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When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad traveled to Lebanon last week, attracting huge crowds and what seemed like an overwhelmingly positive public response, many Western analysts dismissed the trip as a kind of cheap political trick, meant to distract attention from Ahmadinejad's allegedly unpopular standing at home. But, after returning from Lebanon, Ahmadinejad made a trip to Ardabil, one of Iran's three Azeri-majority provinces. One of our readers provided a link to photos of the crowds that greeted Ahmadinejad in the provincial capital (also called Ardabil), which we very much appreciated.