Iran’s Flip-Flopper Supreme

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

PARIS — Will the real Ayatollah Ali Khamenei please stand up?

On June 19, a week after Iran’s disputed presidential election, the supreme leader shed the garb of the lofty arbiter to deliver a raging sermon in which he warned of “bloodshed and chaos” in Tehran if protests continued. They did, the next day, and I will never forget the blood that flowed at Khamenei’s behest.

Khamenei, abandoning the plausible deniability of the Prophet’s avatar, opting instead for perilous political partisanship, said then: “Please see the hungry wolves in ambush who are gradually removing their mask of diplomacy to show their true faces.” He identified the most evil of these foreign wolves as “the British government,” no less.

Now, 10 weeks later, with the Iranian revolutionary establishment still shaken by the brazenness of the June 12 electoral fraud and the rashness of the supreme leader’s gambit, Khamenei declares: “I don’t accuse the leaders of the recent incidents of being affiliated with foreign countries, including the United States and Britain, since the issue has not been proven to me.”

Well, sir, which is it?

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