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Has Ahmadinejad Lost His Global Following?

[Christian Science Monitor] Liam Stack - For 30 years, Iran has cast itself as a leader of resistance to Israeli and Western policies, and few of its leaders have done as much for that image as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Under Ahmadinejad, Iran's "resistance" brand has gone global, challenging Western hegemony in the name of defending the globally downtrodden and winning allies from Lebanon to Venezuela. But analysts say Iran's resistance image has been challenged by Ahmadinejad's controversial June 12 reelection. "People can see now that Iran has the same authoritarian political systems as the Arab world," says Nabil Abdel Fattah, assistant director of Cairo's Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a think tank with government ties. "Ahmadinejad is not a hero." Josh Stacher, a professor of Middle East politics at Kent State University, says: "Every state in the region has a president or a king that the people on the ground disagree with, and every state has seen rigged elections....The amount of people on the streets in Tehran show that people there aren't buying Ahmadinejad's resistance rhetoric anyway, and that could spread through the neighborhood."
2009-07-15 06:00:00
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