Pop quiz: which country do the following traits describe?
- Beligerent, bellicose elected leader
- Irresponsible drive toward nuclear proliferation
- Influential, intolerant religious community
- Radical, rightward political tilt
- Pathological hostility toward Israel
The conventional wisdom has held that the biggest problem in Iran is the fact that its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Jew-hating, holocaust-denying, nuclear weapon-pursuing radical. But, as the Washington Post reports, Mr. Ahmadinejad did not emerge from or into a political vacuum. There is a growing constituency in Iran which feeds and feeds off of the president's radicalism. The growth and spread of this movement is beginning to concern even Iran's conservatives, who are conservative, indeed.
The tension highlights significant divisions within Iran's conservative camp, often viewed from outside the country as a turbaned monolith. In reality, 27 years after the 1979 revolution that brought Shiite clerics to power, Iranian politics is a nuanced landscape defined largely by the lessons taken from the previous quarter-century.Imagine that. A conservative political movement, in order to expand its electoral majority, holds its nose and climbs into bed with a radical element whose members are motivated less by philosophy than by emotion. This strategic alliance results in great political power. However, the establishment members of the movement fail to consider what will happen when the radicals start to ask, "what's in it for us?"
Traditional conservatives describe themselves as firm but flexible. While remaining committed to the precept that clerics should hold ultimate authority, they were chastened in the 1990s when reformists -- determined to lessen the intrusion of the state into private lives and show greater tolerance for dissent -- won landslide electoral victories.
Other conservatives, who proudly call themselves fundamentalists, argue that reformists were hollowing out the Islamic Republic from within. Equating dissent with treason, they demanded a hard-line defense of the revolution's tenets, including strident opposition to the United States and Israel.
In recent years, the two camps united at election time, making common cause against reformists. But after the votes were counted, moderate conservatives were left unsatisfied.
"There was a problem in our structure, our conservative political structure," said Amir Mohebian, a leader in a conservative faction that absorbed some reformist inclinations, including cautious engagement with the West. "We start very well, but the result was not under our control."
The radicals, by their very nature, are louder and more passionate than the conservatives. They shout. They wave their arms. They jump up and down. Very soon, they tire of the measured, deliberative manner of the conservatives. They want what they want and they want it now. Of course, what they want is not consistent with the principles of the movement they joined. Their goals are not, in fact, conservative at all. The movement has created a monster that is not open to reason. The movement's very survival is now in question.
Sound like anybody you know?
To paraphrase Neil Diamond, except for the names and a few other changes, if you talk about the GOP, the story's the same one.
1 comments:
Brilliant comment.
I've been saying for awhile now that we have our own Taliban in the U.S. that should be as much of a concern as the radical regimes in other countries.
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