Deciphering Iranian decision making and strategy today

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American Enterprise Institute :

Michael Rubin

January 28, 2013

 

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (4th R) stands with Army commander General Ataollah Salehi (3rd R), Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Hassan Firouzabadi (4th L), Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammad Ali Jafari (3rd L) and Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi (2nd L) during a graduating ceremony for Iran's army landforce academy in Tehran November 10, 2011.

 

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Key points in this Outlook:

 

*Iran's dictatorship is a nontraditional one in which the supreme leader often wields veto power rather than issuing direct orders.

*In recent years, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has grown stronger and has upset the traditional balance by which Iran's clerical class maintains control.

*Export of revolution remains a central tenet of the Islamic Republic. Recent political debates affirm the regime's view that Iran should export its ideology violently and not only through soft power.

 

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[Valin]

You also might want to look at this from Standpoint

 

Why the West Can't Do Business With Iran

AMIR TAHERI

January/February 2013

 

 

Having started his first presidential term in 2009 by offering "a hand of friendship" to the Islamic Republic in Iran, President Barack Obama has begun his second term by renewing his invitation for direct talks with the leadership in Tehran. In a variation on the same theme, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described Iran as "the toughest problem" facing American foreign policy today. And, yet, she too has pinned her hopes on a "diplomatic solution" before the March 2013 deadline set by Obama.

 

Both Obama and Clinton, who is retiring as Secretary of State, would do well to read James Buchan's insightful new book Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences (John Murray, £25). Buchan, who lived in Iran in the 1970s and has followed developments there for the past 40 years, has a much broader compass than Iran's relations with the United States and the 20-year dispute over alleged Iranian intentions to build a nuclear arsenal. But when it comes to the thorny issue of reaching a compromise with Iran on virtually any major issue, Buchan has grave reservations about the rose-tinted spectacles of American diplomacy under Obama. "History has shown," Buchan writes, "how on four occasions (since 1940) Iran persisted with a weak hand long after it should have folded. Iran's intransigence revealed not strength but weakness and, each time, it underestimated the bloody-mindedness of its adversaries."

 

According to Buchan, Iran, under the Khomeinist regime, holds one of the weakest hands it has had in its recent history and yet is adamant in playing it by rejecting all compromise. He writes: "Contemptuous of diplomacy, the Islamic Republic is now incapable of it." On two of the occasions that Buchan studies in some detail, the impasse created by Iranian intransigence ended with regime change in Tehran. On two other occasions, the Iranian leadership was forced to accept a dramatic change of course, in effect tactically surrendering to foreign diktat in order to save their regime.

 

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