Ahmadinejad on 70% approval. posted by Richard Seymour

Apparently, the Iranian president is enjoying a wave of popularity due to: his reputed incorruptibility; his anti-imperialist stance; his attacks on the Iranian ruling elite; and the fact that he has proven less socially conservative than some would think. Aside from domestic popularity, I'd be willing to bet that Iran's profile in the Middle East has substantially raised partly because of the war that eliminated their local rival, but also because the Iranian president's attacks on Zionism and the Bush administration. Now, this is unlikely to be altered in the immediate future because the leading critics are the so-called 'Modern Right', the neoliberals who supported Rafsanjani - such as Mohammad Atrianfar, whose views appear in the linked article:

The present economy, due to the rate of oil prices, is in a good situation. But the management of the state sector is very bad. I can compare him to a wicked child who has inherited a large amount of money and goes on a spending spree. He has taken horrid and rushed decisions."

Mr Atrianfar said that windfall oil revenue was being squandered through state handouts to impoverished provinces and commodity subsidies. But there was insufficient investment in long-term projects and infrastructure, foreign investment was falling, and the country was suffering capital flight and a brain drain.

The thing about the reformist movement is that what used to be known as the 'Islamic Left' ended up colluding with the 'Modern Right' against the ultra-conservative sectors of the Iranian state, and the fact that the state blocked less right-wing candidates from standing meant that the reformist vote was represented by a right-winger with little real appeal in Iranian society, certainly none among the poor. The above comments are typical fare of the 'Modern Right' - cut welfare and public spending, integrate more fully into global capitalism, liberalise trade, get WTO membership, privatise more industry etc. Ahmadinejad is popular at least in part because he opposes this, and for this reason there is going to have to be a political realignment of the reformists, who have been substantially weakened in the state apparatus. Actually, what there needs to be is a strong and independent workers movement, with an appropriately critical attitude to the state. It's a curious thing that many of the most violently repressed protests under the reformist rubric have been against precisely the kind of privatisation and cuts in public expenditure that the leadership of the reformists, including Khatami, have tried to introduce.

America is going to continue with its nuclear weapons gambit, and I think they hope that this is one way of exacerbating the cleavage within the Iranian state, between those tempted to take America's 'offer' seriously and those inclined to rebuff it. However, if they intend to attack Iran at some point, you would expect them to have a difficult tast in portraying a democratically elected leader with a 70% approval rating as a dictator - although, in fact, Ehud Olmert has already referred to Ahmadinejad as a dictator, as has Germany's Council of Jews in opposing his visit to the World Cup. Given that Western media still, obscenely, describe Chavez as a 'dictator' shows that it isn't all that difficult.