The Real Power Struggle in Iran

Western media sources watched the Iranian street protests following Iran’s June 12 election with bated breath. Many outsiders have viewed the protests as a sort of prelude to a long-awaited Islamic counter-revolution. What they largely fail to see, however, is that the struggle on the streets of Iran was actually only a side effect of a bigger power struggle going on behind the scenes.

That power struggle is among rival conservative factions. There has not in fact been an uprising against the regime. As Stratfor wrote, “The post-election unrest in Iran … was not a matter of a repressive regime suppressing liberals (as in Prague in 1989), but a struggle between two Islamist factions that are each committed to the regime, but opposed to each other” (June 29). In this picture, any truly reformist faction simply doesn’t exist as a credible political force.

The primary struggle within the regime is between the hard right under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his spiritual mentor, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, and the pragmatic conservatives led by former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Neither side opposes the regime. Stratfor points out that “Rafsanjani was part of the 1979 revolution, as were Ahmadinejad and the rest of the political and clerical elite. It would be a massive mistake to think that any leadership elements have abandoned those principles” (ibid.). Rather, the power struggle is over who ought to be leading the clerical establishment.

Both of these factions want Iran to become a nuclear powerhouse capable of dominating the Middle East. Ahmadinejad, of course, has made this clear. But Rafsanjani, despite being considered a moderate by some in the West, has the same national goals.

In a 2001 speech, Rafsanjani said that it was not irrational to contemplate the day when Iran may possess nuclear weapons. He also said that Iran will one day vomit Israel “out from its midst” in one blast, because “a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counterstrike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.” For the time being, however, Rafsanjani wants to avoid confrontation with the United States so that the Iranian nuclear program can progress unhindered and the Iranian government can play a larger role in Iraq.

Ahmadinejad’s ultraconservative faction, on the other hand, opposes any sort of rapprochement with the West, publicly advocates suicide bombing, and keenly supports such things as public floggings. Ahmadinejad’s extremist worldview centers on his belief in the imminent return of the Islamic “Messiah,” the Twelfth Imam. He sympathizes with the Hojjatieh sect, which believes that the return of the Twelfth Imam can be hastened by the creation of human-induced apocalyptic chaos.

While Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has striven to build a consensus between the two camps in order to uphold the strength of the Islamic Republic, things came to a head with the latest elections.

Ahmadinejad had been stacking the Iranian government with his loyalists for years, and prominent politicians and clerics came to see him as a threat to their own political careers as well as the clerical establishment itself. The recent street protests were only a symptom of the behind-the-scenes power struggle between Iran’s pragmatic conservatives and ultraconservatives. Indeed, not all those out on the streets protesting against the election results were people wanting Western-style liberal change in the country. Many were supporters of senior clerics who just wanted Ahmadinejad out.

For now, Khamenei has more or less succeeded in crushing the public protests. Rafsanjani has backed off and, while he spoke out on Sunday against the election, he put blame for the post-election unrest on a “complex conspiracy plotted by suspicious elements with the aim of creating a rift between the people and the Islamic establishment and causing them to lose trust in the system.” In other words, unprepared to stand up to the supreme leader, Rafsanjani tactfully put the blame on foreign interference.

The battle for power will continue on behind the scenes, but at the end of the day—as we’ve said before—the battle is not over foreign policy. That will remain the same. The regime may even take a more aggressive stance in its foreign policy and nuclear development in an effort to unify the country.

To learn more about the real significance of Ahmadinejad’s reelection, read Joel Hilliker’s column “The Truth Behind Iran’s Election Protests” and The King of the South, by Gerald Flurry.