Are the wheels coming off the Iranian regime bus? On July 26, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fired the country’s Intelligence Minister, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie, a man who customarily reports directly to the Supreme Leader, , rather than to the President. The move came a day after Khamenei had forced Ahmadinejad to drop Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie as his candidate for Vice President. But, in an act of flagrant defiance of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad appointed Mashaie as his chief of staff. All this suggests that a political brawl is raging within the corridors of power, the likes of which we have not seen since died in 1989.It is bad enough that Khamenei is fighting with the man be backed for President, but what really keeps the Supreme Leader awake at night is Khomeini’s ghost. In the West many fall back on the easy assumption that the demonstrations protesting the June 12 election expressed a desire for liberal democratic reform. While there may be some truth to that, the opposition leaders — the candidates who lost the June 12 election — are fighting for something else: the mantle of the 1979 revolution. They believe they are the true inheritors of Khomeini’s legacy. They call themselves the followers of Beit-i Khom…
