What Ahmadinejad Thinks He's Doing

The crisis in Lebanon was a rude awakening for Iran’s populist, fiery, and forked-tongue president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His dangerous messianic rhetoric crashed on the hard rocks of geopolitics and on the even harder reality that the rest of the Iranian regime is reluctant to support anything that seriously endangers their control of $70 billion a year in petro-loot. The fissures within the regime in Tehran appeared pronounced in the beginning of the Lebanon crisis. Once the crisis ended—and the regime was assured of Hezbollah’s survival—the tension gave way to the regime’s collective effort to score political points at the expense of the United States and Israel.