Iran president defies supreme leader over deputy

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI and LEE KEATH, Associated Press Writers

TEHRAN, Iran – President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad showed rare defiance of his strongest backer, Iran's supreme leader, by insisting on his choice for vice president Wednesday despite vehement opposition from hard-liners that has opened a deep rift in the conservative leadership.

The tussle over the appointment comes at a time when the clerical leadership is facing its strongest challenge in decades following last month's disputed presidential election.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's top concern appears to be keeping the strong support of clerical hard-liners so he can withstand attempts by the more moderate, pro-reform opposition to erode his authority.

Conservative clerics and politicians have denounced Ahmadinejad's choice for the post of first vice president, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, because Mashai said last year that Iranians are friends with Israelis. There are also concerns because Mashai is a relative of Ahmadinejad — his daughter is married to the president's son.

Khamenei ordered Ahmadinejad to remove Mashai, semiofficial media reported Wednesday.

Arguing for a further chance to make his case, Ahmadinejad said, "there is a need for time and another opportunity to fully explain my real feelings and assessment about Mr. Mashai."

The president may be digging in because he fears an attempt by hard-liners to dictate the government he is due to form next month.

At the center of the dispute between the president and supreme leader is Mashai, a member of Ahmadinejad's personal inner circle. Iran has 12 vice presidents, and Mashai has been serving in one of the slots in charge of tourism and culture. Ahmadinejad said last week he was elevating Mashai to the first vice presidency. That is the most important of the 12 because it is in line to succeed the president if he dies, is incapacitated or removed. The first vice president also leads Cabinet meetings in the president's absence.

Ahmadinejad is a member of the hard-line camp, but throughout his first term he had disputes over policy and appointments with fellow conservatives, some of whom accused him of hoarding too much power for close associates rather than spreading it among factions.

Most surprising is Ahmadinejad's defiance of Khamenei's order for Mashai's removal. The supreme leader has been the president's top defender in the election dispute, dismissing opposition claims that Ahmadinejad's victory in the June 12 vote was fraudulent. The opposition says pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was the real winner and calls Ahmadinejad's government illegitimate.

Hard-line clerics on Wednesday demanded the president obey Khamenei.

Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said whether Mashai is immediately dismissed "will test Ahmadinejad's loyalty to the supreme leader."

"When the exalted supreme leader takes a position explicitly, his statement must be accepted by all means and implemented immediately," he said, according to the Mehr news agency. "Those who voted for Ahmadinejad because of his loyalty to the supreme leader expect the president to show his obedience ... in practice."

Ahmadinejad may believe Khamenei's rejection of Mashai is not written in stone and is testing whether he can keep his close associate.

Iran expert Suzanne Maloney pointed out that the supreme leader has not publicly spoken on the issue and reports of his order have been leaked by hard-liners through semiofficial media.

"If Khamenei comes out in Friday prayers calling for (Mashai's) removal, then it would be difficult to imagine Ahmadinejad would refuse that," said Maloney, with the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Washington-based Brookings think tank.

Ahmadinejad is "not looking to open his second term by picking a fight with his most important ally in the system," she said.

Khamenei's order to remove Mashai is unusual extension of his powers — perhaps a sign he wants to strengthen his position as unquestioned leader in the face of the reformist threat.

As supreme leader, Khamenei has ultimate say in state affairs and stands at the peak of the unelected clerical leadership that under Iran's Islamic Republic can overrule the elected presidency and parliament.

Traditionally, the supreme leader has stayed out of a public role in government appointments. He is believed often to informally vet choices for senior positions behind the scenes, but he does not have a formal role in approving them or an official power to remove them. Even under Iran's 1997-2005 pro-reform government, with which Khamenei clashed, he never overtly ousted any of its officials.

Now Khamenei is facing tests to his authority on two fronts. One is from Ahmadinejad, the other is the open defiance from the reformist opposition, which has continued its campaign against Ahmadinejad despite the supreme leader's declarations that the election dispute is over.

Powerful moderate clerics in the religious leadership under Khamenei have backed Mousavi or declined to recognize Ahmadinejad as the victor. Hundreds of thousands held mass protests in support of Mousavi in the weeks after the election, but were crushed in a heavy crackdown that killed at least 20 protesters and left more than 500 in prison. Still, the opposition has managed to hold two smaller protests since, and is demanding a referendum on Ahmadinejad's legitimacy.

The announcement outraged hard-liners, who have opposed Mashai since he said in 2008 that Iranians were "friends of all people in the world — even Israelis." Mashai also angered many top clerics in 2007 when he attended a ceremony in Turkey where women performed a traditional dance and in 2008 when he hosted a ceremony in which women played tambourines. Conservative interpretations of Islam oppose women dancing.

After days of controversy, Khamenei weighed in. The semiofficial Fars news agency reported Wednesday that Ahmadinejad had been notified of the leader's order to remove Mashai.

The deputy parliament speaker, Mohammad Hasan Aboutorabi-Fard, said late Tuesday that Mashai's dismissal was "a strategic decision" by the system of ruling clerics and he must be removed "without delay," according to the semiofficial ISNA news.

Later Wednesday, Ahmadinejad stuck by Mashai in a speech at Mashai's farewell ceremony from his lower vice presidential post.

"One of virtues and glories God has bestowed to me in life was to get acquainted with this great, honest and pious man," Ahmadinejad said, according to the state news agency IRNA. He said he has "a thousand reasons" to support Mashai and that there was "no convincing" reason for the attacks on his choice.

Why Kurds vs. Arabs Could Be Iraq's Next Civil War

By ANDREW LEE BUTTERS

With a projected capacity of about 40,000 bbl. a day, the new oil refinery inaugurated on July 18 by the Kurdish regional government of northern Iraq is modest even by the standards of Iraq's dilapidated oil industry. But its significance shouldn't be underestimated: in Kurdish minds, the region's ability to refine the oil it pumps is a vital step toward deepening its autonomy from the Arab-majority remainder of Iraq.

Until recently, Iraqi Kurdistan had no refineries of its own, and though the area is sitting on a huge pool of oil, it had to rely on gasoline supplies from elsewhere in Iraq, Turkey or Iran. Fearful of giving Iraq's ethnic Kurdish minority any control over the country's most precious resource, Saddam Hussein had not only declined to build refineries in the region; he made sure Iraq's oil pipelines bypassed Kurdish areas, and his army forcibly removed much of the Kurdish population from Kirkuk - the most important oil-producing area in the north - and repopulated the city with Arabs from the south.

Since Saddam's demise, however, the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is steadily developing an independent oil industry in northern Iraq. It has discovered and begun to develop new oil fields inside its boundaries, and has entered production-sharing deals with foreign oil companies that were made without the consent of the federal government in Baghdad. Those deals have raised suspicions among Iraq's Arab-dominated government that KRG is not simply taking on more of the prerogatives of sovereign statehood but is actually laying the economic infrastructure for independence.

For their part, Kurdish officials suspect that Baghdad's failure to pass a national oil law (which would give Iraq's provincial governments greater control over the industry in their territory) and its failure to press ahead with a referendum to settle Kurdish claims to Kirkuk and other disputed areas are signs that the Arab majority plans to settle matters in its favor.

Such is the enmity, in fact, that KRG's president, Massoud Barzani, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki haven't spoken in over a year. Recently, KRG Prime Minister Nechirwan Barzani said that Arab-Kurdish relations in Iraq are at their lowest point since Saddam was in power. With Iraq's Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian violence largely in check, the Kurdish-Arab dispute has become the most worrisome fault line in Iraq.

Ever since the U.S. invasion, the Kurds of northern Iraq have enjoyed many of the trappings of sovereignty. Kurds have their own parliament and executive government, plus an 80,000-strong army (the Pesh Merga militia) and control over their borders, which Baghdad-controlled security forces are not allowed to enter. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Kurds want independence from Iraq, their leaders have proceeded with caution, mindful of the risks. Their small, landlocked region is surrounded by neighbors - Turkey, Syria, Iran - whose own restive Kurdish minorities make them hostile to the prospect of an independent Kurdish state emerging in Iraq.

While the rest of Iraq was in the grip of insurgency and sectarian civil war, the Kurds quietly advanced their economic-development policies, building an international airport, business hotels and hydro-electric dams and - most important - doing oil deals. They explained this autonomous engagement with international oil markets on the grounds that they couldn't wait for the barely functional Iraqi state to get its house in order. Indeed, such is the dismal state of Iraq's oil production (not yet back at pre-invasion levels, which were a fraction of its full potential) that in June, the Iraqi government allowed the Kurds to begin pumping oil extracted from newly developed Kurdish oil fields through federal pipelines for export sale to Turkey. (Currently, only Iraqi government companies can sell oil, the revenue from which is shared among the regions.)

Kurds have also grown impatient with Baghdad's stance on disputed territories. According to the Iraqi constitution, the central government should hold a referendum in the Kurdish-populated areas of four Iraqi governorates in northern Iraq (including Kirkuk) to determine whether they should remain under Baghdad's control or become part of the KRG. But even before that takes place, the constitution commits the Iraqi government to a potentially explosive reversing of Saddam's "Arabization" policies in these areas, moving Arabs out and Kurds in.

The Iraqi government has postponed the referendum several times from its original date in 2007, citing the understandable excuse that it could spark a new civil war between Kurds and Arabs.

But now that Iraq's government is increasingly stable, Kurdish leaders fear that Baghdad is merely playing for time, allowing the Iraqi military to grow in strength and capability as the U.S. moves to draw down, allowing the Iraqi government eventually to settle the issue the old-fashioned way: with tanks. Already, Kurdish and Iraqi forces have nearly clashed on several occasions in the disputed territories.

Last month, Kurdish lawmakers passed a regional constitution that unilaterally laid claim to the disputed territories and the oil resources in them. Though some Iraqi officials have said that the constitution amounts to a Kurdish declaration of independence, Kurdish leaders are pushing for a referendum to be held on the constitution as early as August.

Meanwhile, the domestic politics of both the Kurdish region and the wider Arab Iraq are pushing the two sides toward confrontation. In Kurdistan, where parliamentary elections will be held on June 25, a new party called Change is mounting the first significant challenge to the duopoly of Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. The new party is gaining ground by tapping into growing dissatisfaction with government corruption and nepotism. Although the parties credited with delivering today's de facto independence are likely to win, they have moved to strengthen their position by sharpening their tone toward Baghdad as the election approaches.

Baghdad has troubles of its own, which creates an incentive for Kurd-bashing. Most Iraqi Arabs have even less faith in their corrupt leadership class than Kurds have in theirs. And as al-Maliki consolidates his grip on power and styles himself as Iraq's new strongman, he may find that promising to push back against Kurdish efforts to dismember Iraq could help rally Arab Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi'ite, behind him. Hey, it worked for Saddam.