Whither Iran?

A fascinating article in the New York Times today suggests that Iran’s ruling elite’s decision to steal the election grows out of the new shape of the theocratic state now increasingly dominated by a sort of Praetorian guard.

In the piece a RAND expert terms Iran a ‘regular military security government with a façade of a Shiite clerical system’.

While the former Soviet Union or the current Chinese regime can be seen as one-party dictatorships, the military never took over or neutralized the ideologues. Even under the Stalinist terror, the main guy remained in charge and was hardly shy about whacking his top generals if he took a notion. Upon his demise power devolved onto the ruling party’s surviving commissars, not Beria’s secret police or the armed forces.

Times reporter Michael Slackman suggests that the Iranian theocracy is moving toward a model we know a lot about closer to home—Latin-style military dictatorships.

As often happens in military regimes, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has branched out into the economic sphere and has generated lucrative business opportunities for its members. Similarly, Latin American secret services quickly turned their spying and repressive activities into profit-making turns from travel agencies to drug-running operations. As the security apparatus always needs lots of money, the evolution into for-profit business is natural and inevitable, especially if you can muscle your corporate rivals out of the way with convincing threats.

The Guards, however, unlike a secret police force, are a full-fledged military entity, and their role in the economy goes far beyond small-scale free enterprise. Their affiliated companies scoop up oil and gas contracts and construction deals, which must bring them into direct conflict with legitimate businesses that, unlike theirs, must pay taxes and submit to some forms of state oversight. Strident, public opposition from wealthy businessmen like Rafsanjani over the election debacle thus makes a lot of sense.

The Times article says the Guards also make a killing in smuggling, not mentioning the most obvious component of that—control of the heroin trade. This is a little complicated if you are a religious fanatic although, as the Taliban have shown, perfectly manageable.

Considering the severe limitations on the Iranian president’s power in a system in which the leading mullahs can simply override his decisions, it is curious that the Ahmadinejad faction was so nervous that it felt compelled to rig the election in such a ham-handed way. A more confident ruling elite would simply have repeated the experience of the 1997-2005 Khatami presidency by letting the reform candidate win and then systematically blocking him from doing anything.

Instead, they bulldozed over any pretense of democratic expression, which suggests a much weaker consensus and a more desperate power struggle at the top.