After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors

7/29/2019 After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors

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AFTERK H O M E I N I

Iran Under His Successors


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5-he Rise and Fall of President Khatami

and the Reform Movement

"We the protesting Deputies have had a share and role in the Revolution andhave struggled for its victory and consolidation in various arenas, have learnedthe lessons of honor, truth-telling, piety and freedom in the school of ImamKhomeini (God's mercy be upon him), and consider his way and Tradition(sonnat) the path to the salvation and high standing of the Islamic Republicof Iran."

So began, after a perfunctory quotation from the First Imam, 'Ali, in Arabic,the last letter of protest of February 17,2004, rom the 131deputies of the SixthMajles who had gone on strike in January, after the Guardian Council haddisqualilied 80 of them from running for the Seventh Majles. The reformistspresented themselves as spokespersons for "the forces loyal to the Revolutionand democracy (mardom-sakiri)," and complained that "the forces faithful(mo'men) to the Revolution and the regime" had no option but to retreat frompo li ti d involvement. There was a reference to the rumor of the Supreme Lead-er's complicity in their disqualification, and oblique questioning of his authorityto issue this panicular "governmental order" (hokm hohmari). But the "clarity"(shaffdjyyat) advocated by President Khatarni and his reformist followers sevenyears earlier was totally absent.' There was strong evidence that Khatami himselfbelieved the same rhetoric and was trapped in it.2 Th e reformists ended theirletter with an admonition in the manner of the councilors to old kings: "Weare very worried about the ht ure when our regime, with the nostalgia of itsimmense lost popular sup port, would be forced to submit to the open andhidden onsla&t of foreigners." This letter was the sad epitaph for the reformmovement that had began with electr*g effect in 1997and caused a tremen-dous burst of enthusiasm in Iran and throughout the world.

TheRule ofLaw and the G h o s tKhatami belonged to the revolutionary elite, as did many of his followers inthe Majles. It is therefore important to view their reform movement as anattempt at reform from within the regime and from above.As such, it may beinstructive to compare it to the reform movement in the Soviet Union underGorbachev that began with an opening (glasnost) and a restructuring @ere-s t r~ika) .~hese attempts to reform the regimes from within by Gorbachevand Khatami were less than a decade apart. Khatami was relatively successfulin his glasnost, but failed, with on e notable exception, in his perestroika. Th eIranian opening of the public sphere in the reform movement was as impres-sive as the Russian, but the impetus to restructuring was extremely weak. Thereform movement consequently failed to restructure the regime as it intendedor, as in the Soviet Union, to unintentionally produce regime change.

An important issue in the constitutional politics of the Islamic Republic-namely the clash between the traditional hierocratic authority of the so-calledsources of imitation and new system of theocratic government based on theMandate of the Jurist-had been solved during President Hashemi-Rafsanjani'ssecond term, before Khatami came to power. Th e institutionalization of clericalrule also involved a contradiction with the constitut ional authority of the legisla-ture as a rival principle of legitimacy, which was resolved by giving the six clericaljurists in the Guardian Counci l the authority to veto any item of legislation passedby the Majles. These contradictions notwithstanding, he clerical elite ruled Iranfor over two decades through a number of key councils, and by controll ing theJudiciary and the Ministry of Intelligence and using a subservient bureaucratic1technocratic second stratum without any sip hicant power sharing with it.

Although the characteristic shared with other post-revolutionary regimeswas a collective government emerging d uring the period of succession tothe charismatic leader of a revolution, the regime of the Islamic Republic ofIran ( IN) was distinguished by its unique clericalism. Th e Islamic revolu-tion established a hybrid political regime, with an elected parliament a ndPresident, but one subordinated to clerical authority-a-theocratic republic,which can be characterized as a system of collective rule by clerical assembliesor councils under a clerical ruler styled the Supreme Jurist o r Leader. Theclash of clerical conciliarism with the democratization espoused by the reformmovement also occurs alongside a non-institutional process of accumulationof power in the hands of the Leader, resulting in increasingly ~e rs on alule byhim called clerical monarchy (saltanat) by its critics.


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Th e Association of Milit ant Clerics (MRM ) proposed Khatami as itspresidential candidate after the former radical Prime Minister, Mir-HosseinMusavi, and reportedly five other clerics and ministers had declined to run.4He won nearly 70 percent of popular vote in an election with very heavyturnout in May 1997. At the time of his unexpected landslide victory, the insti-tutionalization of clerical conciliarism was proceeding with M l momentum.Early in 1997, following the advice of the influential Investigation Committeeof the Assembly of Leadership Experts, the Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei,reconstituted the Maslahat Council with the mandate to assume its functionof offering advice on major policies of the regime according to Article IIO ofthe Constitution. Following the advice of the same Committee, he broke withthe precedence of having the President of the Republic as the chairman of theCouncil, and appointed the outgoing President, Hashemi-U anj ani , instead.Th e clear intention was to demote the elected President by appropriatingthe function of the determination of state policy to the Council. Here, wecan see the two trends following the demise of the charismatic leader of therevolution clash. The trend toward centralization of power in the state, rein-forced by Hashemi-Rafsanjani as President holding the chair of the MaslahatCouncil, was now reversed, curiously for his benefit, in favor of the trendtoward clerical conciliarism by depriving the incoming President Khatamiof the main institutional means for the determination of state policy. Theelection of Khatami to President suddenly pulled this quiet trend in clericalinstitutionalization into the arena of contested constitutional politics. ThePresident as the head of the executive was pitted against the Leader at the apexof the system of clerical councils and courts.

The Iranian glasnost came as a radical break with the totalitarian ideologyof the Islamic revolution. Back in 1992, Sayyed Mohammad Khatami hadbeen forced to resign as Hashemi-Rdsanjani's Minister of Islamic Cultu reand Guidance for his liberalism and relaxation of press censorship by a newlyelected Fourth Majles that was dominated by hardliners who feared "culturalinvasionn by the West. If cultural invasion entailed liberalization and freedomof the press, the hardliners' fear was not paranoia. After his landslide 1997victory, Khatami appointed Ata'ollah Mohajerani, one of Rafsanjani's deputy-presidents and a founder of the Servants for Reconstruction, his Ministerof Culture and Islamic Guidance, and through him removed many of therestrictions on the press. Khatami's landslide victory was an unexpected andhistorically unprecedented event, and was instantly referred to as the historic"national event of 2 Khordad (23 May)," which date was later chosen by the

THE RISE AND FALL OF PRESIDENT KHATAMI 93

coalition of his supporters as their designation. It reopened the question ofthe fundamental principles of order in the Islamic Republic for the first timesince 1979. Khatami's platform of civil society and "the rule of law (hokumat-eqdnun)" evoked an implicit contrast with "hokumat-e eskimi (Islamic govern-ment)," the slogan of the rev~ lut ion .~Although "the rule of law" was accompanied by "civil society" in Khatami'sprogram, it was more a matter of creating than mobilizing civil society, and ofturning a shapeless mass into a public. The number of political associationsrose from 35 in 1997 to 130 by 2001. The number of professional and advocacyNGOs, including women's (230 by 2000,330 two years later), youth, and envi-ronmental, exceeded 2500 after 2001.' The Student's Office of Consolidationand Unity, whose leaders had earlier acted like officials of the revolutionarygovernment, began an impressive news agency, ISNA, to publish a nationalstudent newspaper, h r , nd some 700 local ones, and sponsor some 1,437cultural, scientific, and social associations. A student leader could crediblyclaim: "The fundamental role of the student movement is to critique power.The student movement is not a political party, an institution, or a politicalactor; on the contrary, it is the antithesis of such powers. Its objective is tomobilize for democracy and human rights, and to reform p~w er . " ~

A popular pro-Khatami press immediately flourished. Before long, anumber of these newspapers were closed down by the clerical judges, whiletheir editorial staffs were given licenses by the Ministry of Culture to start newones. Between 1997 and 2002, 108 newspapers and periodicals were banned.The massive closure, however, came in April 2000 after the Leader declaredthe reformist journalism '> grave threat to all of us."' This press spread Khata-mi's new political discourse and neologisms such as "civil society" (jdmeh-yemadani), "legality" (qrinun-mandi), and "citizens" (shahrvanddn) used in hisinaugural spe ech .To these were soon added others: "pluralism" @brdlizm,takkathur-gardi) as opposed to "monopolism," "law-orientedness" (qznun-

; gar6 i), and finally, "reading" (qerd Zt) [of Islam].i Khatami showed firm determination in promoting the most basic aspectr of the rule of law. Political murders committed by the secret services of their Islamic Republic constituted a blatant breach of the rule of law. In January

1999, Khatami insisted on the arres t of a number of officials in the MinistryI oflnformation (read Intelligence), ncluding a deputy minister, Sa'id Emami(alias Eslami), for the chain of murders of a number of writers and liberal

[ politicians carried out in November 1998 in defiance of the President and inI order to discredit his reformist program.L0 ome of the conservative Ayatollahs


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94 m E R KHOMEINIwere reliably said to have issuedfaturlis (injunctions) justifying the killings.The reformist Ayatollah Musavi-Arbadili declared any suchfaturds invalid.Hojjat al-Eslam Mohsen Kadivar, a younger but prominent reformist clericwho had written a direct and detailed refutation of Khomeini's theory oftheocratic government, delivered a speech in Isfahan in which he declaredterrorism forbidden by the Sacred Law. Kadivar was arrested at the end ofFebruary 1999, and his trial by the Special Court for Clerics became a causecelebre. The national press and student associations protested that the Cour twas unconstitutional, and that it was in contravention of the InternationalHuman Rights Instruments signed by the government of Iran that disal-lows special courts for special classes of persons. The Head of the Judiciarydefended the legitimacy of the Special Court for Clerics on grounds that ithad been approved by the late Imam Khomeini as the Supreme Jurist and bythe Constitution. Disregarding the widespread public protest and Kadivar'selaborate defense, the Special Court for Clerics sentenced him to 18 monthsin prison in April 1999.

More institutionalized struggles were taking place between the Majles andthe Guardian Council, on the one hand, and between the Judiciary and thepress and the Majles, on the other. Th e paradox of Khatami's rule o f lawbecame evident when he and his supporters were seen to be powerless ineither making laws or enforcing them. The ir law-making power was blockedby the Guardian Council, and law enforcement by the clerically controlledJudiciary was unabashedly politicized by Khamenei's hardliners and turnedviciously against the reformers.

Mellowing of the Power Struggle amongthe Children of the RevolutionThe rift between the hardliners or "establishment clerics" and the "reformists"during the Khatami presidency (1997-2005) can be seen as a delayed but typicalpattern of revolutionary power struggle." Th e division of the loyal oppositionto the pragmatists in power under Hashemi-Rafsanjani (1989-199~) into theradicals turned reformist, on the one hand, and the hardliners, who disownedthem and defined their own contrasting outlook, on the other, has been traced.This transformation of identities greatly complicated the power struggle. Thedelay of two decades caused a great ideological turn in the position of theradicals, with a shift of focus from revolution and Islam to reform, democracy,and civil society. Th e ideological (maktabfioutlook of many of the radicals


underwent a complete change, and the term maktabi (belonging to the School[of the Imam]) coined at the beginning of the revolution, died even h t e r hanthe loan word "ideology." The result was the mellowing of the revolutionarypower struggle when it resumed in earnest in 1999.

Compared to other revolutions and the first round of the revolutionarypower struggle in the Islamic revolution, the second round was mild. Someobservers wondered why Saturn did not show an enormous appetite fordevouring his own children in the case of the Iranian revolution, apart fromthe Mojahedin-e Khalq, who were decimated in the early 1980s. The resumedpower strugglecan be attributed to Saturn's unsatisfied appetite. The remark-able lowering of violence in the power struggle, however, was due in no smallmeasure to the weakening of the power of revolutionary ideology. Saturn wasnot devouring his children as much as punishing them less severely.

The summer of 1999 was less glorious than its first half for the reformists.-On July 5, shortly afier Emami or Eslami was said to have committed suicidein prison, the reformist newspaper, Saldm, published a secret letter writtenby him with an out line of the restrictive press law with provisions for clericalcensorship which was under discussion in the Majles. Th e Special Court forClerics immediately banned Saldm, presumably giving itself jurisdiction todo so because the newspaper's editor was a cleric. Students in the Universityof Tehran protested against the closure of S a km on July 8 and their protestspread to other Iranian universities. Th e Revolutionary Guards intervened,alongside the regular police and the hooligans of the Helpers of the Party ofGod, causing a few deaths, many casualties, and hundreds of arrests.

The student riots of July 1999 marked a high point in questioning theprinciple of Leadership or theocratic government. Th e protesters' slogans,for the first time, included "Khamenei must go!" They were also the firstsigns of disconnect between the reformist President and the younger genera-tion who had voted for him. A similar disconnect between the President andhis female supporters had become evident by Khatami's failure to appointa female minister. Emboldened by the suppression of the student riots, thehardliners proceeded with the closure of the reformist nmspaper, f i o rd id ,and trial of its editor, the former Interior Minister under both Hashemi-Rafsanjani and Khatami, 'Abdollah Nuri. T he trial of Nur i in November 1999by the notorious Special Court for Clerics was remarkable in many ways.There was hardly any legal argument in the charges, which were blatantlypolitical. The main charge against Nuri was his criticism of Khomeini's asser-tion that Israel should be obliterated.12 Th e trial also provided the occasion


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for the widespread questioning of the legality of the Special Cou rt for Clericsas well as the legitimacy of theocratic rule and Leadership. The all-clerical juryturned in its verdict before receiving Nuri's final written defense, and he wassentenced to 5 years in prison.

Khatami's supporters in the reform movement were organized by Sa'idHajjarian, the Vice-President of Tehran's newly elected Municipal Council,and by the President's younger brother, Mohamrnad-Reza Khatami, into theIslamic Participation (mosbarekat) Front for the parliamentary elections ofFebruary 2000. They won by a landslide, with 69 percent of the electorateturning out, and dealt the clericalist groups a crushing defeat. They won asolid majority in the first round against the 17 other political groups thathad competed for Majles seats. But the reaction of the Supreme Jurist andthe clerical establishment was swift and determined. Hajjarian, the chiefarchitect of the stunning reformist victory, was almost fatally shot in the headin front of the municipal council building in March 2000 just before Nawruz,the Persian new year (figure 5.1).When the doors of the new Majles opened,its reformist members were in for a rude awakening.

FIGURE 5.1 Sa'id Hajjarian, shot almost fatally in front of the Tehran MunicipalCouncii building on March 12,2000, shortly alter the landslide victory of the reform-ists. (Supplied by SAA)


The crushing electoral defeat of clericalism in the 2000 Majles electionshad some important but less obvious consequences. Hashemi-Rafsanjani,who had been sympathetic to Khatami and reformism untll he was attackedby the journalists, notably Akbar Ganji, was badly humiliated in the Tehranelection. He refused to take the seat he was given after the suspension ofrecounting, and threw in his lot completely with the Leader and the conciliarsystem. Many of the radical clerics, like Karrubi, had lost their seats in theMajles in 1992 and 1996, and became reformists as a result of their soul-searching outside the power loop. Although a few of them regained seatsin the Majles in 2000, these clerics did n ot d o nearly as well as Khatami'ssecular supporters. The top three winners of the Tehran seats were not clericsthemselves but th e brothers and sister of the reformist President and twojailed reformist clerics, Nuri and Kadivar. The reformist clerics who won intheir own right had less influence in the new Majles. Karrubi had difficultybeing elected as Speaker, Majid Ansari failed to keep his temporary posi tion asDeputy-Speaker, and other clerics faced confirmation difficulties. This madethese clerics feel threatened by their secular colleagues in the reform move-ment, and tended to push them to clericalism within the Majles.

2 In fact, sians of trouble multiplied before the new Mailes was convened.uIn April 2000, the Guardian Council postponed the second round of Majleselections, annul led a number of elections won by reformists, and assertedits superiority over the Majles by virtue of its appointment by the Leader.The Maslahat Council, with its chairman Hashemi-Rafsanjani pushed intothe clericalist camp, successfully preempted any Majles investigationsinto t he breaches of the law by depriving it of the right to investigate notonly the Special Court for Clerics but also any other organization under thecontrol of Leadership, including the armed forces and the national radio andtelevision. Th e reformist Majles, when it eventually convened, was too docileto challenge this arrogation by the Maslahat Counci l. By May 2000, all b utone or two of the reformist newspapers were closed down, and many leadingjournalists were arrested and imprisoned. O n August 6,2000, the Leader toldthe Majles to stop its deliberations on the new press law, and clerical judgeswere emboldened to close down the last important reformist paper, Bahdr,and to arrest more journalists.

Th e reformist Majles lost the chance it had at confronting the Leader, whohad clearly stepped beyond his ample constitutional jurisdiction by tellingParliament to stop its debate, and to stand up as the Legislative Power againstthe Judiciary. It was too timid to react and challenge the authority of the


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Leader when thus slapped in the mouth. The grave mistake of electing a cleric,Mehdi Karrubi, as the Majles Speaker became evident when he confirmedthe authority of the Leader, as the Supreme Jurist (vafi-yefaqih), o issue a"governmental order" ( h o b - e hokumatz) to the Majles, and defended it as theconstitutional exercise of the Absolute Mandate of the Jurist. Two days later,k r u b i reaffirmed the value of this prerogative by pointing out that another"governmental order" had "solved the problem of recounting the votes in thesecond round of elections in Tehran.I3 In retrospect, this was the last chancethe Majles had to challenge the surreptitiously expanding system of conciliarclerical rule under Leadership by provoking a major constitutional crisis. Itdid not rise up t o the admittedly daunti ng challenge and was doomed tosuffer further humilia tion.

The Supreme Jurist led the continuous assault with the use of the cleri-cally controlled Judiciary through a group of former Ministry of Intelligenceinvestigators who had been appointed judges toward the end of Yazdi's longtenure as the Head of the Judiciary. These judges began harassing the Majlesdeputies, as they had done with journalists, by summoning them to courtsfor expressing their critical opinions in parliament. The closure of the presscontinued beyond the dailies, and on the eve of the Nawruz 138012001,themost important of the remaining reformist magazines and monthlies wereclosed down. The abuse of the courts to harass and sentence anumber of reformist Majles deputies continued unabated.

The reformists were very much the children of the revolution, as werethe "moderates" of 1979-the so-called religious-nationalist followers ofBazargan, Khomeini's revolutionary partner and the first Prime Minister ofthe IN. t is no accident that in addition to the "reformist" children of therevolution, those chastised by the Leader and the politicized Judiciary underhis command in the second, delayed round of revolutionary power struggle- -included these 1979 moderates. Bazargan's Islamic liberal nationalist move-ment, the Freedom Movement of Iran (nahzat-e znidi-ye ir zn), had beenjunior partners in the initial Islamic revolutionary coalition in 1979. It wassuppressed after some 90 of its members wrote a letter of protest to Hash-emi-Rafianjani in May 1990, and was banned from taking part in the 1992elections.'* This was another group of his children Saturn did not spare. Theintelligence agents waged their war against the old moderates with the brutalmurder of Bazargan's Health Minister, Kazem Sami, on 23 November 1988,'~and the equally brutal murder of his Labor Minister, Dariush Foruhar, withhis wife on 22 November 1998.Arnir Entezam, Deputy Prime Minister under

THE RISE AND FALL OF PRESIDENT KHATAMI 99Bazargan, having spent 17 years in prison, was arrested again in December1999 for criticizing his notorious warden at the Evin prison and returned toprison after rehsing to sign a "c~nfes sion. "'~

Nevertheless, encouraged by Khatami's promise of the rule of law andhis reining in of the intelligence agents, some members of the Freedom~ o v e m e n t f Iran and their sympathizers formed the Nationalist-ReligiousCoalition (e'tehf-e melli-madhhabt) in 2000, applying to the Ministry ofthe Interior for recognition and fielding some 3 0 candidates for the Majleselections. Their application was promptly rejected, however, as were theircandidates." In March 2001, the Tehran Revolutionary Court closed downthe Freedom Movement of Iran. T he Nationalist-Religious Coalition was alsobanned. Both groups were declared "illegaland outcast by the late Imam," andsome 21 of their members, most notably 'Ezzatollah Sahabi, were detained.I8A hrther 3 0 members, including Bazargan's Interior and Justice Ministers,were arrested a few weeks later in April 2001 . ' ~ hose who were eventuallybrought to trial received rather harsh sentences in May 2003. All this wasdone by order of the Leader's men in the politicized Judiciary, while the Presi-dent looked the other way.

Constitutional Politics of the PerestroikaThe election of the rural, municipal, and provincial councils in February1999 marked the height of Khatami's success in implementing his programof rule of law and democratization. T he Organization of the Mojahedinof the Islamic Revolution, one of Khatami's key reformist allies, had alsoemphasized political participation through the councils as early as 1995: "Theformation of the councils from the village and dist rict to the highest nationallevels. . s the most impor tant factor for encouraging the people to exercisetheir rights and institutionalize the culture of popular participation."20Th elaw concerning the organization and elections of the councils had eventuallybeen passed in 1996, and Khatarni promised to have them elected during his1997 campaign. Participation was a major component of Khatami's favoriteidea of political development. As he put it in a major speech, "the first stepin political development is participation," and the election of the councilswas "the most evident channel for parti~i~ation."~'he reformist DeputyMinister of the Interior responsible for carrying out the 1999 councils elec-tions, MostafaTajzadeh, was a member of the Organization of the Mojahedinand considered the elections as the fulfillment of the major requirements of


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I 00 m E R KHOMEINI

political development by extending participation to the most remote villages.Other reformists such as Ebrahim Asgharzadeh and Sa'id Hajjarian, whowere running for the Tehran Municipal Council , recognized the councils as anew space for self-government, independent of the state and therefore morereal than the much talked about civil society.22Hajjarian alternately includedthe councils among the institutions of civil society and considered them "thefoundation stone of re p~bl icani sm."~ ~he elections took place as Khatamihad promised. Over half a million candidates competed for seats in 35,000villages and over 900 municipal councils. Some 80 percent of the popularvote (65% turnout) was reportedly cast for supporters of JShatami's reformmovement who won the majority of the seats. O n the second anniversary ofhis presidential victory, Khatami addressed the gathering of some 107,000elected members of the village and town councils in Tehran, again empha-sizing the importance of political development and the need to struggle for"the consolidation of Islamic democracy and popular government (mardom-sakzn]." He noted that sacred terms such as "revolution," "freedom," "Islam,"and "Leadenhip" are not the monopoly of any group." The Leader was point-edly absent, and his message was read by the director of his office.24

In February 1998, President Khatami appointed a Commission for theImplementation and Supervision of the Cons titutio n, citing Article 113 ofthe Cons titu tion , one of the few remaining Articles unchanged from theoriginal draft that made the implementation of the Constitution one ofthe main duties of the President. The Commission displayed little energy.Despite losing repeated rounds to the Leader and the resourcefd Ayatollahs,Khatami made his duty of safeguarding the Consti tution a meansfor driving a wedge into the hitherto seamless edifice of monolithic Islamic-ideological interpretation of the law by clerical jurists. This episode and itsbackground demonstrate yet again how constitutional politics are movedby vested interests independently of the personal inclinations of historicalactors. In 1983, when the radicals were in power and pushing for centraliza-tion under Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Musavi with Khomeini's s upport,and the Guardian Council was on the defensive, it had sought the allianceof President JShamenei, and urged him to carry out the presidential respon-sibility according to Article 113. The latter, as a president seeking to increasehis power against the Prime Minister an d probably with little expectationthat he would one day be the Leader, had already tried to set up a mechanismfor implementing Article "3, but had been blocked by the C o ~ n c i l . ~ ~owwith the blessing of the Guardian Council, he the 198611365Law of

THE RISE AND FALL OF PRESIDENT KHATAMI I01

Delimitation of the Functions, Powers, and Responsibil ities of the Presidentof the IRI. This law was enacted pursuant to Article 113 of the Constitu-tion to define the President's authority "for the purpose of guarding @lis&ri)the Constitution of the IRI."2GArticle 15 of the 1986 Law further gave thePresident the right to issue "warnings" to the three Powers in cases of consti-tutional ~iolation.~'n 1998, Khatami set up the new Commission to advisehim on how to exercise this authority. The Commission advised him on oneoccasion to issue "warnings of constitutional violation" against the Head ofthe Judiciary at the height of the constitutional struggle, and he did so.

Meanwhile, the power of the clerical jurists of the Guardian Council todetermine the qualification of candidates for all elected office, which wasfirst effectively challenged by the disqualified clerical or clerically endorsedcandidates, now became more widely contested. "Conformity with the stan-dards of Islam" therefore became more fluid and contested with the widelyaccepted reformist position that different "readings" of Islam were possible.28This was particularly the case with regard to human rights and freedom of thepress. Khatami and the chairman of his Constitutional Commission, HosseinMehrpur, nevertheless avoided confronting the Guardian Council a nd theJudiciary, which under a more assertive Head, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi, was putting forward its own claim to constitutional judicial reviewand considered the President's Commission a nuisance.29 n January 2002, theJudiciary even denied Mehrpur's request to visit dissident political prisoner^.'^Finally, Khatami did not dare augment the power of the Commission in hislast assertive endeavor to be considered shortly.

Meanwhile, the temporarily interrupted process of consolidation of theconciliar system had resumed in 2001, with the Guardian Council and theMaslahat Council turning their heavy guns on the Majles. Early in February2001, the Guardian Council rejected the budget passed by the Majles, a matterthat patently had nothing to do with th e conformity of laws with Islam, andthe Maslahat Council supported it without reservation. At the same time, thejurists of the Guardian Council went out of their way to assert that they hadbeen too lax in disqualifying he Majles candidates and wsuld be much firmerin rejecting any candidate they disliked in the forthcoming elec-tions (including President Khatami).

With Ayatollah Khamenei's decision to suppress the reform movementand block any further restructuring (perestroika) of the regime, the GuardianCouncil and the Maslahat Council assumed the functions of political controlnecessary for maintaining the system of clerical conciliarism, while the


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I 0 2 AFTER KHOMEINI

political abuse of the Judiciary to suppress the freedom of expression reacheda new high. The state-favored maraje'-e ta qlid spoke out in favor of theo-cratic government and against the Majles. Dissident clerics, however, couldnot be silenced. In fact, to Ayatollah Montazeri goes the credit of demandingin February 2001 that the Consti tution of the Islamic Republic be revised,something President Khatami and his Majles supporters lacked the courageto

Not until October 2001 did President Khatami join the fray of constitu-tional politics as the protector of the Constitution. He warned the Head ofthe Judiciary against the constitutional violation of the parliamentary immu-nity of several Majles deputies convicted by the politicized courts.32But thiswarning was ignored and the political abuse of clerically controlled judi-ciary power against legislators continued. Some 60 reformist legislators weresummoned to court in the ensuing months, and four were sentenced. DeputyLoqmannia began serving his sentence in January 2002, but was pardoned bythe Leader after a few days when his reformist colleagues walked out of theMajles in protest."

Khatami took the next few months t o prepare for one final confrontation.In an important speech, given on 28 August 2002, he renewed his vow withthe nation and f i r med that he was not only the Head of the Executive Powerbut also the authority responsible for the upholding of the Constitution. Here fi rmed that "religious democracy" (mardom-sdkri-ye dim] and "rights ofthe peoplen were not empty slogans and that he was determined to realize themodel of religious democracy proposed to the world by the Islamic revolu-tion.+ This speech was followed by the introduction in September 2002 oftwo pieces of legislation that provoked the constitutional crisis prefigured inthe combination of the heterogeneous principles of theocracy and democracyin the Constitution of the IN .

On September I, 2002, the President introduced a bill to curb the GuardianCouncil's power of approbatory supervision based on its own constitutionalinterpretation of 1771. Predictably, it was vetoed by the Council. Khatami'ssecond bill aimed at increasing the powers of the President as the guardian ofthe Constitution according to its Article 113. It was presented as an amend-ment to Khamenei's 1786Law and was passed by the Majles in April 2003. Ittoo was promptly rejected by the Guardian Council. The Commission wascautious and conservative, wishing to remain strictly within the confines ofthe Constitution, and its bill was consequently too timid to make a signifi-cant difference. It missed the opportuni ty to make the bold first step toward

THE RISE AND FALL OF PRESIDENT KHATAMI I 0 3

introducing a form of judicial review under the aegis of the President, whichseemed technically possible:5 by couching the bill in administrative ratherthan judicial terms. The proposed presidential commission was to be giventhe power of "inspection" to determine violations of the Constitution andwas no t explicitly given jurisdiction to hear cases of human rights violations.Only obliquely and at the end was the President given the power to provide abudget for compensating victims of human rights violations. Despite all thetalk of reform, the global wave of the human rights revolution had evidentlypassed the Iranian shores without a ripple. But even this feeble attempt toprovide administrative redress for human rights violations was too much forthe Guardian Council. In April 2004, a despondent Khatami wrote about hisdashed hopes to the relentless Guardian Council, and withdrew his bill.36

As resignation of the President and a national referendum were beingdiscussed by the reformists as ways to overcome the recalcitrance of theGuardian Council and the Maslahat Council, Rahim Safavi, commanderof the Revolutionary Guards, announced his readiness at the beginning ofNovember zoo2 to unleash revolutionary violence against the reform move-ment.37Meanwhile, the political abuse of the clerically controlled JudiciaryPower had become more blatant. A number of reformists outside the Majleswere arrested in the fall of 2002, and on November 6, a university lecturerand former Islamic student leader, Hashem Aghajari, was sentenced to deathfor his anticlerical remarks, which the judge considered insults to the Prophet.Students joined the constitutiona l struggle with protests against judicialabuse.38Unrest continued in to December, resulting in numerous arrests, andeven a hard-line judiciary spokesman resigned in protest against the grossmiscarriage of justice in the Aghajari case.39At this point, Aghajari introduceda radically novel oppositional tactic int o the constitutional politics of theIslamic Republic. Sensing the feebleness of the President as the leader ofthe uncoordinated opposition within and outside parliament, Aghajari refusedto ask for the pardon hinted at by the Supreme Jurist and demanded insteadthat the unjust death sentence be carried out.40His example was followed bythe one surviving "moderate" leader, the religious-nationalist dissident 'Ezza-tollah Sahabi, who wrote an open letter to the Heads of the three Powersasking that he be executed rather than subjected to continued harassmentafter his release from jail.41

Th e legislative power of the Maslahat Council also came under reformistattack after their victory in the parliamentary elections of 2 0 0 0 . In May2002, the Maslahat Council issued a statement in response to an article in


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104 AFTER KHOMEINI

the reformist newspaper, Nawnrz, which had cited a number of instances ofits legislation being unconstitutional. T he Maslahat Council reaffirmed theconstitutionality, with the Leader's permission, of its legislation in m attersother than disputes between the Guardian Council and the Majles. Thislegislative power was implied in Clause 8 of the amend ed Article IIO f theCon stitution , which gave the Maslahat Coun cil responsibility for "solvingthe difficulties of the regime that cannot be solved through ordinary chan-n e l ~ . " ~ ~he argum ent seemed logical, but it could only reinforce the growingconviction among some of the leading reformists by that time that theirgoal of democracy was not achievable within the framework of the existingConstitution. Writing in the same reformist newspaper, 'Abbas 'Abdi arguedthat reform was impossible within the existing constitutional framework andconvoluted power structure and called upon Khatami to resign rather thangive legitimacy to a lawless regime.43Many reformists realized by then thatthe discursive terrain was badly sloped against them a nd they had no ch anceto beat the hardliners at the appropriation of Islamic terms. Reformist jour-nalists 'Alavitabar and Jala'ipur called for d eleting th e qualification "religious"from "religious democracy," and Ganji did so when issuing his RepublicanManifesto from Evin prison. Ganji stated that reformists were paralyzed bypolitical deadlock, bluntly acknowledged that "there is no hope for democ-racy within the framew ork of existing laws," and advo cated civil disobedienceand boycotting elections as "the only way to open the door to reason andjustice."44 By De cemb er 2002, University ofTehran students were shouting"Dea th to D ictatorship " and "K hatam i, Resign!"45 Behzad Nabavi may havebeen one of the last to give up hope, but in May 2004 even he admittedthat "young people n o longer take us seriously when we speak of religiousdemocracy."46

Th e loss of the only serious constitutional struggle Khatami and thereformists had mou nted against the Leader led to widespread disaffectionthat man ifested itself in the elections of the mun icipal councils in Tehran andsome other major cities in February 2003. Th e same general disaffection withKhatami was evident in the widespread and continuous student protests andyouth unrest in a large numbe r of cities through the summ er of 2003.T h eMajles reformists, to their great disc redit, disowned the stud ents.

As these events demonstrate, the major problem of the political wing of thereform movem ent as the true childre n of the Islamic revolution of 1979 nd itsundoing was a double disconnect: a disconnect between the President and thereformist members of the Majles at the organ izational level, and a d isconn ect

of both Kh atami and the reform movem ent from the people in general andthe new g eneration in p articular, especially the university studen ts. There waslittle coordination between th e President and his cabinet and the reformistMPs, and even less between the reformists in the Majles and the newspapersand the press. Nor did the reformists reach ou t to the sympa thetic groups insociety. As a prominent reformist Mohsen Mirdarnadi admitted, they did nothave any comm ittee for coordinating their activities with like-minded socialgroups.47

Meanwhile, the reformist children of the revolution w ere trapped asinsiders (khodz) n their revolutionary discourse. The empty slogans they du ngto for salvation in their last mom ent o f desperation were in fact the heavyweights around their necks that drowned them. Building a coalition withoutsiders-students, wom en, the urban poor, and citizens with out impec-cable revolutionary credentials-may have saved the reformists, but they wereincapable of building the bridges. They chose perdition over treason to therevolution as its insiders.

Clerical Councils versus the MajlesTh e Co nstitution gave the Majles very little to use against the G uardianCouncil and absolutely nothing against the Maslahat Council. In 2001, heMajles had tried to use its power of confirmation of the lay members of theGuardian Council proposed by the Head of the Judiciary. O n August 8,2001,however, with the backing of the Leader, the Maslahat Cou ncil ruled thatif the nominees of the Judiciary failed to obtain confirmation in the Majlesin the first round, those nom inees with the highest plurality of votes in thesecond round would be appointed to the Guardian Co uncil. Th e rejectedcandidates were confirmed retroactively on a plurality of votes, with manyof the reformist deputies turning in blank votes in protest. One candidatewas even considered confirmed with less than a handful of votes out of 290.Two years later, in November 2003, he Hea d of the Judiciary proposed twoother candidates, including a notorious mobster of the Helpers of the Partyof God, who were rejected by the Majles for failing to obtain a majority.Majles Speaker Karrubi explained that the Leader had changed his mindon the subject. The Guardian Council did not insist on its newly acquiredconstitutional prerogative.

Yet the Guardian Council d id no t show the slightest interest in avoidingconfrontation; it had simply chosen a different battlefield. The Council's


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function as the protector of the ideological foundations of the regime bynow required not only filtering legislation but also controlling the electionspolitically. The Seprember zoo2 bill to restrict the supervisory power of theGuardian Council was predictably rejected by the Council. In March 2003,the Majles passed amendments to the electoral law with the same effect.48Khatami threatened to resign or put the bills to referendum. At this point, theMaslahat Council let its position be known by quadrupling the budget of theGuardian Council at a meeting on March 15. President Khatami and MajlesSpeaker Karrubi walked out of the meeting in pr~test.~'hat the GuardianCouncil would reject these attempts to restrict its power was a foregone conclu-sion. What the reformists had not expected, however, was that the GuardianCouncil would be fully supported by its sister Maslahat Council and giventhe budgetary means to punish them by depriving them of their ~ar lia men-tary seats in the forthcoming elections of February 2004. Th e enlarged budgetwas used, among other things, to increase the number of Guardian Councilinspectors and agents, reportedly to as many as 200,000 (Ehsani 2004). TheCouncil made clear that "approbatory supervision" would henceforth meanpracticing "continuous supervision" or vetting a candidate's competency atany time. President Khatami prepared to capitulate, telling the members ofelection supervisory boards on December I, 2003, "Even if some renownedcandidates are not nominated or qualified, the people should not withdraw.In this case we should look for a candidate whose thoughts are closest to ourideas and vote for him."50 A month later, 3,600 of the 8,200 candidates weredisqualified, including 80 incumbent members of the Majles.

The final and most resounding popular defeat of the reformist movementcame in the presidential elections of June 2005. The reformist candidate,Khatami's lackluster Education Min ister Mostafa Mo'in, was rejected byan unduly apprehensive Guardian Council but shrewdly reinstated by theLeader, who had a much better sense of popular opinion. H e came in fifth inthe first round and was elin ~in ated .~'he hardliner, Mahmu d Ahmadinejad,who became the mayor of Tehran after the hardliners had won the munic-ipal elections of zoo3 in the first massive expression of disillusionmentagainst the reformists, won the final round against Hashemi-Rafsanjani bya wide margin. The reformist Mo'in was just as much a child of the Islamicrevolution as the hardliner Ahmadinejad. Both began as radical Islamicrevolutionaries, committed to violence and wedded to ideology,52 nd theircareer paths diverged only in the mid-1990s. Quite a few students, presum-ably disillusioned with the reformists, had joined Ahmadinejad's campaign.

Th e ineffectiveness of the studen t organizations' anti-regime boycott ofthe presidential elections was demon strat ed by the larger than expectedturnout, even though the official 60 percent figure should be discounted.Finally, the Ahmadinejad vote also highlighted the reformists' alienationof the students and its failure to attract the urban poor. Trapped in theirinsider rhetoric and narrow vision and refusing to draw on the huge reser-voir of secular professionals, the younger generation and the urb an poor,Khatami and his reform movement came to naught also because of theirfailure to build bridges to these growing social forces that were easy poten-tial constituencies.

Trapped in Theu Own Rhetoric and AbandonedThe revolutionary rhetoric of the reformists and their profession of faithas followers of the line of the late Imam fell on deaf ears, except for thosehardliners who resented this futile attempt to appropriate the revolutionaryheritage they considered their own, and hastily closed two reformist news-papers. In truth, this was an overreaction on their part. Anyone who stillcared for th e revolutionary rhetoric would infinitely prefer to hear it fromthe mouth of Khomeini's t rue heir and successor. And the word was to comewith out delay. When casting his vote on February 20, the Sup reme Juristand Leader Ayatollah Sayyed 'Ali Khamenei said that he considered theseelections particularly important "since you can see how those who fight theIslamic revolution and Iran, are trying to prevent the people from going tothe polling b~oths."~'Afterhe withdrawal in protest of a further 1,179 candi-dates and the foregone victory of his hardliner followers in the elections thatleft at least eight persons dead in two reported clashes, he obliquely retortedto the reformists' admonit ions by saying that the losers were "the Unit edStates, Zionism, and the enemies of the Iranian nation."54The reformists werethus hoisted on their own petard. After 4 years of insults and humili ation,witnessing the assassinations, near-assassinations, and imprisonment of theircolleagues, they were still pathetically trapped in the net of their bombasticrevolutionary discourse.

The reformist strike had begun in January by the members of the Majleswho had been surprised by the rejection of their candidacy by the GuardianCouncil despite their impeccable revolutionary credentials. In the last weekof January the Majles passed a bill "to solve the election crisis,"55which waspromptly rejected by the Guardian Council. Interior Minister Musavi-Lari


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announced that he was not willing to hold the elections on schedule under thecircumstances. Th e high point of the protest came in the first days of Februaryafter the Guardian Council, while restoring just under a third of some 3,600(out of a total of 8,200) candidates it had originally rejected, not only refusedto reinstate the 80 striking reformists but instead barred seven more of them.In response, 123 or 125 reformist Majles deputies handed in their resignations.Some 12ministers and some 28 governors and deputy-ministers, representingthe lay, "technocratic" second stratum in the administration, were also saidto have submitted their resignations in sympathy. The main student orga-nization, the Office for Consolidat ion of Unity (dafiar-e tahkim-e vabdat),by contrast, kept its distance because the students had been badly let downby the President and the reformists during their prolonged sporadic proteststhrough the summer of 2003, and only one group of students decided tosupport the striking Majles reformists at the last minute on February 3. O nFebruary 11, in the speech marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Islamicrevolution, President Khatami let down his Interior Ministry and cabinet,and capitulated to the Leader, confirming that the elections would take placeon schedule. This was yet another instance of the President's caving in rather-than standing firm and provoking a constitutional crisis that might havebeen resolved by some concessions to the reformists, or by the dismissal andjailing of the President and the Interior Minister; Musavi-Lari went alongwith the elections, and nothing further was heard of the resignation of thecabinet ministers and provincial governors. The only deputy whose resigna-tion was accepted happened t o be a woman, Ms. Fatema Haqiqatju; the restwere said to require a case-by-case hearing and a vote by the Majles. Thesereformists thus continued to receive their paychecks until the expiration oftheir terms.With their shoes piled up in the corner of the carpet for an extra cozy sit-in,the uncouth reformists, whose tieless white shirts and inelegant suits evokeMarx and Weber's contemptuous term "petty bourgeois" (Spieflbburger), gath-ered to protest their treatment by the clerical elite. President Khatarni stayedaway from the gathering in his elegant clerical attire, cutting a truly tragicfigure. Mohsen Kadivar, the reformist cleric who had been jailed for over ayear for writing an erudite refutat ion of Khomeini's theory of the Mandateof the Jurist, called on him to resign rather than accept an unfair election.More ~ o i ~ n a n t l ~ ,n a letxer urging the striking to push for anew constitution, the jailed reformist, Hashem Aghajari, aptly referred to the"Tragedy of KhataminS6 figure5.2).

FIGURE .2 Pro-reform lawmakers listen to an address during a sit-in to protest thedisqualifications from seeking election ofover 3,000 of he 8,200 people, includingmore than 80 sitting lawmakers, by the hard-line Guardian Council in Tehran,Monday, January19,2004. (Al' PhotolVahid Salemi)


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I10 AITER KHOMEINI

He was referring to the destruction of the "smiling Sayyedn (sayyed-ekh ad -n ), elected President in 1997 and 2001, by the ruthless Ayatollah, selectedby his clerical colleagues as the Le ader and Khomeini's successor. Th is destruc -tion was already complete in 2000. It came in the spring and summer of 2000,at the very time o f the astonish ing defeat of the pro-clerical candidate s in thenationa l elections of the Sixth Majles, with t he Leader's several deadly strikes:the almost successful assassination of th e President's most importa nt reformistaide, the clampd own o n the pro-President reformist press, and, above all, his"governmental ordern to the new ly elected reformist Majles to stop its deb ateon th e press law in August 2000. Khamen ei embraced the President after eachstrike, and with each embrace came his affirmation that Kh atami is one of us.Khatami did no t have the courage to push him away and say he was no t oneof them. From then on, Khamenei knew he could do anything he wantedwith the smiling Sayyed. Khatami's maudlin speech for Nawruz 138olMarch2001, which was read by many as his intention t o quit, was that of a defeatedman and reflected his sense that he did n ot have the strength to stand up tothe Supreme Jurist and the price of his clinging to presidential power wouldbe capitulation and further humiliation. The defeat of President Khatamiand his reform movem ent an d a hardliner takeover were foregone conclu-sions. Khatami's second landslide victory in the presidential elections of June2001, when he won 7 7 percent of the popular vote, running against nine othercandidates, only delayed the realization of true defeat.57Th e electorate stillhad faith in him, but massive disillusionmen t soon followed. The reformistswere soundly defeated in the local elections of 2003, which delivered Tehran toAhrnadinejad, the nation al elections of 2004, in which th e hardliners won themajority of seats in the Majles, and t he p residential elections of 2005, in whic hAhmad inejad was elected.

Th e analysis of the constitutional politics of the Islamic Republic from1997 to 2005 demon strates that the co ntradictions between two heteroge-neous principles of the Con stitution of 197-namely, theocratic governm entand participatory representative government-- explain the confron tationbetween the Leader, or clerical mona rch, and t he President. The Leader stoodfor the first principle and aligned behind h im w ere the conservative clericswho c ame to power as a result of the Islamic revolution and are in control ofthe revolution-generated system of collective rule by clerical councils, founda-tions (bony&), and fo undation-supp orted unofficial groups, including thethuggish Helpers of the Party of God, the Judiciary, and the co mmanders ofthe Revolutionary Guards and its Mobilization Corps. Th e President stood

THE RISE AND FALL OF PRESIDENT KHATAMI I11

for the second principle, which was fused in his new discourse withthe rule of law, democratic participation and civil society. Th is principlewas increasingly referred to as the "republicanism" of the IR I in con trast roits "Islamicness." Behind him stood the technocrats for reconstruction, thereformist and excluded clerics, and the disenfranchised middle classes. Theplaying field was steeply sloped against the President an d his sup porters, giventhe Co nstitution a nd the rhetoric of the Islamic revolution. The reformistseither made the tactical mistake of thinking they could appropriate the rher-oric of the Islamic revolution, or much more likely, did not have the courageto d issociate themselves from it because the y were afraid of being called trai-tors. Either way, these good children of Khomeini's re volution lost the powerstruggle for reform.


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9-homeini's Successor

Ayatollah Kharnenei as the Leaderof the Islamic Republic of Iran

AS WE PRESIDENTS OF ME ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN HAVE CHANGED,herehas been remarkable stability at the apex of the Islamic order, with A yatollahSayyed 'Ali Khamenei having served as the Leader and Supreme Jurist sinceKhomeini's de ath. T he gradual extension of Ayatollah Khamenei's contro lover the political, judiciary, and economic institutions was the counterpart tothe progressive marginalization of Hashemi-Rafsanjani in the mid-1770s andto the decline and fall of Khatami in the early 2000s. It took the form of thepenetration o f the Judiciary by securing the app ointmen t o f the Ayatollah'sown men , thereby "politicizing it, and more surprisingly, by penetrating thestate bureaucracy and lastly the legislature. Khame nei considered th e military-security elite his men and let two of them run for President in 2005. T h evictory of his preferred candidate, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, in 2005 and theelectoral putsch of June 20 07 did not end the Leader's dom inance, bu t modi-fied it as the military-security elite represented by the President has becomeincreasingly vocal in spea king for Iran's n ewly ma turing political class.

Neopatrimonial Domination and Growinginto the O&ce of LeadershipThe Supreme Jurist of Khomeini 's novel theory o f theocratic governmentprevailed over the "sources of im itation" of th e traditional Shi'ite hierarchy.

But a revolution whose avowed goal had been to save Shi'ite Islam from theonslaught of secularism and westernization could no t abolish the positions o fits custodians or the independence of the traditional S hi'ite hierocracy basedon religious learning throug h the seminaries. The attempt to organize theShi'ite clerical body by the Islamic Republican Parry in a one-party systemfailed, and Khomeini abolished it in 1787. In the same year, he set up theSpecial Co urt for Clerics to keep them in line, but the measure of politicalcontrol and clerical disciplining it could achieve had limits. Nor was theLeader's appointment of the Head of the Judiciary sufficient to obliteratethe Judiciary's institutional autonomy. Limited but effective institutionalpluralism th us persisted in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IN),nd is perpetu-ated by clerical conciliarism, while the authoritarianism of the Leadershipprinciple is combined with transmuted mobilizational features and attenu-ation of revolutionary ideology into loyalty to the Man date of the Jurist .Furtherm ore, the hydra-headed consolidation of the revolutionary powerstructures alongside the state bureaucracy has created a political regime thathas been typified as "fragmented authoritarianism."' What observers have

EIGURE 9.1 This mural in a busy Tehran thoroughfare depicts Imam Khomeini andLeader Khamenei. The caption reads: "We will continue on the Path of the Imamand the martyrs of the revolution." The Supreme Leader [K hamene i]. (Photogra phby James Hill/Contact Press Images)


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15/22

marja'iyyat in Iran, while accepting it for the Shi'a outside of Iran. Nasrallahwas predictably appointed his representative in L e ba n~ n .~y separating therwo principles tenuously linked in the 1979 Constitution, the 1989 amend-ments had resulted in a new dualism of political and religious authority,representing a compromise berween traditional and innovative principles,berween marjari)yatand vehya t-e f+h. This compromise proved stable andsurvived the failed attempt to establish Khamenei as the sole marjaf.

Ayatollah Yazdi knew-in the early 1990s that the great age and imminen tdeath of the Grand Ayatollahs Kho'i, Golpaygani, and Araki meant a uniqueoppor tunity for solving the problem created by the incompatibility betweenthe old and the new principles of Shi'ite authority. This attempt a t its solutionfailed, however, and the regime's structural fault line was not repaired. WithGrand Ayatollah Sistani's eminence in Iraq since 2003 and a new generationof jurists in their sixties and seventies forcing its way into the highest Shi'iteclerical rank, he issue could only be shelved, not solved.

This did not prevent Khamenei's far-reaching practical measures to tightenhis bureaucratic and financial control over the religious institution and toestablish a system of surveillance under Leadership that greatly underminedthe autonomy of the Grand Ayatollahs and thus of the Shi'ite hierocracygenerally. Khomeini had been content to continue acting through a consor-tium for distributing stipends from the Grand Ayatollahs to seminarians of- .the Qom Learning Center (hawza)and just set his own stipend as the highest.Khamenei reorganized the consortium for the distribution of stipends into aH a m Management Center with a "Statistical Office" for collecting infor-mation on the seminarians and preachers that created a modern surveillancesystem as an instrument of political control through information. The vastfinancial resources at the disposal of Khamenei compared to other GrandAyatollahs' meager resources through voluntary donations pu t him in a posi-tion to control and manipulate the impaired hierocratic authority structure,while a bureaucratic nerwork extends over the seminaries to standardize thesyllabi and find employment for its graduates9

Since the declaration of his marja'igat abroad, Ayatollah Khamenei hassupplemented the discretionary budget of the Leadership Office in Iran withthe collection of religious dues from the rich Shi'ites in Kuwait and otherGulf co~ntries . '~fter the invasion of Iraq in 2003, his representative 'Alial-Tashkiri frequently returned to Iraq to distribute largess to the madrasasand other religious institutions in the Najaf Learning Center and throughother Shi'ite clerical networks abroad, thus bringing them under Ayatollah

KHOMEINI'S SUCCESSOR 177

Khamenei's influence, making credible his claim to be the spiritual leader ofall the Muslims of the world.

Protecting the Islamic Revolution against CulturalInvasionby theWestKhamenei had meanwhile been carving a special position for himself incontradistinction to Hashemi-Rafsanjani's pragmatism and economic recon-struction. The new mission may have been suggested to him by an open letterpublished in June 1991 by 35 professors. Talung their cue from Khomeini' sfamous pronouncement against East and West during the Cultural Revolu-tion in 1980-"We are not afraid of military attacks, we are afraid of colonialuniversitiesv-these post-Cultural-Revolution-purge professors claimed thatthe undermining of tradition, the family, and social mores by the spread ofsuch notions as "one-world culture," "the global village," and "the new worldorder" constituted a Western cultural invasion." In a series of sermons thatcontinued through the assassination of dissident intellectuals by the Devo--tees of Pure Mohammadan Islam in 1994-1995, the Leader championed theprotection of the Islamic revolution against the Western cultural onslaught.The hardliners' alarm was heightened by the convergence of Sorush'sreformism with the formation of the Servants for Reconstruction by Hashemi-Rafsanjani's top technocrats in January 1996. The technocrats announced intheir founding statement that enough had been done for "strengthening thevalues of the revolution and the regime.. . Now the time has come to utilizeour skills and efficiency to face the challenges arising from the lack of devel-opment and to strengthen our economic policies.. . "The hardliners tookthis statement to be the declaration of the end of the revolution. As a journalof the Helpers of Hezbollah put it the following month: "it amounts to thedeath of the revolution as well as of Islamic val~es." '~

In response, as satellites were being impounded and state-controlledpublic media incessantly sounded the alarm about the Western onslaught,the Leader's pronouncements on the subject were collectedand published bythe Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance later in 1996 under the title ofCulture and the C ultura l Invarion (Farhang va tahrijarn-efarhan gz).AyatollahKhamenei reassured the hardliners that the revolution would not end: "Donot think that the revolution has ended; it continues." It is "not a struggleof today, or one day, two days, one year or two years. It is the struggle ofgenerations." The Islamic republic therefore needed to be defended: "Groups


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of the faithful, mobilized forces, the Hezbollah fighters should act in such away throughout the country that America, the Zionists, and the rest of theenemies of the Is lamic republic lose any hope [of ~ in ni n g] ." '~

Khamenei's apprehension of the Western cultural invasion shaped hisconsistent outlook that has fou nd repeated expression in the current decade.Preparing to clamp down on reformism despite its resounding victory in the2000 parliamentary elections, he stated: "I have now reached the conclusionthat th e United States has devised a comprehensive plan to subvert the Islamicsystem. Th is plan is an imitation of the collapse of the former So viet Union."Three years later, he told the Iranian nation that "Iran's enemies, more thanartillery, guns and so forth, need to spread cultural values that lead to moralc o r r ~ p t i o n . " ' ~ e proceeded to attrib ute the following remark to o ne suchAmerican enemy: "Instead of bombs, send them miniskirt^."'^ In January2005, he explained a new method of subversion: "In the present postmoderncolonial era, the arrogant powers are trying to influence other nations withthe help of their agents, by spending money an d through propaganda tacticsand colorful enticements."" He developed this interpretation of the velvetrevolutions of the decade, offering an inimitably smooth Persian equivalentfor it, "soft overthrow" (baran&iiYe n a m ), which by z o o 7 became part ofthe official terminology o f the Iran ians for several arrests, including someAmerican-Iranian scholars. Khamenei was convinced of a countervailingIslamic soft power th at h e sought to harness, using th e extensive resourcesof the Iranian Leadership office and other means. He has consciously soughtto ride the wave of Islamic resurgence in th is decade, and his official websiteaccordingly calls him the "Supreme Leader of Muslims.""

Growth of the Leader's Personal Power: His Pickfiom the Second StratumKhamenei had begun as the weaker parrner of the post-Khomeini diarchy bu tclearly became th e do min ant on e in the last years of Hashemi-Rafsanjani'ssecond term. As the Leader, Khamenei reinforced th e ties he had carefullycultivated with the R evolutionary Guards, whose command er, Mohsen Reza'i,he retained until 1998. H e also quickly changed his modern ist predispositionand saw the Leader's com monality of interest with th e traditionalist clericsin charge of the th eocratic conciliar system. T he legitimacy of Leadershipwas inextricably bound with thar of clerical conciliarism an d underm iningit was self-destructive. T he m odernist dispo sition he had displayed in t he

KHOMEINI'S SUCCESSOR 179

different office of the IRI President did not befit his new supreme office andwas quickly discarded.

Durin g the first decade or so as Khomeini's successor, Khamenei tendedto rely on Iraqi exiled clerics of Iranian descent-the so-called returnees(moh-vedin)-to streng then his powe r as these clerics were aliens wi tho utdeep social ties or influence. Foremost in this group was Ayatollah Ma hm udal-HashemiIHashemi-Shahrudi, the first chairman of the Supreme C ouncilfo r the I s lam ic Revo lu tion in I r aq (S C IRI ) , w ho w as appo in ted to th eGuardian Council in 1995 and became the Head of the Judiciary in 1999.Anoth er pro mine nt returnee is 'Ali al-Taskhiri, who was appointed to th e newOffice of the Supreme Leader with Shahrud i in 1989 and was put in charge ofinternational relations with the Muslim world.

T h e in i t i a l ly co rd ia l r e l a t ions be tw een th e L eader and P res iden tHashemi-Rafsanjani b ecame strained after the M ajles elections of 1992, whichbrought the hardliners into the majority in the Fifth Majles. With Hojjatal-Eslam 'Ali-Akbar Nateq-N uri as the new M ajles Speaker, the hardlinersimmediately set out to o bstruct Hashemi-Rafsanjani's eco nomic reconstruc-tion and privatization, and gravitated toward Khamenei, who found theirsupport convenient in the bid to increase his power. Th e President, under pres-sure from bo th sides, bowed to the wishes of the new Majles and appo intedhardliners close to th e Suprem e Jurist to key Ministries of Interior an d IslamicGuidance. Meanwhile, the Leader would not miss any opportunity to replaceother Hashemi-Rafsanjani men with his own. In 1992, for example, the Leader

i used his prerogative (added by the 1989 constitutional amendmen t) to oust theI President's brother as the head of the nationa l radio an d television and replacehim with 'Ali Larijani. Larijani had briefly held the Ministry of Culrure and1 Islamic Guidance after Khatami was ousted by th e Majles hardliners earlier inthe year. Th at Ministry did not revert to a Rafsanjani man, bur went to one o fKhamenei's: Mostafa Mir-Salim. Th e final break between the two m en cam e/ in the last year of Hashemi-Rafsanjani's second term, whe n D eputy-PresidentMohajerani's proposal to ame nd the Constitu tion to allow him t o run forr.I another te rm was vetoed by the Supreme Leader, wh o, &er failing to secure

a declaration as the sole "source of imitation," was less and less inclined to,

share power. Instead, he accepted the advice of the Assembly of LeadershipExperts to revitalize the Maslahat Counc il in the sprin g of 1997 and leave it toHashemi-Rafsanjani in order to ease him out o f the presidency.

Having failed to amend the C onstitution and remain President, Hashemi-Rafsanjani supported the candidacy of his former Minister of Culture and


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180 AFTER KHOMEINIIslamic Guidance, Sayyed Mohammad Khatami, in the 1997election. Like his predecessor, Khatami in turn felt compelled to acceptKhamenei's men in som e key positions in the Executive. Th e Leader's clericalcommissar for universities, Hojjat al-Eslam Qorban-'Ali Dorri-Najafab adi,notably, became his Minister of Intelligence and Security.

Du ring Khatami's presidency, Hashemi-Rafsanjani's men were gradu-ally pushed ou t of the administration, a nd th e former President lost muchpolitical clout. After the refusal by th e clerical hardliners of th e JRM to putthem on th eir list, Rafsanjani's second strat um organized themselves into aparty, the Technocrats for Con structi on (kZrgo~ran-es&n&hg2], mou nted avigorous campaign du ring the 1996 Majles elections, and appeared as partnersin Khatami's reform administration in 1997, with M ohajerani taking the keyposition of Ministry of C ulture an d Islamic Guidance. O the r Rafsanjani lack-luster technocrats, too, contin ued to serve under Khatami. T he hardliners,however, went after Rafsanjani's men with the Leader's blessing. Their firstvictim was the Secretary-General of the Technocrats for Co nstructio n andthe mayor of Tehran, Gholarn-Hossein Karbaschi, who was put on trial forcorru ption in 1998. Hashemi-R&anjanik inability to protect his prottgk wasa foregone conclusion. It was damaging to his reputation within the rulingelite, and was seen as his final capitulation to K hamanei. Hashemi-Rafsanjanihimself was forced o ut of t he reformist camp. Th is was the reformists' cost-liest mistake. Akbar Ganji, heady with his utopian op timism transferred fromthe myth of revolution to t hat of inevitable democracy," implicated Rafsan-jani-as Hi s Emi nenc e dressed in red (mode led on Card inal Riche1ieu)-inthe murders ordered by the eminencesgrises, presumably 'Ali Fallahian,Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ezhehi, 'Ali Razini, and Most& Purmoh ammad i,the clerical hardliners in the Ministry of Intelligence trained by AyatollahMohamm ad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi at the Haqq ani School." T his ill-conceivedattack, and Hashemi-Rafsanjani's h umiliati ng defeat in the Tehran 2000Majles elections, alienated him from the reformists, and he threw in his lotentirely with t he Leader. H e could n o longer be said to have much o f anindependen t power base and become just an in fluential advisor to Kharnenei.Before long, Khamanei also forced former Deputy-President Mohajerani, ou tin December 2000, while Khatami gave the latter a nonpolitical position asthe Director of the D ialogue of Civilizations to pave his exit from p olitics intoincreasing obscurity. Rumo rs and com plaints abou t Mohajerani's second andthird wives resulted in h is dismissal, while th e first, Jamileh K adivar (the sisterof the dissident reformist cleric), was active as a Majles feminist reformer.

Another key KZrgoz&-, Mohsen Nurbakhsh, who had managed the CencralBank and Ministry of the Econom y for Rafsanjani, was eased ou t of powerand died in 2003.

Meanwhile, throughout the Khatami presidency, the Leader's men werebeing put in charge of the politicized courts an d charged with the suppressionof the press and harassment of the reformists. Th e constitutional theocracywas thus imperceptibly tu rning in to a system of neo-patrimonial personal ruleby th e Leader, with increasing politicization o f the Judiciary and a d hoc infil-tration of a variety of !governmental organs. Th e Islamic Revolutionary G uardsCorps (IRGC) generals, Moharnmad Baqer Zolqadr, Ahmadinejad's formercommand er at the Ramazan H eadquarters of the Revolutionary Guards inthe 1980s, and 'Ali-Reza Afshari were placed in th e Interio r Min istry an dput in charge of internal security and conduct of the 2008 Majles elections.Th e Leader intensified his use of laymen--often nonentities-from the intel-ligence apparatus, inspectorates, and revolutionary a nd m obilization corpsto concentrate power in his own hands. Beginning with the February 2004Majles elections, he endorsed their intention to invade not only th e Executiveand th e Judiciary but also the Legislature. In May 2004, he also appointeda former IRCG command er, 'Ezatollah Zarghami, as the head of nationaltelevision and radio. Although invasion had been ongo ing through out t he1990S , i t cu lm ina te d in the ~ re ~ o n d e r a n tresence of the military-securitypersonnel in the Eighth Majles elected in 2008. The loud an nouncement ofthis invasion as an express goal by the hardliners in 2008 marked a new stagein the consolidation of Iran's new political class; and the Leader was deter-mined to make th e new class his own. The victory of th e hardliners in t he2004 an d even more in the 2008 Majles elections, many of whom were theformer personnel of the Leadership Office or the Leader's men in th e securityappara tus and mo bil i~a tion ,2~trengthened Ayatollah Kham anei's agglomera-tion of personal power in relation to the Majles. It was presumably the zealof these men of the Leader that indu ced th e Majles to deprive itself of thetheoretical right to dem and accountability from the Leadership Office andanything related to t he Leader in Decemb er 2008.

At the end of February 2007, f inding the Maslaha t Counc il Cha irm anRafsanjani heady with his recent election as President of the powerfulAssembly of Leadership Experts, the Leader added Ahmadinejad's Ministerof Inte ll igence an d Securi ty , his Deputy-Pres ident , two ot her mili ta ry-intelligence men and one Mo'talefa hardliner to the Maslahat Council tobalance the number of Rafsanjani pragmatists on the Council (8 to 8).2L he


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Leader's shif i in favor of the mili tary-intelligence men made the mainstay ofthe regime, the hardliners who subscribe to the Mandate of the Jurist andobey the Leader, a more heterogeneous group. Iran's new political class isa composite group, consisting of the clerical elite and the military-securitysecond stratum, whose composition has been changing in favor of the latter.Th e traditionalist clerics and the military-mobilizational apparatchiks aretwo different political formations. It is true that they share power in the IRIstructure and are Further linked by the network of economic clientelism thathas grown between the bony& and the IRCG economic empire around themilitary-industrial-commercial complex. However, the network of economicclientelism is not strong enough to ensure the smooth functioning of thesystem, hence the crucial neo-patrimonial role of the Leader in balancing thetwo political factions of the hardliners while managing a modicum of "nega-tive integrationn of the reformers as a loyal opposition. In the spring of 2008,the Judiciary, controlled by the Leader, ended the suspension of publicationof three reformist papers, most notably Sharq. After completing his secondterm as President-cum-Leader of the Opposition, fi at am i was allowed tocreate a foundation, B&Zn, and transfer most of the members of his cabinetinto its board of trustees. He continues t o enjoy the privileges of a formerPresident.

Seven important ministries went to men from the military-securitysegment of the second stratum in 2005. The one exception was the Ministryof Foreign Affairs, for which the Majles rejected Ahmadinejad's candidateand forced him to accept Manuchehr Mottaki, who belonged to a hardlinerMajles faction whose offer of cooperation Ahmadinejad had turned downduring his ~arn paign .~'n addition, he appointed two clerical hardliners whohad been involved in the chain murders stopped by Khatami in 1779: Hojjatal-Islarns Gholam-Hossein Ezhehi, Minister o f Intelligence and Security,and Mostafa Purmohammadi, Minister of the Interior until 2008. The elec-tion of Ahrnadinejad with the backing of the Leader-controlled security andmobilization apparatus in June 2005, the Majles law of December 2008, andespecially the sham reelection in June zoo7 can thus be seen as the culmina-tion of the trend in accumulation of personal, extra-constitutional power bythe Leader.

Th e men from t he military-security second stratum promoted by theLeader seem to have come into their own since ZOO), making a bidfor the representation of the new class in the Majles and thus thefuture takeover of Iran. Th e control of a personal system of power is difficult,

and the hardliners, formerly Khamanei's men, are not as easy to control as theyappropriate the positions they attained through the Leader's favor. With theMajles and presidency as their additional power bases, the second stratum ofIran's new poli tical class may decide to shake loose the tutelage of the Leader.The military-mobilizational hardliners turned politician have not remainedunited so far, however, and quite a few of them in the Majles and local govern-ment have distanced themselves from Ahmadinejad an d formed their ownfactions. Many of them in the Majles did not endorse Ahmadinejad for asecond term in 2007. Furthermore, the difficulty in controlling Ahmadinejadseemed to have motivated the Leader to begin tilting the balance of powerback towards the clerical elite and Hashemi-Rafsanjani's faction in 2008, andeven making a rare kind gesture toward the reformist loyal opposition.

The most assertive of Khamenei's new men is President Ahmadinejad, whohas been claiming the direct blessing of the Hidden Imam and cultivatingpopularity with his program of economic populism and an assertive intrusioninto foreign policy. The President's economic populism had been counteredby the Leader's assumption of a greater role in economic policy. Accordingto his instructions, the Maslahat Council has bypassed the Majles and deter-mined the guidelines for the resumption and acceleration of privatizationand strengthening of the market economy. In preparation for the ouster ofKhatami and the reformists, Khamenei had recruited his own [earn of tech-nocrats to take over the economy, or more precisely the sector of the economywhich was not already under his loose control. Wi th t he expansion of thereach of the clerical conciliar system and the growth of the personal, extralegalpower of the Leader, both of which are typical modes of post-revolutionaryconcentration of power, the trends toward centralization set by Hashemi-Rafsanjani and democratization initiated by Khatami have been reversed.The pro-clerical Developers, who won the Seventh Majles elections in zoo4with the help of the clericalist Guardian Council a year earlier, had a plan oftheir own forperestroika. Th e plan, as unveiled by their leader Haddad-'Adel,whose daughter is married to Ayatollah Khamenei's son, proposed to makeIran into a new China or Japan by performing the ecdnomic miracle ofcombining political and religiocultural conservatism with economic liberal-ization. This policy seems highly unrealistic because it requires the destructionof the economic base of the Islamic Republic. In any event, it was set aside byAhrnadinejad when he was elected President a year later. Leaving Ahmadinejadto implement his populist programs of social justice, diversion and personaldispensation of state funds into the provinces and small towns, international


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support, the putsch created great tension between the military-security secondstratum and the ruling clerical elite. Ahmadinejad's assault on Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Nateq-Nuri, and other important members of the ruling clericalelite durin g the June 2009 election and its aftermaths seriously strained theorchestrated unity of the tw o com ponen ts of Iran's new political class. Byidentifying squarely with his men in the military-securiry apparatus headed byAhmadinejad, the Leader and Supreme Jurist alienated an important segmentof the ruling clerical elite and dim inished his ability as the regime arbiter toengage in the balancing act he had learned from Khom eini.

Th e damage don e to th e relations between the clerical and the military-security com ponen ts of Iran's new political class by the resumptio n o f thepower struggle among the children of the revolution with the June 12 putschwas even greater. Hashemi-Rafsanjani was now a powerless man, all his menin positions of power having long been ousted by the Leader except for theeight in the M aslahat Coun cil who were equally matched by th e Leader'smen.29We will not know th e extent of his supp ort in the other clerical councilhe chaired, the Council of Leadership Experts, as, rumors notwithstanding,the Revolutionary Guards did not allow him to convene either council.30H eremained silent for a mo nth, then appeared to have come to terms with t heLeader and was allowed to lead the Friday prayer on July 17. In his sermonto a raucous audience of sympathizers of the reformists, Hashemi-Rafsanjanipicked up the major re formis t theme in the power s truggle and empha-sized the "republicanism" o f the IRI. Having reminded the audience of hiscredentials as a revolutionary leader from th e beginning, h e reiterated th eposition he had staked out for himself as a candidate in the 2005elections that the IRI regime derived its legitimacy from the people and allits major offices were ele~ tiv e.~ 'his time, however, he waxed more eloquentand skillfully invoked the autho rity of the father of the Islamic revolution toprove that t he people's consent was essential for the legitimacy of all govern-ment. Imam Khomeini was said to have mentioned to him a little-knownhadith attribute d to the First Imam, 'Ali, which makes the consent of thepeople the exclusive basis for the legitimacy of political rule.32A few dayslater, Khatam i, Hashemi-Rafsanjani's successor as I N President, rehsed toaccept the Guardian Council's certification of the election and proposed anational referendum on the matter.

Meanwhile , the re formis ts sought to draw the Grand Ayatollahs intothe power struggle, but the majority of these "sources of imitation" did notrespond, proving t he Leader's successfd domination over the Shi'ite learning

center in Q o ~ . ~ ~delegation from the women's movement could secure anaudience only with Grand Ayatollah Sane'i, and letters from the reformistscandidates Musavi and Karrubi remained largely unanswered. Two Gran dAyatollahs ambiguously supported the reformists, while three others joinedSane'i in expressing their unequivocal support. The leading oppositionalGrand Ayatollah, Montazeri, however, fiercely condem ned electoral fraud anddeclared Ahmadinejad's government illegitimate in a num ber o f proclama-tio ns a n d f a t ~ i i s . ~ ~he most vehement personal attack on the Leader himselfcame from a leading radical cleric and the founder of the original Hezbollahin 1979, Hojjat al-Eslarn Ha di In a gathering of Karrubi supportersin early July 2009, Ghaffari remind ed Khamenei that Imam Khorneini hadfound his understanding of the Mandate of the Jurist defe ~ti ve, ~% d nvitedhim to a debate as a fellow-cleric. Declaring that h is body was accustomed toprison cells, he accused Khamenei of "turn ing religion int o lying," and statedflatly that "the result of your leadership is the ruinin g of the reputa tion of theclergy," addin g that his "clumsy defense of M r. Ahmadin ejad" was a gravem i ~ t a k e . ~ '

ClericalMonarchy:Who Guards the Guardians?T he greatest challenge to the legitimacy of Leadership and th e entire systemof clerical conciliarism depen dent o n it came with the landslide victory ofthe reformists in the winter of 2000. Ayatollah Kharnanei was not dau ntedand acted with singular determination to stem the incipient tide as early asAugust of that year by ordering the Majles what not to do. From that pointon, he entrusted the neutralization of the Majles to the Guardian Councilformally and to the pu rposeh lly politicized Judiciary informally. Whe n th etaming of the Majles as the only organ of popular will in the IR I was ruth-lessly comple ted, the hardliners of the Seventh and currently t he E ighthMajles turned to the Leadership for protection-this time not against theGuardian C ouncil, which had no reason for Further opposition, b ut againstthe Executive Power, now headed by one of their own who had turned o ut t obe a most imperious Pre~ident.~'he Leader, as the supreme arbiter over theThree Powers of the graciously obliged and took the hum bledLegislative Power unde r his protectio n. As an expression of its deep gratitud eand in an astoun ding feat of self-limitation in Decem ber 2008, the M ajlesexempted all activities under the auspices of Leadership from account-ability to th e people and its elected representatives.40By explicitly giving u p


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this fundamental right of oversight as a derivative of national sovereigntythe Majles has greatly weakened t he "republican" aspect of the I RI an dits elected organs vis-5-vis the appointive organs, including the GuardianCouncil, which for this and other reasons was unlikely to find this legislationunconstitutional.

Although several characterizations of the regime by outside observershave been offered, there is anothe r coined by the form er reformists. As th eemphasis on the "republican" character of the regime by the early reform-ists in the 1990s appeared less and less convincing with t he resurgence andvic tory of the hard l iners in the ~O O O S ,isillusioned reformists offered anew typological description of i t : new Sultanism. T he term saltanat wasincreasingly used by Mohsen Kadivar to refer to what he characterized asthe "appointive Mandate of the Jurist system." Th e term m eans "monarchy"and is pejorative only within the ideological vocabulary of the Islamic revo-lution. Akbar G anji , now in exile, has sought t o highlight i ts pejorativeaspect by coining the term "latter-day Sultanism" and supplying a Webe-rian sociological genealogy for it.*' Clerical monarchy, however, seems moreneutral an d closer to Kadivar's Persian term. Clerical monarch y is a consti-tutional regime, i ts constitution defining rule by clerical councils underthe Leadership of the Supreme Jurist . Th e Guardian Co uncil guards theideological foundation of th e regime, while the M anda te of the Jurist makesthe Leader the su preme guardian of t he people l iving under that regime.The advisory function of the Maslahat Council is to assist the Leader withguarding the interest of the regime (neam) ,only indirectly identifiable asthe public interest or interest of the people. Clerical monarchy has a neo-patrimonial feature made all the more conspicuous by the growth of thepersonal, extra-constitutional power of the Leader an d the recent exem ptionof his political and econo mic patrim ony from parliamen tary oversight. Thatthis Constitution is not dem ocratic and, in my opinion , not acceptable inthe contem porary world is a matter of great polit ical an d moral concern,but is not a sociological issue. T he sociological issue is the goodness or lackof fi t between the constitutional structure of the regime and the powerstructure that sustains it.

T he power s tructure that sustains clerical monarchy includes the Revolu-tionary Guards w ho are constitutionally designated no t the guardians of thepeople or of the regime, but of the Islamic revolution.Th at their coming of ageand their assumption of the leadership of Iran's new political class are throw-backs to Khomeini's revolution should not come as a surprise in view of their

fundamental constitutional and ideological asset. They must have judged theygot as much mileage from this asset as they could by June 2009 and embarkedunabashedly o n stealing the presidential election in their bid for the regimetakeover with the blessing of the Leader.

Whatever his intention, the regime

After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors

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