Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the US and Israel’s unlikely choice to lead Iran

For all their outward differences, there always seemed to be things that linked Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Donald Trump. A visit to the then Iranian president’s rather humble Tehran neighbourhood nearly 20 years ago highlighted cost of living problems that prefigured those facing Trump now. Amid soaring prices, the grocer at the end of Ahmadinejad’s street in the Narmak district was no longer stocking tomatoes, saying customers could not afford them and voicing a wish to close down. Shoppers at a nearby fruit and vegetable market complained at the cost of potatoes, onions and fish. It seemed to represent a failure on the kitchen table issues that the populist leader had pledged to tackle. Trump critics will surely hear an echo. Two decades later, that reporting trip has uncanny resonance amid reports that Israeli strikes on a security post were designed to free Ahmadinejad from house arrest and lead to his installation as Iran’s new leader . The New York Times , citing official sources, reported that the US and Israel had identified the anti-western and anti-Zionist former president as the person they wanted to lead Iran after the regime’s presumed collapse in their face of their military onslaught. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivers a speech in Tehran in 2012 in which he said Iran had broken the ‘idol’ of the Holocaust. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/ The plan went awry almost immediately. …