One thing the president of Iran has in common with other powerful madmen throughout history: he does not bother to hide his intentions. Iran’s president criticises detente foreign policy.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday told lawmakers the foreign policy of detente adopted by his two predecessors had achieved little and reduced Iran’s standing in the Islamic world, a lawmaker said.

Since taking office in August Ahmadinejad has stiffened Iran’s foreign policy stance, replacing dozens of pro-reform diplomats, pushing ahead with atomic work frowned on by the West and launching a series of searing verbal attacks against Israel.

In a closed-door meeting with parliament’s Foreign Policy and National Security Committee, Ahmadinejad said that under former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami Iran had tried to appease Europe.

“On foreign policy, Ahmadinejad said that during the last sixteen years, we adopted a detente policy … but in practice this policy had not achieved anything for Iran,” Kazem Jalali, a member of the committee, told the official IRNA news agency.

By the end of Khatami’s second term in 2004 “we were distanced from the goals of the (1979 Islamic) Revolution and our activity in the Islamic world had been somewhat diminished,” Jalali quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

He’s instituting a tyranny out of the Dark Ages…

TEHRAN (Reuters) - The Iranian government on Monday ordered the closure of a daily newspaper and banned a new women’s bi-weekly from publication in the first media crackdown since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in August.

“The Supervisory Board on the Press agreed to the temporary closure of Asia newspaper and Nour-e Banovan and ordered their cases sent to court,” said the Culture Ministry in the ban, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.

No reason was given for the closure and ban although a journalist at the economic daily Asia said the paper had been given a warning in recent months for printing photographs of women considered to have been improperly dressed.

…with one crucial difference.

This Dark Ages tyranny will have nuclear weapons: Iran to Resume Nuclear Fuel Research.