In fact, Ahmadinejad's presidency has been rife with controversy. His aggressive stance vis-à-vis the United States has not pleased some of the ruling mullahs in Tehran who would have preferred to see a rapprochement with Washington.

Additionally, his ultra-conservative views have not been welcomed by many of Iran's youth, who make up the majority of the population, and who are more than ready to welcome normalized relations with the rest of the world.

Ahmadinejad's anti-Israeli rhetoric, his denial of the Holocaust, his ravings that Israel must, or will, eventually disappear, and his pursuit of nuclear weapons has succeeded in alienating a portion of the Iranian leadership, a large segment of his country's population, and of course a larger majority of other countries, primarily the United States and Europe.

While some of these antics may have been to his detriment at home, and in the West where some think he has justified the U.S. president's infamous "axis of evil" label -- along with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- the maverick Iranian president has managed to become popular among many Arabs, including Sunnis, for his defiance of the United States.

It is indeed rare for a Shiite leader to take root in the mostly Sunni Arab world. The founder of the 1979 Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who held the first title of "supreme leader," had tried to export his Islamic Revolution to other Muslim nations, but without success.

As a matter of fact, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein launched a war against Iran, which ran on for eight grueling years and claimed 1 million lives, the Iraqi leader had tacit support of most Arab countries in the region who were only too happy to see Iran contained and the Islamic Revolution kept well within the confines of its borders.

But enter Ahmadinejad into the political arena, and things begin to change. Ironically, Ahmadinejad, according to Ali M. Ansari, a professor of Iranian history and director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at Scotland's University of Saint Andrews, "was generally considered to be a political lightweight with strangely unorthodox religious ideas."

In a recent paper published by the International Institute of Strategic Studies titled, "Iran under Ahmadinejad: the Politics of Confrontation," Ansari attributes Ahmadinejad's success to "precisely because his reputation for ineptitude and eccentricity meant that he was not taken particularly seriously, and many reformists believed that this ineptitude meant he would not be in post for long."

As mayor of Tehran, Ahmadinejad displayed rather unorthodox ways of grabbing the media's attention. For example, his policy of "re-interring the remains of war martyrs in key public locations throughout the city so that citizens can be reminded of and duly commemorate the sacrifices of the people during the war," writes Ansari, who has authored several books on Iran and is an associate fellow of the Middle East Program at the London based Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House).

Secondly, Ahmadinejad claimed to know where the Twelfth Imam, sometimes called the Hidden Imam, would "imminently" return; a topic which, writes Ansari, obsessed Ahmadinejad.

Things did not turn out exactly as Ahmadinejad had hoped. From the start his victory in the presidential elections over Muhammad Khatami had left a bitter atmosphere in the country. "The post-election atmosphere was so negative, in fact, that [Ayatollah] Khamenei decided to refuse Ahmadinejad permission to publicly celebrate his victory," Ansari writes.

As his economic policies at home faltered Ahmadinejad used his charisma, made up of a blend of religion and nationalism, to take the focus away from domestic ills. And what better way to do this than to pick a fight with the United States?

Of course the United States had laid the foundation to help Ahmadinejad more than he could have ever hoped for when it invaded Afghanistan, in a first step in 2001, and secondly neighboring Iraq.

Those were the two countries posing immediate and imminent threats to the Islamic republic. Both Afghanistan and Iraq were dominated by Sunnis: Afghanistan by the ultra-conservative Taliban, adherents of Wahabism who regard the Shiites as infidels if not worse; and Iraq was ruled by Saddam. Though his regime was not based on religion, Saddam made a point of keeping Iraq's Shiites under his authoritative boot. By the end of Iraq's invasion and occupation of Kuwait in February 1991, Saddam's henchmen had massacred over 200,000 Shiites.

The U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had opened previously closed doors. Iran's maverick president is riding high. Politically, he has managed to stave off the world's most powerful nation by supporting Shiite militias in Iraq. He also supports the Islamic Resistance Movement, otherwise known as Hamas, in the Palestinian territories. He has signed a defense pact with Syria. And he has the loyalty of Lebanon's Hezbollah militia.

Today, Ahmadinejad may feel to be in a position of strength and therefore will allow himself to turn toward arrogance, something he seems prone to.

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Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times.