re: #568 MandyManners

What’s special about his wife?

From Ledeen’s article:

The biggest roar of the afternoon was reserved for the main speaker, Zahra Rahnavard, Mr Mousavi’s wife. “You’re here because you don’t want any more dictatorship,” she declared. “You’re here because you hate fanaticism, because you dream of a free Iran, because you dream of a peaceful relationship with the rest of the world.”

The big question is why Khamenei didn’t shut her up. Two answers, one: its to bring out the dissenters so they can be dispatched later. Two: The Mullahs see Ahmadinejad as too destabilizing, especially with the Mahdi’s return crap. As Ledeen states:

Many months ago I was told that Khamenei was gravely concerned about the future of the regime, that he had concluded that there was so much hatred by so many people that it was impossible to continue to govern by repression, and that Ahmadinezhad’s aggressive domestic and foreign policy threatened everything that had been constructed over the course of the past thirty years. The people telling me these things were friends of Mousavi, and they accurately predicted that Mousavi was going to run, and that he would have surprising public support, something I would not have expected. They also said that Khamenei had encouraged Mousavi to run, precisely because he, the Supreme Leader, was prepared to grant greater freedom to the Iranian people and to normalize relations with the West.

Which is it? Time will tell, but I think the Mullahs recognized that things were getting kinda hairy with Dinnerjacket in charge and that a Mousavi victory would placate the West, especially Obama, as many here have said. Its not like he could have done much, the Mullahs still control the courts and get to pick the people who run for president but it would have bought time and maybe forestalled an Israeli attack. Problem is Ahmadinejad controls the Ministry that counts the votes and he wasn’t going to loose whatever the Mullahs may have wanted. That’s why I say this is a power-grab and he may have overplayed his hand. If he had won by a slim enough margin to prevent a runoff he might have gotten away with it but the dumb-ass egomaniac had to give himself a landslide victory. We will see what the Mullahs do, they have to OK the election results.