Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi (born 1934) is an Iranian Shia cleric and politician. He is widely seen as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's spiritual advisor, and a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts, the body responsible for choosing the Supreme Leader. Mesbah Yazdi espouses complete isolation from the West and opposes non-fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran. He advocates a return to the values of the 1979 Iranian revolution and is a prominent opponent of the Reformist movement in Iran. He believes that the use of nuclear weapons has religious legitimacy under Islamic Law.
Isolation from the west enforced by nuclear weapons. Given Ahmadinejad proclivity to attack Israel verbally, one wonders if this isolation included a liberated Palestine. However, the idea that Iran could liberate Palestine with Hezbollah and Hamas support is absurd. Iran may well be a threat to oil supplies and destabilize the fragile balence in Iraq towards civil war and partitian, but they don't want a Kurdish state on their border anymore than Turkey. And they know their oil income will take a precipitous drop should their been a regional Sunni-Shiite war.
Short of enduring nuclear devastation should they develop and use their nuclear skills, I just can't see Iran being a particular threat to anything more than economic hegomony by the US. What country would choose nuclear war? On the other hand, I suspect most countries with hostility towards the US are hoping to go nuclear to prevent what happened in Iraq.
Here is an excerpt from The Head Heeb has the details of the political intrigue behind the scenes.
Articles 91 through 99 of the constitution give the powerful Iranian Council of Guardians authority to supervise national elections, and this authority includes the power to disqualify candidates from the ballot. In effect, the Guardians can thus limit the political space within which the voters can choose.
The Guardians are, theoretically, subject to the oversight of both the velayat-i-faghih and the parliament, with the former appointing half the council and the latter choosing the other half from nominees proposed by the judiciary. In practice, however, the supreme leader has exercised total control over the appointment process. The one time that the Majlis tried to exercise its authority - in 2001, when the reformist majority that existed at the time rejected two of the three names put forward by the chief justice - Khamenei forced them to back down by threatening to hold up then-President Mohammed Khatami's inauguration.
As a result, the Guardians' primary guiding principle in exercising their power has been to pre-empt any threat to the supreme leader's authority. In the past, as in the 2004 parliamentary election, their primary targets have been reformists. This time, though, the threat came from the faction associated with Ahmedinejad and his spiritual mentor Ayatollah Mohammed Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi. The Ahmedinejad faction hoped that, if it could take control of the Assembly of Experts, which has the power to dismiss the supreme leader and appoint a new one, it could replace Khamenei with Mesbah-Yazdi and give the president a free hand in foreign and security policy.
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