that, if there is any moral sense in this group of clerics of what is right -- and I would hope that there is -- they would see that their idealistic revolution of 1979 has become what they did not intend it to be. And now is the perfect time to change that direction.

Ralph