Smash hit

John Prescott, the deputy prime minister, is not alone in regarding George W Bush’s Middle East policy as “crap”. There is almost as much unhappiness among American conservatives over his mistakes as there is in the Labour party at Tony Blair’s.

How immediate is the Iranian threat?

AN expert on the Middle East, Ilan Berman, is based at the American Foreign Policy Council. He said last week: “I’m not in the camp that believes the end of the world will come about on Tuesday, but there is a strong apocalyptic strain in Ahmadinejad and his group. He is positioning Iran to be in the vanguard of the clash of civilisations with the West.”

Even those experts who say that Ahmadinejad is no more apocalyptic than fundamentalist Christians (including Bush himself), who believe there will be a day of “rapture” when the faithful will be lifted to heaven, agree that the Iranian president has his eyes firmly set on nuclear weapons.

In their view, on Tuesday Ahmadinejad will offer the West a few measly compromises or at best a temporary freeze, while playing for more time to build a nuclear bomb — and western governments will again fail to stop him.

In an interview with Mike Wallace, the veteran American journalist, last week, the Iranian president presented himself as a mild-mannered man of the people who was merely standing by the suffering Lebanese and pursuing a peaceful nuclear energy programme.

He looked appealingly diffident and laid into Bush for wanting “to solve everything with bombs. The time of the bomb is in the past . . . Today is the era of thoughts, dialogues and cultural exchanges”.

It was Ahmadinejad the “blogger” and letter writer to the White House on show, while out of sight his thugs continue to harass dissidents such as Mansour Ossanloo, leader of the bus drivers’ union, part of whose tongue has been removed by the Iranian security forces.

The mask slipped for a moment when Ahmadinejad went on to accuse Israel of being a “fabricated state” and failed to deny that he wanted it “wiped off the map”.

The son of an ironworker, Ahmadinejad, 49, hero-worshipped Ayatollah Khomeini as a student and was in the vanguard of the 1979 revolution. He went on to join Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, where he became known as a persecutor of dissidents. In 2005 he was catapulted into the presidency by the mullahs as a trusty hardliner who had impressed working-class Iranians with his homespun lifestyle as mayor of Tehran.

There is no doubt that he is a millenarian who believes in the coming of the 12th imam, the mahdi (or messiah) of Sh’ite theology. In his first speech to the UN last year, he startled his worldly audience by begging “O mighty Lord” to “hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace”.

While his piety is no pose, Ahmadinejad is a shrewd political opportunist. He has consolidated his power by playing the game of “holier than thou”. Vali Nasr, a professor at the US Naval Postgraduate school and author of an influential book, The Shia Revival, says: “The leaders of Iran are hardline, revolutionary militants and men of power, but they are not crazy.”

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