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Iran Moderates Tone a Bit

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Shiite Muslim cleric who holds ultimate authority in Iran, has altered the country`s power structure by granting a relatively moderate panel new authority to supervise an elected government increasingly dominated by religious hard-liners.

Khamenei expanded the authority of the Expediency Council, an appointive body whose longtime chairman, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is a fixture of Iranian politics and invariably described as wily insider. "You need diplomacy and not slogans," said Rafsanjani, who is both a cleric and a millionaire businessman. "This is the place for wisdom, the place for seeking windows that will take you to the objective."

Along with Khamenei, 66, Rafsanjani lived through the trauma of the Islamic revolution`s early years, when the broad-based uprising against the U.S.-backed monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, soon splintered into bloody factional fighting. That was followed by a bloody eight-year war with Iraq.