“I looked up, and there before me was a ram with two horns, standing beside the canal, and the horns were long.  One of the horns was longer than the other but grew up later.”  (Daniel 8:3   NIV)

As I wrote about in my book, Hidden In Plain Sight, prior to the great invasion by Iran which is the Second Signpost a second horn – a new office – must come up next to the first horn that is the supreme leader.  In my book I posited that it was to be the current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  After all, he challenged the supreme leader starting in 2010 or so, and no one had done that before in Iran.  He was also the most visible politician.

In this post, we saw that the power behind the second horn has already ascended and that power is the IRGC itself.  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was supported by the IRGC for president, and on such a scale that the IRGC stuffed ballot boxes in the 2009 election to get him elected.

Ahmadinejad has been recently making statements that not only agitate the supreme leader, but also his backers in the IRGC.  We saw in this post that both Ahmadinejad and the IRGC command both belong to the faction called the Neo-Principalists.  But even with that faction there seems to another faction split.  And Ahmadinejad is splitting with the IRGC command.

In a recent IranPolitik article dated January 17, 2013, the IRGC’s past support of Ahmadinejad is confirmed, but now that support is trailing off due to Ahmadinejad’s actions this past year, “Unfortunately Ahmadinejad, with all the positive aspects he could have had, today is turning from an opportunity to a threat for the regime.” [Ref. 1]  When the General says that Ahmadinejad is a threat to the regime, understand he means Ahmadinejad is getting in the way of the IRGC.

Funny, in a way you can see that behind the veil the IRGC is at odds with the supreme leader because it supported Ahmadinejad who was also visibly at odds with the supreme leader.  But one of Ahmadinejad’s cabinet members, Esfandiar Mashaei, is of an idealogical shade that the IRGC command finds unfavorable.  But because Ahmadinejad supports Mashaei and won’t distance himself from Mashaei, Ahmadinejad is falling out of favor with the IRGC.

The spokesman of the IRGC, General Nasser Sha’bani, said in the article that even though Ahmadinejad and Mashaei think they have a chance for Mashaei to run for president in June 2013, General Sha’bani doubts it.  In reality General Sha’bani is saying in so many words that the IRGC is disapproving of Mashaei and no one gets elected president without the IRGC’s support.  It looks like Ahmadinejad has disagreed with the wrong people, and may now be out of the running for the second horn.

It is looking more and more like anyone who is to be the occupier of the new office that will be the second horn will have to be in lock step with the IRGC command’s idealogies.  Don’t worry though, a whole field of candidates has become visible.

References

[Ref. 1]  Could economic turmoil lead to a new protest movement in Iran? General Nasser Sha’bani certainly thinks so; IranPolitik, 17 January 2013, retrieved from http://www.iranpolitik.com/2013/01/17/news/economic-turmoil-lead-protest-movement-iran-general-naser-shabani-thinks-so/ 25 January 2013

Categories: Signpost #2: Iran