CNN reports President Obama has compared the GOP to the hardliners in Iran:
President Barack Obama is standing by his comparison between Iranian hardliners and Republicans who he says are dead set on derailing any nuclear deal.
“What I said is absolutely true, factually,” Obama told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview that will air in full Sunday.
“The truth of the matter is, inside of Iran, the people most opposed to the deal are the Revolutionary Guard, the Quds Force, hardliners who are implacably opposed to any cooperation with the international community,” Obama said.
This is rather interesting since the GOP is also a party that is suffering declining popularity, even as it continues to dominate the legislature, as we see here.
I put the GOP’s faltering partially to their use of RINO, as I noted in an unrelated post here:
Well, ever hear the acronym RINO? It’s Republicans in Name Only, and is used by conservative Republicans against the moderates to chisel them from the mainstream of the party, and then eject them into the formless political void. I’ve become convinced that it is one of main operational mechanisms that is “purifying”, if I may use the term without laughing, the GOP into nothingness, splitting off non-conforming members on less and less significant features until all the RINO-users are pointing at each other, spitting their potent curse in confidence; ideological purity, to use Mr. Brodsky’s fine phrase.
Well, most interestingly is this article, from AL Monitor‘s Rohollah Faghihi:
Larijani, known as a moderate conservative, has been chairing parliament since 2008. Following the disputed 2009 presidential election and its violent aftermath, Larijani was labeled as “the silent man of sedition” by hard-liners who charged that he was refraining from condemning the protests. Today’s conservative camp, which is increasingly defined by its hard-liners, has seen many of its senior members separate from it in past years. These include Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, chairman of the Expediency Council; Ali Akbar Nategh-Nuri, head of the Supreme Leader’s Inspection Office; and President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate conservative who remains loyal to his longtime patron, Rafsanjani.
Rafsanjani and Nategh-Nuri have been the target of conservative infighting. Both were initially marginalized by hard-liners who supported Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against Rafsanjani in the 2005 presidential election. But that wasn’t the last of it. In the televised presidential debates with candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi preceding the 2009 vote, Ahmadinejad accused Rafsanjani and Nategh-Nuri’s sons of corruption on live television. After these accusations in front of millions of Iranian viewers, neither Rafsanjani nor Nategh-Nuri were supported by their old conservative friends.
These incidents point to an overarching trend over the years — more moderate figures have been forced to part ways with the conservative camp. As a result, the latter is now dominated by hard-liners. This trajectory was accelerated under Ahmadinejad, who strengthened hard-liners more than at any point in the history of the Islamic Republic.
Bolded by me. So the Iranian hard-liners engage in their own version of purification, achieving a higher level of obdurate agreement at the expense of fewer voices, and probably less sympathy from the populace. One wonders how far it’ll go. From another AL Monitor article:
One of these figures is Seyed Morteza Rashidi, who is based in the holy city of Qom. Since the conclusion of the nuclear deal earlier this month, Rashidi has lashed out at Rouhani and the negotiating team — including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi — in over 20 Facebook posts. He argues that “the Islamic Revolution is now controlled by those who do not even believe in its principles, but are also as Westernized as one can get.” One week after the agreement was struck, Rashidi wrote on his Facebook page: “The deal, signed by enemies of the Revolution, is legally too flawed. It seems that Iranian negotiators are either traitors or uneducated individuals.”
Rashidi often fills his page with quotes and pictures of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. There are numerous other pro-Khamenei young people active on social networks, many of whom say they don’t fit into any Principlist grouping. They say they follow the path of “Imam Khamenei” and that they’re willing to give their lives for him.
So, if the treaty is approved by Supreme Leader Khamenei, will he be the next one boosted out of the Conservative camp?
The unwillingness to compromise, the certainty of the rightness of their positions in a situation in which even the most skilled and knowledgeable experts will acknowledge a basic uncertainty – this phraseology could be applied to the Iranian hardliners or the GOP with equal facility.
The mark of political immaturity? Obduracy. Political maturity? Reserve judgment, ask pointed, relevant questions about the critical matters – and if the answers are satisfactory, vote for it, and if they are not, vote against it. Use it to play political games, to achieve evanescent political superiority? A waste of opportunity to make real progress.
