President Ahmadinejad is smearing his enemies while under persecution himself for insisting on pushing his own candidate for president in the June 24 election and bringing the economy to the brink of disaster.

Khamenei has cut short the brawl between Ahmadinejad and Speaker Larijani in the run-up to the June presidential election, by picking a bland, unassuming professor as his favorite candidate for next president.

Revolutionary Guards and army chiefs are weighing a military takeover in Tehran to end the ferocious infighting within the regime and prevent Ahmadinejad stirring up trouble to get his candidate elected in the June presidential vote.

A secret US Pentagon study “casts doubt on whether the multibillion-dollar missile defense system planned for Europe can ever protect the US from Iranian ballistic missiles...” Clearly, the missile shield against Iran, which aroused ire in Moscow, is about to fall under the axe of US defense budget cuts. debkafile: Scrapping it will leave Israel and Turkey undefended against Iranian missile attack. But if Tehran can put a satellite in orbit of 36,000 kilometers above earth, as Ahmadinejad boasts, America is just as exposed.

As Israeli parties haggle over a new government coalition, Bashar Assad, backed by Iran and Moscow, sits firmly in the saddle and plays hardball with the Syrian opposition. Former military intelligence chief Asher Yadlin says Iran can “achieve nuclear breakout in four to six months.” Ahmadinejad invites Egypt to join Syria, Hizballah and a nuclear Iran for an unbeatable coalition to “solve the Palestinian question” and wipe Israel off the map so that he can pray on Temple Mount, Jerusalem.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a speech Wednesday, Jan. 2, “The country’s economy should not be controlled by 3,000 or 10,000 people.” Seventy-six million Iranians still don’t benefit from the country’s oil revenues, "only an elite minotiry."  debkafile:  The president’s new role of social crusader has sent his relations and friends rushing for the exits, selling property and packing their bags. They know his fate and their own hangs by a thread in a country where car accidents are a common feature of political life.

Amid another peak wave of violence in Syria, Washington has quietly withdrawn from its waters the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier and its Strike Group and the USS Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group with 2,000 Marines aboard. Russian vessels have meanwhile unloaded at Tartus a large consignment of arms for Assad’s army. Adding to stresses around Syria, Ahmadinejad cancelled a scheduled trip to Turkey, citing the warning by Iran’s military chief that the deployment of Patriots in Turkey heralded world war.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has decided against opening direct talks with the Obama administration, upsetting the reelected President Obama’s best-laid plans to solve the Iranian nuclear controversy by diplomacy.

An Iranian ex-diplomat and a lawmaker provide unknown details of the four years of secret American-Iranian exchanges on solving the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program which ended without results.

debkafile reveals one of the CIA’s most dramatic scoops in many years, an epic disaster for Iran. Our most exclusive Iranian and intelligence sources disclose that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s personal cameraman, Hassan Golkhanban, who defected from his UN entourage in New York on Oct. 1, brought with him an intelligence treasure trove of up-to-date photographs and videos of Iran’s top leaders visiting its most sensitive and secret nuclear and missile sites. He is staying at an undisclosed address.

Iran is assuming the worst: a) that its plummeting rial is the victim of a Western-Israeli conspiracy to softening the regime up by popular protest ahead of a military attack and b) that their enemies’ agents are manipulating the currency to force Iran to abandon its nuclear aspirations and ...

Abdullah, 89, functions fully as monarch, prime minister and national policymaker all rolled in one. He has decided to slow down negotiations for a non-aggression pact with Iran because Tehran is in too much of a hurry.

Some Western intelligence circles suggest that Israel may choose to disable Iran’s nuclear program by eliminating its leaders.

Saudis offered Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Mecca a non-aggression pact. Tehran rejection would lay Iran open to attack. The Iranian president sought counter-guarantees that Saudi Arabia would not be party to US or Israeli attacks. It is up to Khamenei to decide what next.

Saudi armed forces are on top war alert after Riyadh decided that the war with Iran had already begun between their undercover agencies in Syria and Iran was on the warpath even now and certainly after an Israeli strike against its nuclear program.

In their different ways, the rulers of Iran, North Korea and Syria this week tried to throw US President Barack Obama off balance by exploiting the foreign policy balls he is juggling to win the November election – a combination of tough talk and maneuvers for staying clear of military confrontation. They will continue to try and throw the US off-balance by extreme provocations, especially at the nuclear talks starting in Istanbul Saturday, April 14, between Iran and six world powers.

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are fighting to the finish for the supremacy of their factions in Iran’s March 2 general election unheeding of the mounting political chaos in Tehran, international sanctions or the threat of war.

The White House expects talks to start in days and lead to the halting of Iran’s nuclear program development and nuclear enrichment and the dismantling of its nuclear weapons facilities and labs. Israel’s Binyamin Netanyahu is less sanguine, says sanctions or not working and slams Iran as “the most ...

Tehran was always willing to talk, less to listen. This time, Iran is preparing to enter into negotiations from a position of strength after demonstrating that US and European sanctions have not had the effect of blocking the bulk of its oil exports.

Tehran has come around to deciding that Bashar Assad will have to be forced out of the Syrian presidency and may be willing to join forces with the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey to accomplish this – provided the foursome can get past a whole thicket of animosities.