As this paper goes to press, Iran has just come through its long anticipated presidential election. Despite predictions of a victory for a well-known clerical "moderate," former president and Expediency Council Head Akhbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the winner was the hard-line conservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a relative unknown. The terms hard-liner and conservative are used virtually interchangeably by many inside and outside Iran; they are relative terms, since there are no political parties in Iran, with their meaning dependent on context and issue.-----