The War within Islam: Iran: Not a simple struggle between conservatives and reformists

The struggle between the worldly clerics (in alliance with the bazaar) and the republicans is as old as the 1979 Iranian revolution, where the "fedayeen" of the Tudeh party [Communist cadres] were the foot soldiers of the revolution but the clerics eventually usurped the leadership. ...Imam Khomeini was wary of the Iranian mullahs and he created the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (which is Mr. Khamenei's source of power today) as an independent force to ensure clerics didn't hijack the revolution. His own preference was that the government should be headed by non-clerics. In the early years of the revolution, the conspiracies hatched by the triumvirate of Beheshti-Rafsanjani-Rajai who engineered the ouster of the secularist leftist president Bani Sadr (who was Mr. Khomeini's protégé), had the agenda to establish a one-party theocratic state. ... If Mr. Rafsanjani's putsch succeeds, Iran would bear the look of a decadent outpost in the "pro-West" Persian Gulf. Would a dubious regime be durable? More important, is it what Mr. Obama wishes to see as the destiny of the Iranian people? The Arab street is watching. Iran is an exception in the Muslim world where people have been empowered. Iran's multitudes of poor who form Mr. Ahmedinejad's support base, detest the corrupt, venal clerical establishment. They don't even hide their visceral hatred of the Rafsanjani family. -- M.K. Bhadrakumar

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