ANNOUNCER: Bringing you the world for 20 years, this is CNN.</s>RICHARD BLYSTONE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The ordeal of Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, he was dismissed by the supreme by the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, because the parliament, on the day before, had impeached him for incompetence. He had failed, and really failed, to win the battle of the Islamists in the power structure of Iran. Bani-Sadr represented a Western-oriented league. He won the presidency by a huge majority in January 1980, but he never managed to get hold of the grass roots. He didn't want an Islamic state ruled by Islamic law. As president, Bani-Sadr had been fighting off parliament attempts to reduce has powers. The fundamentalist wing, the Mullahs, had been picking away at his supporters, and finally it became too much. But the Ayatollah took away Bani-Sadr's only real remaining power base by stripping him of his position as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Bani-Sadr might have actually been in exile by the time that he was officially dismissed, and he aligned himself briefly with the Mujahadeen. In more recent years, Bani-Sadr has distanced himself from these people, who are not popular even among opponents of the Mullahs.
CNN 20: Bani-Sadr Dismissed, June 22, 1981