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Ahmadinejad II

You’ve stolen an election. Now what?

by
July 15, 2009
Amadinejad doing presidenty things, like receiving the Omani foreign minister, last week.(Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images)
Amadinejad doing presidenty things, like receiving the Omani foreign minister, last week.(Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images)

The New Republic takes a look at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will do with his ill-gotten second term as president of Iran. Abbas Milani, who previously explainedhow the schisms within Shia Islam account for Iran’s recent proto-revolutionary activity, argues that Ahmadinejad will redouble his efforts to stifle even democratic posturing within the country; that he’ll lay the groundwork for a possible presidency-for-life; and that with his regime’s legitimacy discredited by its recent brutality, he’ll cling onto his last bid credibility, Iran’s nuclear program. “More than ever,” Milani writes, the mullahs “need to claim a ‘victory’—and continuing some level of enrichment is a “red line” beyond which they will not relent.”

Ahmadinejad II [The New Republic]