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.

The White House was unmoved by the IAEA finding that Iran had installed 180 advanced centrifuges at Natanz to speed enrichment and commented Thursday, Feb. 21 that “a diplomatic solution is still possible” for Iran’s nuclear program. debkafile: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is calling in a debt from the US president: He respected Barack’s Obama’s campaign for reelection and gave up Iran’s “October surprise. Now he expects the US president not to upset his push to get his handpicked choice elected as Iran’s next president.

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.

While running for reelection, Barack Obama said an Iranian “breakout capacity” must be averted because it meant Tehran could quickly assemble a nuclear weapon before US or Israeli intelligence caught on and had time to intervene. debkafile: Iran is widely presumed to have passed this stage already, and so “breakout capacity” is just another red line to be blown away by Tehran. The talk of 2013 being a critical year for preempting Iran’s nuclear capacity is nothing but election spin.

Israel’s political parties are on the move and eyeing new alliances in the wake of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s surprise announcement of a merger between his Likud and Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu ahead of the general election in January. Netanyahu is eying the brand new Future party headed by ex-journalist Yair Lapid as a third prospective partner in his post-election cabinet. Labor under its new leader Shelly Yachimovich is resurgent and on the lookout for satellites. But the new Likud Beitunu list is still front-runner.

Ten days after Hizballah launched an Iranian stealth UAV into Israeli air space undetected, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu unveiled his new security doctrine in a Knesset speech confirming elections on Jan. 22, 2013. He said that his light but firm finger on the trigger had given Israel seven years without war.
Iran’s leader Khamenei, in contrast, handed Hizballah a $1 m prize for the sending the spy drone in a blatant act of belligerence. He rewarded the Iranian UAV designers with a Porsche car each.

Netanyahu was in touch with Barack Obama and Mitt Romney before his UN speech last month and reached agreement with both that he would set up a centrist government with Labor after Israel’s January election and join them n getting set for a showdown with Iran in March.

Islamist candidate Muhammad Mursi did not wait for the ballots to be counted before proclaiming himself President of Egypt. Shafiq’s protest that final results were not in was drowned out by street celebrations preparing the masses to confirm the Brotherhood win. The Netanyahu government did not oppose Obama’s policy of bringing Muslims to power through the ballot box and now faces Moslem adversaries from a strategic pit. To recover its deterrent effectiveness, Israel must dismantle Iran’s nuclear program by force.

The Brotherhood's Islamist militias, which first put in an appearance in Egypt's presidential election campaign last month to disrupt Ahmed Shafiq's rallies, quickly took on a national character. They then formed into hierarchical structures on the lines of the paramilitary militias which surfaced in the early years of Iran’s Shiite revolution in the early 1980s and evolved into Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The Muslim Brotherhood lost substantial ground between Egypt’s general and presidential elections round one. The emergence of the two frontrunners, the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and former PM Ahmed Shafiq, has cast the original revolutionaries and pro-democracy elements onto the sidelines.

Results of the final round of the presidential vote in Egypt depends on two things: The candidates’ ability to organize their campaigns and funding from the Arab world and American sources.

Two stalwarts of the Western confrontation against a nuclear-armed Iran suffered election defeats this week: Nicolas Sarkozy was swept out of the Elysee by the Socialist leader Francois Hollande Sunday, May 6. Three days earlier, the two parties forming UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s government coalition were trounced in local elections across Britain.  Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who faces an election in four months, never imagined he would so soon be left on shifting sands against the Iranian nuclear threat.

General Omar Suleiman was gulled into throwing his hat in the presidential ring by two generals who needed a fig leaf for disqualifying the two Islamist contenders for the presidency.

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.

Egypt's immediate future is up in the air over unanswerable questions about its form of government, the nature of its leadership and the lack of clarity about its new constitution. The country is meanwhile on the brink of economic collapse.

The results of a recent opinion poll in Egypt shocked Washington. Two-thirds of the sample canvassed promised to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood and extremist Salafi movements, leaving pro-democracy and liberal factions no more than a third. The leading MB candidate Salim Al-Awa wants to cut off ties with ...

All ten presidential contenders in Egypt are plugging an anti-Israel line and promising to annul the peace treaty with Israel – even though the military rulers show no sign of setting dates for presidential and parliamentary elections. Israel remains silent as Cairo tears up the peace treaty piece by ...