Battle within

For years Iran has been hostile to the West and Arab neighbors. Now with election results in question and unrest lingering, the fight for the future of the Islamic republic resides with its own | Mindy Belz

Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images

In a long narrow conference room in Qom, the religious center for Iran's Shiite Muslims, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sits surrounded by about a dozen of Iran's ruling ayatollahs who make up the Council of Guardians. It is the day after June 12 elections, and he is preparing to mobilize the plainclothes paramilitary group known as basiji to counter rapidly multiplying street demonstrations.

Yet all the while, the 52-year-old, a former mayor of Tehran, civil engineering academic, and son of a blacksmith, is talking into his shirt. He mumbles, his face barely moving, looking downcast, tired, and not at all like someone who just won an election.

This is not the fiery Ahmadinejad, who in April prompted delegates from the United States, Canada, Germany, and Italy to walk out of a UN conference on racism. The boycott erupted when he spoke of the Holocaust as "the pretext of Jewish sufferings" used by the UN Security Council to create "a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine."