Iran’s supreme leader affirms a hard line

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s supreme leader gave a ringing endorsement Saturday to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy, suggesting Iran’s top authority favors an ultraconservative hard-line bloc over moderate elements seeking rapprochement with the West.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the final arbiter of political, military and religious decisions in Iran’s government, which grafts elements of a boisterous democratic republic onto a clerical autocracy.

Ahmadinejad’s policies have spawned discontent across the political spectrum. His allies lost badly in the December municipal elections and a loose coalition of moderate conservatives and reformists has begun to form against him.

But Khamenei, with the beleaguered Ahmadinejad sitting next to him on the podium, backed the government’s hard-line course, including its ambitious foreign policy.

Iran has defied U.N. Security Council demands to halt its nuclear enrichment program and provides material and moral support to armed groups in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Khamenei said Iran would continue to develop advanced nuclear technology without regard to the “hues and cries” of foreign powers, according to the Fars News Agency.

He said nothing about whether Iran would agree to U.S.-European offer not to implement new sanctions against Iran if it halted expansion of its nuclear program. But Ahmadinejad, who also spoke, said Iran would continue a “policy of resistance” to western pressure.