3 Faces of Iran

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President-Elect of Iran

As a student, Ahmadinejad joined an ultra-conservative radical student group spawned by the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and staged (i.e. planned and participated in) the capture of the US Embassy. He was later a revolutionary guard. When he became mayor of Tehran in 2003, he curtailed many of the reforms that had been put in place by the moderates who had run the city before him. Ahmadinejad was the only presidential candidate who talked against future relations with the United States. As an unabashed conservative, he resurrected the fervour of the 1979 Islamic Revolution during the campaign by saying Iran "did not have a revolution in order to have democracy, but to have an Islamic government."

Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, President of Iran 1989-1997

Here is a partial list of crimes committed by the state of Iran while Rafsanjani was president:

- massacre of Iranian Kurds in a restaurant in Berlin, 1992

- bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, 1994

- bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, 1996.

Rafsanjani was billed as the “moderate” in last month’s presidential election. He supported the Ayatollah Khomeini in prolonging the war with Iraq, later convincing him to accept the UN resolution to end it. He preached against the US as the “Great Satan”, then was happy to deal hostages for arms with Satan’s government.

“He’s what our lazy press means when it describes some opportunist torturer and murderer as a 'moderate' or a 'survivor'” – Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair.

Hossein Khomeini, grandson of the Ayatollah Khomeini

Khomeini is a “strong supporter” of US intervention in Iraq and he shares the traditional Shia belief that clerics should not have political power. “I stand for the complete separation of religion and the state.”

Hitchens in July’s Vanity Fair: “In terms that would make the heart of a neocon soar like a hawk, [Khomeini] goes on to praise President Bush’s State of the Union speech, to warn that the mullahs cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, and to use the term ‘Free World’ without irony: ‘Only the Free World, led by America, can bring democracy to Iran.’”

Sources: Al Jazeera, BBC News, GlobalSecurity.org, Vanity Fair, Wikipedia.