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The arrest of almost a million people over the past six months. (This includes individuals who were held for a few hours to be cautioned on their anti-Islamic appearance.)
- The highest number of executions since 1988.
- The disbanding of independent trade unions and the jailing of hundreds of their leaders and activists.
- The imposition of a new “Islamic” dress code, and the revival of the ban on private musical concerts and other cultural events.
- The abolition of state subsidies on gasoline, something that Ahmadinejad’s predecessors mulled over for 15 years but lacked the courage to implement.
- Massive privatization of state-owned enterprises, mostly sold to the personnel of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). (Again, this was something that Ahmadinejad’s predecessors had promised but dared not apply.)
- Shutting down scores of newspapers and magazines and disbanding two independent news agencies. (The current media crackdown is the biggest since 2001when then President Muhammad Khatami carried out a major purge.)
- The use of force against ethnic Kurdish, Baluch, and Arab dissidents, including military intervention against Kurdish rebels’ strongholds in the Iraqi Kurdistan.
- A massive purge of leadership aimed at strengthening the position of the IRGC as the effective ruling elite. (By some estimates, more than 500 high officials have been replaced since 2005.)
All this does not look like the record of a leader afraid of imposing his agenda.
Ahmadinejad’s performance on the foreign policy scene is even more impressive, and includes:
- The IRI was invited to the summit of the Shanghai Group something that Ahmadinejad’s predecessors coveted but failed to achieve. The group consists of Russia, China, Kazakhstan and the four Central Asian republics.)
- Ahmadinejad has hosted the summit of the Caspian Sea states in Tehran, again achieving something that his predecessors failed to obtain.
- Ahmadinejad has just played host to President Vladimir Putin, the first Russian head of state to visit Tehran since Nikolai Podgorny in 1971.
- The emergence of a pro-IRI axis in Latin America, consisting of Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua is also a success for Ahmadinejad, something his predecessors failed to pull off.
- It seems likely that Ahmadinejad will secure the leadership of the so-called Nonaligned Movement (NAM) and transfer its headquarters to Tehran, thus buttressing his claim of being “the leader of the global front against Western Imperialism.”
- The IRI’s controversial nuclear enrichment programme, which gives it the raw material to make atomic bombs, has been resumed after a suspension of two years during which the Khatami administration failed to develop a framework for resolving the dispute with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
- In recent months, the IRI has dramatically heightened its profile in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza and emerged as the leader of an un-announced Rejection Front.
- Ahmadinejad has radicalized the IRI’s diplomatic discourse and broken some taboos of international life without serious consequences. Instead, his discourse has earned him support among radical movements outside Iran, something that none of his predecessors achieved.
- Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at Columbia University, thus establishing the fact that positions that many regard as weird, if not actually criminal, can be aired as if they were legitimate opinions worthy of debate in a Western democracy.
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