In June the hard-line mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, walked across American and Israeli flags painted on the pavement of a mosque and voted in Iran's ninth presidential election. After all the ballots were counted, the results stunned the international community-an unreconstructed ideologue had emerged triumphant, confounding all predictions that Iran's youthful populace and sophisticated middle class would somehow press its politics in a reformist, even liberal direction. In the intervening months, Ahmadinejad has gone on to perplex and outrage the international community through his denials of the Holocaust, incendiary denunciations of America and a marked indifference to global opinion.
As Iran's nuclear program crosses successive thresholds and edges closer to a military capability, the Western capitals are struggling to understand the man at the helm of power in Tehran. Is Iran's president as irrational as his rhetoric would suggest? Is Ahmadinejad driven by a messianic religious fervor that makes him immune to practical considerations? What are the political and ideological determinants of Ahmadinejad's policies? Before contemplating measures to arrest Iran's impetuous impulses, it is important to have a better appreciation of the ideology that animates the new president and the new cohort of hardliners that are leading the Islamic Republic.
The War Generation Comes to Power
After 27 years, the complexion of the Iranian regime is changing. An ascetic "war generation" is assuming power with a determination to rekindle revolutionary fires long extinguished.
