Warns Rouhani: Stop Complying With America!

As verbal assaults by Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders on Hassan Rouhani’s nuclear talks with the world major powers continue with persistence, this week once commander implicitly accused the president of being “deceived and traitorous” and warned him to end his “animosity with the nation and complicity with America.”

Speaking at a ceremony on April 25^th, Guard general Mohammad Ali Asoodeh, who is the cultural advisor of Iran’s supreme leader in the Guards force, made a reference to the aborted US effort to free the American embassy hostages April 1980 because of an accident in the Tabas Desert, and addressing “the deceived domestic individuals and the treacherous” said, “Just as the US was plotting on this day to commit a crime against the Iranian nation, Bani-Sadr and his associates were planning to commit treason against the great nation of Iran.” Bani-Sadr was the first president of the Islamic republic who was ousted and fled the country.

While Asoodeh did not name Rouhani by name he clearly alluded to him when he said, “Those who still think that the US is a superpower and the leader of the world, those who believe that we cannot accomplish our goals without seeing the ‘chieftain,’ those who implement the sedition scenario domestically, should learn and look at what ultimately happened to Bani-Sadr.” The word chieftain is the pointer in this talk and the guard used it to reference a remark that Rouhani had made last year in connection with the nuclear talks when he said that talking to the US, whom he called the chieftain superpower of the world, directly would resolve the nuclear issue. Other Guard officials had used the word ‘chieftain’ to address Rouhani’s remarks and to ridicule him. For example cleric Ali Saeedi, ayatollah Khamenei’s representative in the IRGC force and cleric Haji Sadeghi had both used the term to criticize Rouhani.

Asoodeh continued, “Liberate yourselves and stop your animosity with the nation and going along with America. This is a divine revolution. The Tabas Desert event proved that God loves this revolution as its own and will not allow it to be destroyed.”

Since Bani-Sadr was officially removed from office through impeachment in parliament, the Majlis, Asoodeh’s reference to Bani-Sadr may be implicitly conveying the message that Rouhani too could face the same from the legislature.

More recently when direct US-Iran talks on the nuclear issue hit some hurdles and the US Congress got involved in the talks through its letters and resolutions, and Rouhani publicly said that Iran was negotiating with the 6 major powers – known as the P5+1 – and not just with the US, Mohammad Hossein Saffar Herandi, a senior cultural advisor in the IRGC used Rouhani’s latest remarks to assert that the president had finally realized his mistake and that the US was not the world’s chieftain.