Iranian politics increasingly resembles a brutal game of
musical chairs.
Last month, two former senior politicians who ran against
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009 disappeared into political detention. On
Tuesday, March 8, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani -- a former president and
for three decades one of Iran's most powerful politicians -- lost his post as
head of the Assembly of Experts, the body of clerics that theoretically
supervises the Supreme Leader of Iran and chooses his successor.
Rafsanjani's replacement by Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi
Kani, an elderly conservative who is bound to a wheelchair, is the culmination
of a slow-moving purge by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who,
ironically, acquired the top job at Rafsanjani's instigation in 1989. The apparent
intent is to strip other Iranian institutions of any authority, further
demoralize Iran's opposition Green Movement, and prove that the Arab uprisings
of the past two months will stop at the border with Iran.
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