IRAN: A hard-liner attacks Ahmadinejad

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The crack between hard-liners in Iran’s upcoming elections widened today when Moshen Rezai, the former head of the Revolutionary Guards, criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for inflammatory rhetoric and bungling the economy.

Calling himself a genuine hard-liner, Rezai, an intense man with a graying beard, said that if Ahmadinejad is re-elected in June Iran “will be thrown into an abyss, and if a reformist candidate wins we will return to the same failed policies of four years ago.”

Rezai has solid conservative credentials – he was head of the Revolutionary Guards from 1981 to 1997 – but it is unclear how much support he may have at the polls. His candidacy, however, is expected to siphon away support from Ahmadinejad and split hard-liners over the economy, unemployment and how to negotiate with the Obama administration.

”The U.S. cannot be the same old USA by deploying troops here and there across the world,” he said during a news conference. “The U.S. has undergone a social change recently and that change will be sooner or later translated in its foreign policy. ... Now, we can take advantage that the U.S. needs us and we can exploit that to maximize our national interests.”

Rezai’s language was less incendiary than what fuels Ahmadinejad’s adjective-filled populism. Rezai preferred to leave the Holocaust, which Ahmadinejad claims may not have happened or been exaggerated, out of the equation over how to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

“It’s an historic question that should be left out of the political dialogue,’ said Rezai, who has stated in the past that Israel wants to create a Zionist empire. ‘Denying it or proving it has nothing to do with it.”

Rezai gave no hint that he would dramatically change Iran’s political course, especially regarding foreign affairs. He said he believed in the late Aytaollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolutionary principles and, although he chastised Ahmadinejad for his verbosity, Rezai added, ‘on the whole our foreign policy is managed. ‘

--Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran