Get ready for stories about how Khameini is a moderate

Power struggle: Khamenei assembles foreign policy group to sideline Ahmadinejad

GERTZ.............

LONDON — Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei is moving to wrest control from his emerging rival, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

(How, the thinking goes, can Israel or America drop their guard–international popularity be damned–when Iran’s supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, blasts the pontiff’s words as "the latest link in the chain of a crusade against Islam started by America's Bush"? The Pope’s remarks, insisted Khameini, were part of a U.S.-Zionist conspiracy to foment inter-religious strife. And the Brits and the French think Iran is less of a threat to life and limb than the Israeli occupation of the West Bank? What kind of world are we living in? )

Khamenei has ordered the creation of a foreign policy council that would be solely responsible to the ruling cleric. In a decree, Khamenei said the Strategic Council for Foreign Relations, formed on June 25, would facilitate decisions on foreign policy. "It's the first time Khamenei has asserted control since Ahmadinejad took over the presidency," a Western intelligence analyst said. "Until now, Khamenei has taken a back seat to Ahmadinejad."

For Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s spiritual leader, “the presence of Zionists in the region is a satanic and cancerous presence and an infected tumor for the entire world of Islam.”

Analysts said the council could become Khamenei's back channel to the United States amid the Western incentive package for Teheran to terminate its uranium enrichment program. Ahmadinejad, backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has dismissed any prospect of an enrichment suspension.

Iran's Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khameini, in a meeting with visiting Prime Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong on Tuesday, spoke about world terrorism, including the beheadings of foreign civilians taking place in Iraq. "We seriously suspect the agents of the Americans and Israelis," Khameini said, according to Iran's IRNA news agency, "in conducting such horrendous terrorist moves, and cannot believe that the people who kidnap Filipino nationals, for instance, or behead U.S. nationals are Muslims." Khameini also said on Tuesday that drug addiction and ethical wrongdoings amongst Iran's youth were the fault of the Americans and Zionists, IRNA reported: "There is no doubt that the hands and brains of the enemies are behind the conspiracy of drug addiction and ethical lawlessness."

Former Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi, a longtime proponent of reconciliation with the United States, heads the council. Kharazi, a critic of Ahmadinejad, said Khamenei "sensed a deficiency" in the implementation of Iran's foreign policy.

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