Mahmoud "divorced from reality"

By James Lewis

Today's Sunday Times (UK) quotes "foreign diplomats and a Western official" as saying that Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad is "increasingly divorced from reality."

THE president of Iran, Mah-moud Ahmadinejad, has taken to regaling his inner circle with a startling anecdote from his travels around the country to bolster domestic support for a nuclear programme that has generated vociferous international opposition.

Flying back to Tehran one day from a Western province, he realised that he would not reach the capital in time for a scheduled prayer and ordered his helicopter pilot to land.

As Ahmadinejad tells it, he had just laid out his prayer mat on the flat, fertile terrain of rural Zanjan when three shepherds appeared and began to chant. "Nuclear power is our inalienable right," they cried in faithful unison."

Three shepherds chanting in unison, three Magi, three Angels of the Lord visiting Abraham. It's a common theme. Mahmoud at prayer has been reported to claim communication with the messiah of the Khomeini cult, the Hidden Mahdi. When he talked to the UN General Assembly last year, he told his friends, he was surrounded by a halo of light, and every other person in the hall "didn't blink for 27, 28 minutes."

In psychiatric jargon, these reports sound like dissociative delusions of reference, a common feature of paranoid personalities. There are worrisome similarities to the Rev. Jim Jones of Jonestown infamy.

In other Iran news, the Times reports that:

"A former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran last month is being held by Revolutionary Guards in a "safe house" in Tajrish, northern Tehran, according to a source within the guard, writes Uzi Mahnaimi. ... They want to swap Robert Levinson, 59, a private investigator from Florida, for Ali Reza Asgari, an Iranian general who vanished in mysterious circumstances in Turkey in February.

Levinson, who is said to be unwell, has apparently been interrogated by guards who intend to broadcast his testimony on television once Tehran acknowledges that it is holding him."

The Times claims that popular dissatisfaction with the declining economy is now being expressed openly, even by devout Shi'a Muslims.

James Lewis blogs at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/