Iran Analysis: How Secure is Ahmadinejad?

The Los Angeles Times parallels our analysis with an article this morning, "Iran is Far From United Behind Mahmoud Ahmadinejad".

And this passage in a Council on Foreign Relations interview with Professor Kaveh Ehsani, who is based at Chicago's DePaul University, is striking:

I don't think Ahmadinejad is in such a strong position. In fact, nobody is in a strong position in Iran at this moment.

It's very unclear who has the ultimate legitimacy. The population seems to be highly angered, disillusioned with a lot of the leaders. The Green Movement leaders --- [Mir Hossein] Mousavi and [Mehdi] Karroubi, the two presidential candidates who were the victims of the rigged elections --- seem to have retained their popular support among those who are unsatisfied with the system, but we don't know how strong these sentiments are because there is no way to measure it. There are no opinion polls, there is no free media. All the oppositional press has been suppressed.

I wouldn't say that Ahmadinejad has a lot of power, nor does the leader. The point is, it's a Catch-22. They need each other; they can't do without each other. If Khamenei comes out and says Ahmadinejad should go, then he's admitting openly that they made a huge mistake by promoting him and supporting him against all odds and against his own conservative constituency, through a very disputed election and against huge popular discontent. His own position would become really shaky.

Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, really has not that much popular support anymore. People like the fact that he's spreading money [around], but he's not really improving the economy. The conservative establishment is really uncomfortable with the way that he has handled foreign policy, the nuclear issue, the Israel issue. His confrontational style has really increased the cost of Iran's policies and its place in the international community. They are really uncomfortable with what he's been doing domestically and internationally. But, in some ways, they're caught in this dance that they prepared themselves. They can't do without each other.