According to al-Arabiya News, President Ahmadinezhad's constant references to Imam Mahdi are not going over well with some of the ayatollahs:
"Iranian scholars have told President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to stick to more worldly issues after he said the "hidden imam" of Shiite Islam was directing the country's affairs...in a speech to theology students broadcast by state television on Monday, Ahmadinejad went further than ever before in emphasizing his belief that the Mahdi is playing a critical role in Iran's day-to-day politics. 'The Imam Mahdi is in charge of the world and we see his hand directing all the affairs of the country,' he said in the speech, which appears to date from last month but has only now been broadcast....Two leading scholars retorted that Ahmadinejad would be better off concentrating on Iran's social problems -- most notably its double-digit inflation -- than indulging in such mystical rhetoric. 'If Ahmadinejad wants to say that the hidden imam is supporting the decisions of the government, it is not true,' said Gholam Reza Mesbahi Moghadam, the spokesman of the pro-reform Association of Combatant Clerics. 'For sure, the hidden imam does not approve of inflation of 20 percent, the high cost of living and numerous other errors,' he said, according to the Kargozaran daily. Ali Asghari, a member of the conservative Hezbollah faction in parliament, told the president not to link the management of the country to the imam. 'Ahmadinejad would do better to worry about social problems like inflation ... and other terrestrial affairs,' the Etemad Melli daily quoted him as saying....Earlier this year, Iran's former top nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani complained that superstition was growing in the country and that people were even putting out food for the Mahdi in case he returned that very night" (http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2008/05/07/49515.html).
Observations:
1) Ahmadinezhad is a true believer in, if not the imminent appearance of the Mahdi, at least his active involvement in the world today, whereas many Iranians (including a number of ayatollahs, it seems) are content to relegate his coming to some nebulous point in the future. There is an analog here to Christianity, which has as a staple belief in all three creeds (Athanasian, Nicene and Apostles') Jesus' Second Coming but yet is divided into a global majority (Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans/Episcopalians--altogether some 1.5 billion of the world's 2.3 billion Christians) that believes this yet does not incorporate it into everyday political analysis and action, and a minority (Evangelicals, "Fundamentalists," many Pentecostals--folks who tend to have "In The Event of Rapture, This Car Will Be Unmanned" bumper stickers) which expects His return any day now.  President Bush is often derisively lumped into the latter category, but in point of fact, as a Methodist, would fall into the former.  As I've said before, President Bush has never gone to the well of the United Nations and prayed "come, Lord Jesus." But Ahmadinezhad has done this vis-a-vis the Mahdi more than once.
2) Interesting that Iran has an "Association of Combatant Clerics."  Can you imagine such a parallel organization in the Christian world? True, we've had them--during the Crusades.  But they don't exist anymore--which puts the lie to all those recent tomes (Harris, Hitchens, Dworkin, et al.) on how all religions (Christianity every bit as much as Islam) are equally responsible for violence and intolerance in the modern world.
3) Even (some of) the ayatollahs in Iran would prefer a "Problem-Solver-in-Chief" to a "Mystic-in-Chief."
4) I hope those people putting food out for the Mahdi are treating him better than I did Santa Claus when I was a kid--I used to leave out bologna sandwiches with ketchup on Christmas Eve and they were always gone the next morning.  I always thought it an uncanny coincidence that my father also liked the same fare.  In any event, let's hope the Mahdi has better tastes and more creative chefs.

Two recent developments on the international stage would appear to be unrelated but, on closer analysis, are linked and important.  1) As "The Economist" reports in the April 26th issue, the new Human Rights Council at the U.N. is "[d]ominated by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement," such that "last month...the council's Islamic members, backed by Russia and China, pushed through a resolution saying free speech should be limited out of 'respect for religions and beliefs'" (meaning: no more Muhammad cartoons, or else).  In creating the HRC "what no one foresaw was the extent to which Islamic states would use this...to single out Israel" ("The U.N. and Human Rights.  A Screaming Start").  Actually, a number of us in the States foresaw this; and our fairly objective journalistic friends over in London are understating the case to say that the OIC uses the HRC merely to go after Israel; that free speech-bashing resolution was aimed at the larger West.  2) In an event ignored by the Jurassic Media in the U.S., the head of Iran's Islamic Cultural Relations Organization--aptly named MAHDI Mostafavi--met with Pope Benedict XVI shortly after his return from the U.S., in order to foster relations and dialogue between Roman Catholics and Shi`i Muslims.  He even presented the Pope with a copy of the Qur'an (http://english.irib.ir/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10728&Itemid=42).
Observations:
1) Geopolitically, these two developments illustrate, once again, the global struggle between Sunni Muslims--which the OIC largely is, being based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia--and the Shi`a, led by Tehran.
2) We in the West, and Americans in particular, are frankly wrong to label Shi`i Iran (and Iraq) as the font of all evil and fanaticism emanating from the Islamic world. This is a hangover, I think--at least among Americans--of the hostage crisis in Iran during 1979-80, when Ayatollah Khomeini became for many in this country the face of Muslim extremism.  At the risk of overgeneralization, it is Shi`ism that historically tends to be more open to theological and even political debate than Sunnism, because of the Shi`is status as a minority branch of the religion and also because of the survivial therein of the idea of ijtihad, "exegesis...on matters of theology and law" (Haim, The Shorter Persian-English Dictionary).  I would argue that when (not if) a revolution occurs in Islamic political thought--a Muslim "Enlightenment"--it will start in the Sh`i world (if it hasn't already, in the arguments among ayatollahs in Iraq about the wisdom and applicability of vilayet-i faqih).  This is not to deny the sponsoring of groups like Hizbullah and Jaysh al-Mahdi by the Islamic Republic. But note that while the OIC is working to curtail a fundamental human right--freedom of speech--Tehran is sending delegates to meet with the leader of 1.1 billion Christians.  Quite a contrast.
3) Wouldn't it behoove us (the U.S.) to consider re-establishing official diplomatic relations with Iran? Even without succumbing to a Barack Obamaesque naievete about international relations, one cannot help but observe holding grudges in geopolitics is not the basis of a realpolitick foreign policy.  Vietnam is, if not an ally, at least a friend of America now--and there's a lot more blood under the bridge between us and the Vietnamese than between us and the Iranians.  And we had, and have, diplomatic relations with countries Washington deems every bit as, if not more, unsavory. 

In the latest issue of Parameters (Spring 2008), the U.S. Army War College's quarterly journal, Major Pat Proctor argues that "dire warnings....of an emerging 'Shia Crescent,' led by Iran and encompassing Lebanon, Syria and Iraq" are, well, "mythical"--especially in the case of Syria, which is not really Shi`i at all but rather Alawi (or, as the sect is sometimes called, Nusayri).  Major Proctor is correct about the Syrian Alawis (who were actually declared non-Muslims in a fatwa by the famous Sunni jurist Ibn Taymiyah some seven centuries ago). However, he overstates the weakness of Shi`i Hizbullah in Lebanon and understates the Twelver Shi`i ties between Iraq and Iran.  And his analysis ignores the Shi`a movement in several other Arab countries, most notably Yemen, whose popluation is not much smaller than Saudi Arabia's (23 million to about 27 million), of which a large minority--perhaps as high as 40%--is Shi`ite, of the Zaydi persuasion.  Yes, few people even know about the Zaydi, or Fiver, branch of Shi`ism but it was the official religion of Yemen for a millennium or so, until 1962's republican take-over.  The disenfranchised Zaydi Shi`a took up arms some years ago, under the leadership of one Abd al-Malik (or Husayn) al-Houthi, and over this past weekend 19 Yemenis were reported killed in clashes between "rebel" Shi`i forces and government troops (http://www.africasia.com/services/news/newsitem.php?area=mideast&item=080504200319.ru5udpgq.php).  
Yemen is strategically located on the Arabian peninsula and is right across from the Horn of Africa.  Before we consign the "Shi`a Crescent" to chimerical status, Yemen needs to be factored into the equation.    
 

Aswat al-Iraq [Voices of Iraq], the independent Iraqi news service, has some interesting reporting this past week on the recent fighting between the Iraqi military and the Jaysh al-Mahdi forces:
"On the first day of ferocious fighting, namely March 25, a soldier, who settled for mentioning his initials as M.N., surrendered his arms and uniform to fighters from Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militias in the area of al-Keziza, 10 km northern Basra....M.N., a conscript in the Iraqi Army's 14^th Division formations, did not know that Operation Saulat al-Forsan (Knights' Assault) was targeting the Mahdi Army in specific. "I believed that our mission was to serve the people. I surrendered because I did not want to fight our brothers. They're Shiites like us, not Israelis," he said.
The 28-year-old M.N. was one of 1,300 troops and policemen discharged from service. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pledged to have the deserters court-martialed because they failed to "support security forces in their war against the militias. Those people have lied because they swore by the Quran that they would never support their factions or parties but they eventually did just that," Maliki said....
An officer of the 9^th Division, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, "After clashes that continued for hours between us and the Mahdi Army militiamen, I became positive that I could not go on fighting. I found out that it was a lost unequal battle. The Mahdi armament was much stronger than the Iraqi army's. We had no heavy mortars while the Mahdi fighters had mortars of all calibers, not to mention the improvised explosive devices they planted everywhere," the 35-year-old officer told VOI....
Observations:
1) Not only is M.N. loathe to fight against his co-religionists in the central government's name, he thinks the Israelis (at least he didn't say "Jews") are the Iraqis' real enemy.  The question is whether this is a by-product of Ba`ath Party brainwashing under Saddam's long tenure, or of more recent vintage under the new regime. 
2) Does al-Maliki mean simply that Iraqi soldiers take an oath on the Qur'an to defend the  Baghdad government, or that their failure to do so was a  transgression of actual Qur'anic principles? Either way--and much more strongly if it is the latter--we see more evidence of the heavy influence of Islam in this new Iraqi democracy.
3) Most troubling is the assertion that the Jaysh al-Mahdi had superior firepower.  This begs several questions: can't our billions of dollars in aid provide the Iraqi army better, larger-caliber weapons? relatedly, are all Iraqi army forces this underequipped, or is this just a case of a spot shortage of mortars? whence is the Mahdi Army getting these mortars (Iran? Hizbullah? Syria?)?  
(http://www.aswataliraq.info/look/english/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrArticle=76427&NrIssue=2&NrSection=4)

As we're all painfully aware of by now, some of Barack Hussein Obama's liberal legions of supporters harbor messianic expectations about him--and I'm not referring just to journalists.  Over on the other side of the political spectrum, there are evangelical Christians who have seasoned their eschatological stew with Mahdist spices, and in fact kicked things up a notch by claiming that the Mahdi of Islam will be the Antichrist of Christianity.  It was probably inevitable that these two ideological currents would eventually flow together, as evidenced by emails to this site recently:
"Barack HUSSEIN is probably Islam's mahdi.....1400 year old Islamic prophecy says this mahdi will be named HUSSEIN.. I have reference for this...The masses have called b. Obama the messiah... Say he walks on water, the chosen..etc..The entire world is for Obama...looks like anti Christ to me.. And the mahdi to muslims....