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Syria-Lebanon-Iran
Iran: the birth of a militarized state
2009-07-07
The Islamic Republic created its own version of the Commisars, of which Khamenei is one of the originals.
Like we said a day or two ago, they took the 'islamic' out of the 'Islamic Republic'. Just as the ardor of the members of the CCCP faded, leaving the leaders, the apparatchiks and the Cheka NKVD KGB RSF, you now have the leaders, the Revolutionary Guards and the Basiji.
The merger of the military/security man and the clergy was intensified when clerics were dispatched to the war fronts, and became ideological commissars of the new regime. They spied on officers and tried to convert them to the new politicized Islam. What happened, in reality, was the conversion of the clergy to a military-security ethos, not the other way around.

Clerics such as Khamenei, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani and Hassan Lahooti were among the first cadres put in charge of military personnel and commissioned by Ayatollah Khomeini to create the IRGC, a security apparatus designed to run parallel to the state's army, navy and air force. Khamenei quickly learned where the center of the state's gravity rests, and consequently, never left the security forces. Today Khamenei knows more about military and security issues than about traditional Figh and Shi'ite narratives.
After the election ...
Ahmadinejad addressed a meeting with the employees of the Judiciary with these words: "Communism, liberalism and democracy are all dead; it is high time for [the rise of an] Islamic State." What he did not spell out was this: The Islamic State wears boots and parades in military fatigue.

Large segments of the clerical establishment came out against the election results. They are all rightfully anxious about what seems to be the end of clerical hegemony as they know it. The clerical rupture that followed the June events is quite telling. The entire body of the moderate clerics militated against what they felt was a mortal blow to Islamic republicanism.

Sensing the death knell of the clerical state, even hardline Ayatollahs such as Nasser Makarem-Shirazi distanced themselves from the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad-IRGC coalition.
This article does not mention that officers of the IRGC are frequently antagonistic to the Mullahs. In the last 4 years the IRGC has been muscling on the Mullahs' financial turf.
Posted by:Frozen Al

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