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Iran parliament moves to impeach Ahmadinejad
Supreme Leader tells parliament to back off, but MPs are circulating a petition to bring down the president
Moves are afoot to impeach Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad despite a direct order from the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to refrain from doing so, it has emerged.
The Iranian parliament - the Majlis - has released a report, debated yesterday, in which 14 charges are levelled at Ahmadinejad.
According to the Wall Street Journal they include the withdrawal of $590 million from the Central Bank's foreign reserve fund without approval, illegally importing gas and oil to the value of $9bn and, perhaps most seriously in the eyes of MPs, a lack of transparency in the national budget and an attack on parliament's powers of oversight.
The report is damning: "The president and his cabinet must be held accountable in front of the parliament... the accumulation of legal violations by the government is harming the regime."
Although Khamenei warned parliament to back off, MPs are now circulating a petition which would entitle them to debate a motion unprecedented in the history of the Iranian republic: the impeachment of Ahmadinejad. His opponents reportedly have 40 of the 74 signatures they need.
The move by the Iranian parliament, itself dominated by conservatives, seems to be an escalation of a power struggle with the populist conservative Ahmadinejad and the even more conservative Guardian Council, which has the power of veto against any law passed by parliament.
On Saturday the Guardian Council recommended that Khamenei should rein in the parliament's powers - an intervention that seems only to have strengthened the MPs' resolve to bring down Ahmadinejad.
The likelihood of a successful impeachment is slim, however. Khamenei, as well as the Guardian Council, can veto any decision of parliament and the supreme leader has a history of intervening on behalf of his divisive president - not least when mass popular protests threatened to scupper Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election last year. ·
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"Wow, Ronald Dupree, are Americans so egocentric..."
Yes. Yes they are.
Wow, Ronald Dupree, are Americans so egocentric that they must automatically respond to any article with something about their own president? You may not know it, Ronald Dupree, but Iran is a country without freedom of speech, a country of young people fighting religious oppression brought on by a revolution that happened before most of them were even born. They are fighting for a freedom that you obviously take for granted. The question is: do you deserve it? Did you even read the article, Ronald Dupree? Did you know that your president can be voted out of office in two years, while the President of Iran is widely accused to falsifying his last election and can remain in power with the help of a religious dictator? Or did you just come from the Drudge Report, all hot to make an off topic remark, as if the rest of the world was even interested in hearing your idiotic, knee-jerk, reactionary, self-centered response?
Probably as much chance removing Iran's vermin as there is of our being able to remove this turd we have in the whitehouse.