Geneive Abdo writes: When President Hassan Rouhani touched down on Iranian soil after a dazzling week at the United Nations, he returned to criticism as well as cheers and applause. A crowd of demonstrators held placards and chanted the spent slogan “Death to America!” The protesters included members of the Basij militia, a hard-line paramilitary organization under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The theatrics of the demonstrators reflect a much deeper conflict that is already underway in Tehran, as different factions debate whether Rouhani should have accepted a phone call from President Barack Obama, and, more important, whether Iran should trust the United States to unlock the stalemate over Iran’s nuclear program. Even though Khamenei has apparently given Rouhani the authority to expedite nuclear talks, other leaders in key institutions, such as the IRGC, began this past weekend to express their disapproval. There is increasing evidence that a broader opposition to Rouhani has begun to organize to derail any further progress from his diplomatic efforts.
In Iran’s first public, high-level criticism of Rouhani’s U.N. visit, Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of the IRGC, said: “Just as he refused to meet Obama, he should also have refused to speak with him on the telephone and should have waited for concrete action by the United States.” Jafari also said, in an interview with the Tasnim news agency, “If we see errors being made by officials, the revolutionary forces will issue the necessary warnings.”
The operative word here is “revolutionary.” Jafari, defying a warning Rouhani issued to the Guards in mid-September to stay out of politics, is drawing a distinction between Rouhani and the president’s political faction anchored around former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and those who are seemingly more loyal to the values and ideology of the 1979 Islamic revolution. If, indeed, a line in the sand is being drawn, this is a remarkable development in Iranian politics whereby even the clerics of the system — such as Rouhani, one of Khamenei’s advisers and confidants for decades — are too far to the left to silence the hard-liners. [Continue reading…]
