If the west wants to get rid of Ahmadinejad, they should send him some "campaign" money, then leak it to the press. We have a "Chicago" politician in office, would be a pity if he just used his extortion "skills" domestically.
How would that help?
You are misreading the Iranian situation, probably due to the way western media are reporting from Iran.
Iranians do not hate the west, or even Israel. They like the west They want reforms.
Before the "Islamic" revolution, Iran was in many ways "more western" than the west.
Ahmadinejad's anti-western and anti-Semitic rhetoric doesn't win him elections in Iran, it just makes him popular in the Arab world. He played the west and the Arab world like the fools they both are. The Arabs think he is a great leader who will rid the world of the Jews and bring about an Islamic empire (which the Arabs don't yet realise they wouldn't rule). And the west thinks that he is representing Iranian opinion and we have to "compromise" with this other culture.
All of it is rubbish. Iranians are not like that.
Ahmadinejad lost the elections because he could only offer what Arabs but not Iranians wanted to hear. The regime cannot even find enough Iranian followers to beat up protesters and had to import Arab terrorists from Hamas and Hizbullah to do it. (Currently Hizbullah are attacking student dorms of some polytechnic university, which I found interesting because the same thing happened to me in 2006 when Hizbullah attacked my student dorms while I was a summer student.)
Forget what the media tells you.
Ahmadinejad was popular some years ago in the big cities. Then he turned out to be a violent fanatic who cares more about Arab popular opinion of him than about his own country. In spite of what the media say Ahmadinejad was never popular in the country side. (What are they thinking? In Iran the country side is Kurdish and other non-Persian vilages. They don't like any Persian ruler.)
Anyway, it is a common misconception that people in big cities are more progressive and educated than people in the countryside, one that liberals (from big cities and feeling smart) like to propagate too. But the truth is that people in big cities are simply confirming to society. In a progressive forward society like the US, big cities are progressive. But in Iran they are not.
In the middle east big cities are the source of violent hatred for the other and especially for the west and for Jews. Big cities have easier access to government and terrorist propaganda. More "education" creates more people who "know" how evil the west is and how Jews kill babies all the time.
In reality the countryside in the middle-east is very much like the country-side in the US and Europe: people are religious, conservative, and NORMAL. They are not fanatical extremists, because that is an invention of the cities.
And if you are in Egypt you will easily find that hatred for Israel and Jews is very common in the big cities but not a typical feature of Bedouin villages. Israeli tourists typically visit Bedouin towns. The Bedouins, much maligned by city-dwellers, are actually very forward-thinking people. They are very conservative, absolutely religious, but also more tolerant than the city-dwellers and open-minded enough to co-exist with almost everyone. (They are also typically blamed for terror attacks by the Egyptian government. But they are not actually the part of Arab society that produces terrorism.)
And in Iran it is similar. The Kurdish and other villages are not Ahmdinejad's supporters. Kurds didn't vote for Ahmadinejad, even though the official "results" claim that 70% of them did. 2.5 million of the 4 million Iranian Kurds are Sunnis. What are the chances that they voted for a Shia extremist who considers Sunni Islam heretical and forbids the practice of it? Think! The media don't think about this.
We are the Iranians. They are our kind of people. They are open-minded, progressive, educated, and tolerant people. They would make excellent Americans if not for the fact that their society is much older and was ahead of everybody else when it came to those attributes for thousands of years. (So it is fairer to say that Americans would make good Iranians, if you work a bit on yourself.)
The "Islamic" revolution was a historic accident. What Khomeini claimed it was supposed to be and what he made it have little in common. That is why he had to fire his designated heir, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri. Montazeri did not agree with where the revolution went but did agree with what it was supposed to be.
By recognising Ahmadinejad the west basically did what everybody said it shouldn't do: choose sides. But why on earth did the west have to chose Ahmadinejad's side???
