The Second Generation

In 1979, a Revolution placed the Ayatollah Khomeini atop the new Iranian Shiite Republic and toppled a secular regime, the Pahlavi monarchy (Shah = king), which was believed to be most corrupt and exceptionally repressive – the Shah’s dreaded Savak (Sazeman-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar), the intelligence/ security force, routinely arrested and tortured political opponents, people just disappeared. The spiritual rebirth of a nation under God was supposed to change all that.

As a theocracy, Iran’s political hierarchy places its spiritual leaders – who presumably insure that the government follows God’s will – above the elected government, and the supreme spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Khaminei, nears papal status within both the government and the Shiite faith. But thirty years have passed this violent change of government transitioned this nation into an Islamic Republic. The first generation of revolutionary forces is slowly being replaced by a second generation, whose priorities appear to be more crudely aligned with raw political power – at almost any expense – and economic privilege.

The protectors of the State, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, are increasingly the recipients of the benefits of a party in power. Their stranglehold on the people only increased during the Presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and they have been leading the crush against Ahmadinejad’s opposition. They are also battling, with amazing success, some of the clerics and political powers from the first generation that led the nation to its current form of government. A small coterie of elite forces – about 130 thousand with their own army, navy, air force and intelligence service quite separate from the mainstream armed forces – is disproportionately powerful.

The July 21^st New York Times: “The corps has become a vast military-based conglomerate, with control of Iran’s missile batteries, oversight of its nuclear program and a multibillion-dollar business empire reaching into nearly every sector of the economy. It runs laser eye-surgery clinics, manufactures cars, builds roads and bridges, develops gas and oil fields and controls black-market smuggling, experts say…

“The corps’s alumni hold dozens of seats in Parliament and top government posts. Mr. Ahmadinejad is a former member, as are the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, and the mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf. And the influence of the Revolutionary Guards reaches deep into the education system, where it indoctrinates students in loyalty to the state, and into the state-controlled media, where it guides television and radio programming.”

As clerics struggle with differing spiritual agenda, interpretations of the Qur’an, the Revolutionary Guard, and their non-uniformed cohorts (the Basij militia, now with literally millions of volunteers), speak with one voice and clearly set the nation’s direction. The sheer numbers of the Guards and their followers represent a significant voting block, assuming elections are not rigged, an unwarranted assumption I suspect. Their scorn for the first generation of powerful players, people like cleric and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is obvious; they are even educating and preparing their own clerics for the future as figureheads in a regime clearly controlled by the Guards.

Their children get priorities at the universities, their lifestyles are heavily subsidized, and their economic power has exploded: “Since 2005, when [Ahmadinejad] took office, companies affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards have been awarded more than 750 government contracts in construction and oil and gas projects, Iranian press reports document. And all of its finances stay off the budget, free from any state oversight or need to provide an accounting to Parliament.”

The Times quoted one Iranian political scientist who preferred to remain anonymous for obvious reasons: “They are the proponents of an authoritarian modernization, convinced that the clergy should continue supplying the legitimization for the regime as a sort of military chaplains, but definitely not run the show.” But for now, the clerics seem to be on top; for how much longer is anything but certain. Ahmadinejad’s controversial first vice president was forced to resign – under a mandate from the Ayatollah himself – because of earlier statements made last year that Israel might not be the real enemy. If Mahmoud doesn’t toe the line, a not-too-subtle letter from high level clerics suggested he could be forced out as well. Hardliners, religious and spirited (if not pseudo-spiritual) revolutionaries, still rule.

Iran is laboring under a government that lacks both accountability and transparency, a system without the obvious checks and balance built into a solid democracy and obscured by a tethered press where reporting the truth is punishable by imprisonment and torture, maybe even death. But isn’t this the very reason the Pahlavi regime fell in 1979? How long can the Guards muzzle a people who are finally beginning to see what their nation has become?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.