About two hours after you leave the snow-dusted streets of Tehran, after the polluted city air gives way to the warm wind above the salt flats and camel herds of the Dasht-e Kavir Desert, you begin to notice the President's dream poking its metallic spines above the horizon.
There, in the dry scrubland beneath the Zagros Mountains, is a large construction site, its empty asphalt expanse dominated by two cylindrical towers supported by large boom cranes, perhaps 20 storeys tall. Farther away, covered in scaffolding, is a foreboding dome.
This eerie, almost empty place represents the political and spiritual ambitions of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the awkward, voluble man who 18 months ago became President of Iran on stark promises to transform his country and change the world. He is the uncharismatic leader who has shocked the world with his atomic ambitions and his defiance of nuclear treaties and watchdogs, his violent threats against Israel and the United States, his open embrace of anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers, his efforts to build a network of Islamic-extremist governments and movements across the Middle East.
But it is also here, in this ultra-conservative corner of Iran, where you can see most clearly the fractures appearing in Mr. Ahmadinejad's authoritarian façade, and the forces of opposition beginning to mass against him.
Last year Mr. Ahmadinejad seemed unstoppable — the first Iranian president whose views were perfectly in sync with the ayatollahs who'd endorsed his candidacy. But for the past three months, he has become increasingly fragile and isolated. It is a development that could lead to a change of leadership — and reform and moderation for Iran — or to acts of increasingly violent desperation. It all depends on the President's personality.
During two weeks in Iran tracking this man's power and influence, I asked many people, supporters and opponents, where I might go if I want to understand him. Most pointed to a place in the desert called Jamkaran.
No, this place is not the site of Iran's underground uranium-enrichment facility. That is an hour's drive south from here, its 328 giant centrifuges buried deep in the bedrock beneath the desert outside the town of Natanz.
This potential atom-bomb factory has been the subject of a perilous cat-and-mouse game with the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors were expelled from Iran last month.
When you pass the facility on the highway, all you see are the hilltop anti-aircraft batteries peering into the sky, manned by young soldiers who, their colleagues say, have been told to be extra alert this month as the Americans or Israelis could attack at any moment.
Jamkaran, once an obscure mosque on the outskirts of the holy city of Qom, is Mr. Ahmadinejad's other great construction site, and home to the extremist Shia sect whose beliefs provide the apocalyptic images in his speeches and pronouncements. Its spiritual powers, many Iranians fear, are inseparable from the nuclear powers being sought by the President.
In fact, Mr. Ahmadinejad made a point of coming here this week, to reassure the clerics of Qom and to pay homage to the mosque, in advance of the “dramatic announcement” he has said he will make tomorrow, on the anniversary of the 1979 revolution, regarding Iran's nuclear intentions.
That announcement is bound to be controversial, and he has caused enough controversy internationally in the past year — with his open threats to U.S. President George W. Bush, his defiance of international bodies and his playing host in December to a conference of historical revisionists and anti-Semites devoted to “questioning” the Holocaust — to cause grave and open concern among the conservative clerics who brought him to power.
It was these clerics, based largely in Qom, who supported his unlikely, long-shot bid for the presidency in 2005. That bid was aided considerably by the banning of most other presidential candidates by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation's Supreme Leader, and his pledge to launch a “second Islamic revolution” more strict and total than the first.
