Rafsanjani isn’t Wasting HIS Time Eating Ice Cream . . .
By I don’t think it has been linked here yet — I’ve been behind on my LGM reading and posting as the last two days were a sea of meetings, but this was forwarded to me by a colleague who “does” Iran. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that she knows Iran well. The core argument of the piece is that Rafsanjani knows precisely what he is doing in the midst of all this, and he is attempting to “outflank supreme leader Khamenei” et al.
When chatting about it before (and, admittedly, during) one of the meetings over the past two days, we both were shocked at just how ineptly Khamenei and allies have played this. Dude, game theory. Check it out. But it may be a little late, as the linked article suggests:
“To a certain degree, hardliners now find themselves caught in a cycle of doom: they must crack down on protesters if they are to have any chance of retaining power, but doing so only causes more and more clerics to align against them.”
If the linked analysis has legs, it could be interesting . . .
