Trita Parsi of NIAC explained today in a conference call. I was interested in this take:

Parsi further explained, in response to Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress, that the critical constituency would be conservative clerics who feel threatened by Ahmadinejad’s consolidation of power. In an irony from the perspective of the American debate about Iran — which conflates reformism with secularism — the clerics see Ahmadinejad “as a dangerous element, quite correctly, who tries to undermine the clergy as a whole.” That might compel some of them to resist Ahmadinejad, or to place pressure on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to find some compromise with the opposition.

I’m not entirely sue of the implications of a clerical-brokered compromise, but as a second-order observation, we should be careful of presuming that the lines of conflict in foreign countries break down along the ones we expect based on our own cultures. A really excellent point I heard someone make about Afghanistan recently was that Pashtuns are capable of both hating the Taliban’s brutality and accepting its legitimacy insofar as its shadow government can competently provide services.