Who’s the man in Iran?
With its hybrid design of republican and religious institutions, the Iranian government is a vast and opaque structure. Recently, I attended a meeting of the Iran Policy Forum at the U.S. Institute of Peace. The troika of Rob Grace, Hesham Sallam, and myself published a Peace Briefing on the event. The basic concensus around the room - and it was quite a top level group of Iran experts - is that there’s probably about 10 or so people who are really making the decisions over there. Ahmadinejad, starring here in his very own music video (for the record, I have no idea what the words mean, I just enjoy the dancing and his sensuous voice), was quite powerful for a while, but it seems that the higher ups in the office of the Faqih felt the Islamic Republic had endured enough embarassment from his anti-Semitic ranting and wanted to cool things off a bit. So, other regime officials, like the Supreme Leader’s chief of staff Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani, have begun to make high profile appearances and statements including a “scathing disavowel of Ahmadinejad’s controversial remarks on the Holocaust.”
For those of you interested in pseudodemocracies, Iran is an interesting case. It isn’t really a liberalized autocracy; the republican elements of the government have significant autonomy even though the religious side screens the candidates and can basically reject their laws as it wishes. However, public opinion is highly important to the regime because maintaining the status quo requires popular consent. The religious side does not want to come across as undermining the ‘democratic process’ and risk having people question its authority. All in all though, that’s one hell of a ‘reserved domain’. Any thoughts? Go read the Peace Briefing.
