There’s a palpable sense of tension in Tehran these days, said Rudolph Chimelli in the Munich Süddeutsche Zeitung. People are worried sick that America will launch an attack to stop Iran from getting the bomb. Senior figures have openly criticized President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for ramping up tensions. But, far from toning down the rhetoric, he has lashed out at “traitors”—meaning ex-Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hashemi Rafsanjani—calling them “more stupid than goats” for wanting to give in to the West. He has also replaced chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani with an even more hard-line figure, and charged one of Larijani’s deputies, Hossein Mousavian, with spying for the British. Plus, he has ordered all Iranians not to speak to foreigners. Last week’s report by the International Atomic Energy Agency confirming that Iran now has nearly 3,000 operating centrifuges—enough to make a bomb within one year—has ramped up the tension even more.
We’re in trouble, said Iran’s reformist daily E’temad-e Melli in an editorial. Ahmadinejad dismisses the idea of a U.S. attack and calls sanctions meaningless “bits of paper.” But he’s wrong on both counts: President Bush means business, and sanctions have been disastrous for the economy. Our own dangerous neocons are rampant, said Hossein Bastani on the Iranian exiles’ Web site Roozonline.com. Ahmadinejad has placed his stooges everywhere in the administration. Larijani himself was a hard-liner, but apparently he wasn’t rigid enough, so the president has replaced him with Saeed Jalili, whose record of international diplomacy so far consists of trying to convert Cuba’s Fidel Castro to Islam.
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