Let Ahmadinejad Stew

As if we needed further evidence of the need for the West - and particularly America - to lay off grand-standing about Iran, this story in the Guardian reveals that the bellicose Iranian president is losing the support of Iran's Supreme Leader, and heading for a 'winter of discontent'. More significantly, the Guardian report suggests that domestic opposition to Ahmadinejad is being stepped up now that the president can't keep relying on the American bogey to prop himself up. Sane heads have argued for some time that Ahmadinejad needed the threat of American military action to shore up an increasingly untenable domestic position, and the ever obliging Bush administration has not, until recently, let him down. Leave him be, however, and his domestic chickens start coming home to roost. It is perhaps worth adding, in this US election year, that the candidate who has been most robust about Iran, thanks in part to his neo-con advisers, is Rudy Giuliani. Fortunately for the rest of the world, Rudy's hopes of gaining his party's nomination look like a distant one, although a final verdict has yet to be delivered by the primary voters of Florida, where Giuliani has been campaigning hard.