Iranian Leaders Clash Over Nation's Nuclear Policy

The Daily Telegraph

LONDON — Internal pressure on President Ahmadinejad of Iran to abandon his confrontational policies with the West has intensified after the country's supreme spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, snubbed a request for a meeting on the country's nuclear program.

Iran's president meets regularly with Ayatollah Khamenei, who is regarded as the guardian of the Islamic Revolution, to brief him on international and domestic political issues.

But when the president requested a meeting earlier this month, the ayatollah declined.

It is the first time that he has refused to meet Mr. Ahmadinejad since the former Revolutionary Guard commander was elected president in 2005 and is a further indication of the growing unrest within Iran at his hard-line policies.

"It is a clear indication that the cracks are starting to appear in the highest echelons of the Iranian regime," a senior Bush administration official with responsibility for monitoring Iran said. "If the country's leading religious figure is not talking to the political leadership, then obviously something is going seriously wrong."

Ayatollah Khamenei became Iran's supreme spiritual leader following the death in 1989 of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution, which overthrew the shah in 1979. A leading conservative, his influence exceeds that of the president, and his refusal to meet Mr. Ahmadinejad has been taken by opposition politicians in Iran as a criticism of the government's handling of the nuclear issue, which has resulted in the country's mounting international isolation.

The snub comes as new details have emerged of Iran's deepening cooperation with North Korea on its nuclear program.

As the Daily Telegraph reported yesterday, Iranian scientists have been working with their North Korean counterparts to study the results of the nuclear test North Korea carried out last October.

Western intelligence agencies believe the Iranians, who insist that they are trying to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes, are preparing the ground to conduct their own underground test of a small atomic weapon.

The Conservative Party chairman of the British House of Commons Defense Select Committee, James Arbuthnott, said he was concerned by the report.

"This is deeply disturbing, though I cannot say I'm wholly surprised. We have simply got to keep up the pressure on Iran."

Mr. Ahmadinejad's refusal to suspend Iran's uranium enrichment program at Natanz has resulted in the U.N. Security Council passing a unanimous resolution to impose sanctions on Iran.

But the country's growing international isolation, together with a dramatic decline in the economy, has seen opposition to Mr. Ahmadinejad harden.

Last week, 150 Iranian parliamentarians took the extraordinary step of signing a letter blaming him for the country's economic woes.