A slap in the face for Iran's President Ahmadinejad

Telegraph Blogs, At last, something interesting from WikiLeaks’ diplomatic bundles, courtesy of Drudge. The New York Daily News has picked up this tit-bit from the inner sanctum of the revolutionary regime in Tehran. A leaked diplomatic cable says that President Ahmadinejad was slapped in the face by the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard for daring to suggest lifting restrictions on the press. The Daily News reports:

The February 2010 cable, classified secret and puckishly headlined, “He Who Got Slapped,” quotes an intelligence source recounting a contentious meeting of Iran’s Supreme Natuional Security Council. The Iranian bigs were trying to figure out what to do in the wake of Tehran’s explosive pro-democracy street protests of 2009. Ahmadinejad claimed that ‘people feel suffocated,’ and mused that to defuse the situation it may be necessary to allow more personal and social freedoms, including more freedom of the press,” the cable says. It continues, “Ahmadinejad’s statements infuriate Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari, who exclaimed ‘You are wrong! It is YOU who created this mess! And now you say give more freedom to the press?!’ “Source said that Jafari then slapped Ahmadinejad in the face, causing an uproar,” the cable says.

Iran, naturally, denies that the slap happened and claims that it’s just black propaganda. You can see their point. For this little vignette is throughly de-stabilising. It suggests not only that Ahmadinejad is a bit of a whimpish liberal rather than the ranting loony we all love to hate but also that he can be humiliated with impunity by an Iranian brass hat. That would confirm western suspicions that the Iranian president is no more than an irritating figurehead and that it is the military that really calls the shots in Tehran.