Abbas Amanat

And it seems that you were asking, I thought you were going to ask me this question.

Almost without an exception,

since the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979, up to the last of the presidents of the Islamic Republic, Rouhani, before the guy that is last year or a year and a half ago was in a phony election, got into the position of the president, all of them, there's a long list,

all of them eventually fell out with the regime.

So there is no president, except perhaps to some extent Rouhani, but we'll wait and see what's going to happen to him.

But prior to him, all of them, including Ahmadinejad,

fell out with the regime, with the current regime in Iran.

Who's Rouhani?

Yes, it's a phony election.

What's interesting about what happened?

Because the process of actually candidacy for presidency is completely controlled

by a council that is under the control of the Supreme Leader.

So they have to approve who is going to be the candidate.

So not everybody can enter and say, I would like to be a candidate.

You're saying there was some- Well, he is kind of out of favor now because he was more moderate than this most recent regime.

But the point is that if you look, this is something almost institutional, constitutional to the regime.

This is a regime that rejects all of the executive powers.

because the division between the supreme authority as a place of a supreme authority versus the presidency has problematic.

It is as if there would be a supreme leader in the United States above all the three sources of power.

I mean, that's the kind of view that you can see in today's Iran.