Bulldogs beneath the carpet

Winston Churchill once said that watching the Kremlin was like watching two bulldogs fight beneath a carpet — outsiders have little idea what is going on until the bones of the loser fly out from beneath. These days much of the same could be said of politics in Tehran. Although his bones are still intact, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken a severe beating recently as a result of his ongoing, byzantine dispute with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. While rifts between political factions in Iran are well documented, this particular conflict illustrates the reality that the supreme leader and those around him are resorting to increasingly drastic measures to snuff out political pluralism in the Islamic Republic, and that the fallout with their erstwhile neoconservative allies will have far reaching repercussions for Iranian politics in the future. The split between the conservatives and neoconservatives occurred after the latter emerged