Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's "Supreme Leader" (pictured above), does not always call the shots in the Iranian regime, according to this Los Angeles Times article:
For years, Western analysts have struggled to understand the inner workings of Iran's leadership. To many, it is a government tightly controlled by the Shiite Muslim clergy. But the power of the clerics has steadily eroded. Increasingly, power is distributed among combative elites within a delicate system of checks and balances defined by religious as well as civil law, personal relations and the rhythm of bureaucracy.
Iran analysts struggle to discern which officials have authority and how much. And when Iranian officials make public pronouncements, it often is unclear whether they are expressing established policy or fighting among themselves -- speaking for their own faction or just themselves.
Concentric circles of influence and power that emanate from the supreme leader include the clergy, government and military officials -- and at their farthest fringes, militiamen and well-connected bazaar merchants -- altogether perhaps 15% of Iran's 70 million people.
Even the man regarded in Iran as the highest-ranking cleric in Shiite Islam finds himself constrained and challenged.
Those inside Iran's circle of power, says Ali Afshari, an analyst and former student activist now living in Washington, operate according to unique rules.
"It is not a democracy or an absolute totalitarian regime," he said. "Nor is it a communist system or monarchy or dictatorship. It is a mixture."
The article discusses Ali Khamenei's power as situated within the khodi system, the Persian term for "one of us":
"In our society there is a red line between khodi and non-khodi," said one political activist. "If you've never been on the right side of that divide, you're considered guilty until proven otherwise. If you're not khodi, you don't have the right to criticize."
Khamenei and his closest advisors are at the center of that power structure, overseeing grave matters of state, including the country's nuclear program and domestic policy, from a huge tree-shrouded compound in downtown Tehran. Each day, the Supreme National Security Council, Khamenei's main think tank, faxes his orders to newspapers, television stations and government officials. Clergy spread the word at homes and Friday prayer sessions.
Surrounding the supreme leader are several powerful committees consisting of dozens of clerics, each established to cement the central role of religion in Iranian politics. The Council of Experts chooses the supreme leader. The Guardian Council vets laws and candidates for public office. The Expediency Council mediates legal disputes.
Next are the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard and armed forces, who are appointed by Khamenei; the elected president; the Cabinet; parliament; senior military commanders selected by the supreme leader; and the senior clerics in the holy city Qom.
Beyond that are governors and other provincial officials, all approved by the president. At the outer rim of khodi are well-connected merchants, militia members and millions of volunteers who make up the government's shock troops.
Included in the system are people with different ideologies and agendas, including the offspring of Western universities and onetime operatives in the shah's intelligence service whom Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini needed to help bring down the shah in the 1970s, defend his revolution and withstand attack from Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.
From the beginning, Iran's leaders fought over how wide to expand the circles of power, and how much room there would be to challenge the leadership.
Even those on the outer fringes of power can buck authority, especially if they retain a rank within the religious hierarchy. Despite a moratorium on stoning those convicted of morality crimes, a judge this year in the western village of Takistan ordered the stoning of a man for adultery.
Instead of firing the official, judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi decided the judge had a point: Stoning was, after all, part of Islamic law.
Though ordinary people have limited freedom to criticize the power structure, analysts and officials in Tehran say that the heads of government agencies eagerly devour results of polls about their leaders' performance and Iranians' attitudes toward everything from women's dress to making peace with the U.S. Many of Iran's leaders fear a popular uprising like the one that toppled the shah or the communist governments of Eastern Europe.
One after another over the past decades, Iranian leaders have tried to control this convoluted system -- and failed.
This article reminds me of studying political science in the 1980s, when "Sovietologists" worked hard to divine crucial leadership dynamics in the Kremlin, assessing every purge or power shake-up in terms of U.S.-Soviet relations, and international security more broadly.
Perhaps the Times is trying to tell us something with their analysis.
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Note: Political scientists code Iran's political system as a non-democratic regime, composed of theocratic and quasi-democratic principles. Power is concentrated at the pinnacle of the political system in the Supreme Spiritual Leader, according to Iran's Islamic Constitution of 1979.
The Supreme Leader is the pivot of government, mediating politics and policy-directives between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. He selects the presidential candidates (who in turn are elected in a national election), and he can dismiss an elected president under the authority of "the interests of Islam." Iran's executive branch bureaucracy is dominated by the clergy, who direct policy in the semi-public institutions of the state. The most important bureaucratic sectors are the culture and security services (the ministries of culture and intelligence), and the military under the leadership of Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
Party politics and political participation are highly regulated by the state. Western principles of dissent, free speech, and a liberal press are alien to the current Iranian political culture. A current dilemma for the regime is how to manage demands from Iran's rising middle class for greater interest group participation in politics, democratic representation in government and elections, and respect for basic human and political rights.
See Mark Kesselman, ed., Introduction to Comparative Politics, 7th edition (Houghton-Mifflin, 2007).
Photo: Los Angeles Times
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