Iran: A “Naked Power Struggle”

An Iranian member of parliament claims to have enough signatures to bring the motion to impeach President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “into force,” according to a report by Golnaz Esfandiari. The MP, Ali Motahari, says that he has collected “more than 50″ signatures, close to the one-fourth (73) of parliament needed to “question the president.”

Jamsheed Choksy writes at Foreign Policy that “[c]asual Iran observers tend to portray the country’s most prominent political division as that between fundamentalist hard-liners and secular moderates. In reality, however, the struggle for Iran’s future is a three-way fight waged by the different branches of conservatives that control the parliament, the presidency, and the theocracy.” He goes on to describe the situation as a “naked power struggle that has cloaked itself in ideology,” and that the “infighting is motivated by differences over pragmatic political strategy.”