Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Policy toward Iranian Nuclear Development (Page 2)

Continued from Page 1

Background

U.S. policymakers often operate in a sterile environment, looking at foreign policy challenges as intellectual exercises or treating every state as a general template upon which to craft U.S. strategy. But countries develop policies in the context of their history and culture. This is especially the case with the Islamic Republic of Iran, where religion, politics, and nationalism are often so intertwined that they become inseparable. While the problem at hand for the bipartisan array of U.S. legislators, policymakers, and practitioners may be how to prevent the Islamic Republic from developing a nuclear weapons program, understanding Iran’s strategy and decision-making requires understanding its background and view of itself.

Many Middle Eastern states are artificial, their borders haphazardly drawn in backrooms and chancery gardens. This is not the case with Iran.   With only brief interludes of foreign conquest, an Iranian entity has occupied the same area for more than 2,500 years. While Europe for centuries knew Iran as Persia, in the local language, the name has always been Iran, or ‘land of the Aryans.’ Iran’s imperial legacy remains vital to Iranian self-awareness. Most Iranians, be they Islamist or secular, believe that Iran is a great civilization that deserves to be treated as a regional hegemon, if not a great power. Arabs, Afghans, and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia complain that Iranians treat them with disdain and as cultural inferiors. Iran’s sense of superiority is a constant irritant between Iran and its neighbors.

Knowing the Iranian historical narrative is crucial if policymakers are to understand the contemporary Iranian perspective. More so than in the United States or even Europe, history matters. The origins of the Iranian people are shrouded in mystery. The Shahnameh or “Book of Kings,” Iran’s national epic, reaches back into the mist of time. Chapters move from the mythical to the true, tracing the lineage of generations of Iranian shahs. Within written history, Sumerian scribes mention the first Iranian towns, some of which, like Susa (Shustar), are also mentioned in the Bible. The Babylonians tried on numerous occasions to exert their authority into Iran. They discovered that it was one thing to conquer a town, but quite another to hold it. Through the ages, Iranians have taken great pride in the cohesiveness of their society.  

It was during the ninth century b.c. that Assyrian chronicles first mention an Iranian monarchy; they describe tribute sent by the kings of “Parsua.” In 559 b.c., a vassal king in Parsagardae, not far from modern Shiraz, rose in revolt and united many Iranian tribes under his rule. An apt propagandist and military tactician, Cyrus the Great consolidated Iran and its neighboring lands into a vast empire. At its peak, the Achaemenid Empire—referred to as the Persian Empire in elementary school world history texts—stretched from Egypt and Greece thousands of miles into Afghanistan and Pakistan.   School children still read accounts of the Achaemenid Empire’s war with ancient Greece. Among the most famous Achaemenid cities was Persepolis, where the last Shah of Iran celebrated 2,500 years of Persian kingship in 1971.

In 331 b.c., the armies of Alexander the Great swept into Persia.  He left no successor, and the territories under his control fractured into minor local dynasties. The Persian Empire rose again in the third century as the Pathian state, and stretched from modern-day Armenia to Central Asia and the Arabian Sea. Such history remains important today as Iranian policymakers implicitly look at territory once under the Persian empire’s control as their near abroad in which they, and not others, have a right to dominate politically and diplomatically. 

An internal revolt ended the weakened Parthian Empire, but from its ashes arose a third great Persian Empire, that of the Sassanids, which stretched from Armenia and Syria along both sides of the Persian Gulf and all the way to India. Only the newly Christianized Byzantine Empire prevented Sassanian kings from pushing their domains into Europe. The wars of attrition between these two empires exhausted both and left a vacuum for the Prophet Mohammad and his Arab armies to fill. 

The Arab invasion of Iran changed the Middle East. Lured by promises of fiefdoms and booty, the Islamic armies conquered most of Iran by 644 ad. In less than 25 years, the domain of Islam had expanded from the deserts of Arabia to Libya and Afghanistan, an area larger than Europe. The conquering armies and their attendants settled. They needed administrators and found them in Iran. Today, many Iranians, even while embracing a multifaceted identity, take pride in their role of shaping the early practice of Islam. Iran’s nobility, many of whom converted to maintain their privileged social status, facilitated the spread of Islam. A sense of national identity, however, remained as even those who converted to Islam continued to celebrate traditional Iranian holidays like Nowruz, the Persian New Year.

Not all was well in Iranian lands, though. Iran became a provincial backwater. Arab rulers tended to marry other Arabs creating an ethnic stratification that discriminated against Persians. Even as Arabs adopted many traditional Persian bureaucratic practices, Arab tribalism disadvantaged Persians. The early Shi‘a tapped into anti-Arab sentiment and found support in Iran.   Antagonism between Arabs and Persians has deep roots and goes both ways: after all, God had chosen to reveal the Qu’ran in Arabic, not in Persian.

When, in 762, the new Abbasid dynasty founded a new capital called Baghdad, Iranian influence increased. While today the ethnic divide between Arabs and Persians correlates roughly with the border between Iraq and Iran, this was not always the case. Iraq was once the heartland of the Iranian Empire. The first Sassanian capital was at Ctesiphon, 21 miles southeast of Baghdad, not too far from modern Salman Pak.

Ethnic tensions continued to strain the Islamic empire. Civil war erupted in the ninth century. It was a fight between Arabs and Persians. While the Persian pretender to the throne triumphed, he was not able to overcome the centripetal forces which plagued the Islamic Empire; the separatist instinct would first take hold in Iran. 

Subsequent centuries would witness the rise and fall of many Iranian dynasties. Some remained local rulers, while others consolidated control over much of what became modern Iran. Almost all were Sunni, although in the tenth century, a Shi‘i dynasty briefly ruled Iran and even seized Baghdad. In the eleventh century, a Turkish dynasty controlled the lands.

During this period, the cultural and political fulcrum of the Islamic World shifted eastward. Iran became central, while the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant became backwaters.   Iranian rulers patronized the arts and sciences. They founded universities. Poetry thrived. This is one of the reasons why the Crusades, central to the European historical discourse, were but a blip in the Islamic narrative of the time.

In the thirteenth century, Mongol hordes overran the Iranian plateau, sweeping away the autonomous Iranian states. Iran became part of a huge, if ephemeral, new empire which stretched from Eastern Europe across the plains of Russia and the mountains of Iran to China. Islamic art blossomed, as Chinese and Iranian craftsmen familiarized themselves with each others’ work and methods. The Mongols were essentially a nomadic, pastoral people suddenly faced with the task of managing a vast empire. They did what the Arab invaders had done 600 years before: They turned to Iranian administrators. But rather than build the state, the Mongol governors tasked their administrators with looting it. They sought to extract as much revenue as possible from the population. By 1335, their control disintegrated and with it the unity of Iran. Tamerlane (Timur) briefly conquered Iran but, like the Arabs and Mongols before him, he could not retain control. Rival Turkish dynasties arose in the fifteenth century to take his place, but it was only in the sixteenth century that stability returned to Iran. 

The impact of the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, still reverberates. Shah Ismail, its founder, formally converted Iran to Shi‘ism. However, only in the eighteenth century did the majority of Iranians become practicing Shi‘a. The conversion fused a national religious identity with which Iranians, regardless of ethnicity, could differentiate themselves from their neighbors. The period was a golden age for Iran. The Shah’s armies conquered Baghdad, most of eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and western Afghanistan. The greatness of the era is apparent to any Iranian or tourist who walks among Isfahan’s palaces, mosques, gardens, and squares, but it did not last.

Subsequent weak rulers took their toll and, by the early eighteenth century, Iran again faced open revolts along its periphery. An Afghan general swept through and declared himself Shah but, by the end of the century, the power of the central government again disintegrated.

From Iran’s tribal patchwork arose the Qajar dynasty. Their tenure coincided with the penetration of notions of modern nationalism upon the Iranian state. Under Qajar tutelage, Iran transformed itself into a modern nation state. At the beginning of Qajar rule, communications between center and periphery were weak.   The road system was in shambles. Caravans of camels and donkeys carried coins and goods between towns since Iran had no paper currency. There were no banks. While far from stagnant, Iran had never recovered from the inflation that accompanied the influx of New World gold and silver into the Old World. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the chief Iranian export was silk, although opium and cotton soon became more important crops. The economy was, relative to the outside world, moribund. Inflation and political malaise in the early twentieth century undermined confidence. 

During the Qajar period, Iran would experience both internal and external challenges. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Iranian government witnessed the development of a mass movement culminating in a constitutional revolution. Liberals seeking to subordinate the shah to the rule of law, monarchists, and the Islamic clergy clashed, sometimes peacefully and at other times, with considerably more violence. When the smoke cleared, the era of absolute monarchy had ended.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Qajar period, however, was Iran’s clash with European powers. During the Qajar period, the world shrank, as did Iran, both literally and figuratively. Iranian rulers had always struggled to meet and match their neighbors militarily. Suddenly, though, Iran was faced with a challenge much more potent than Turkmen raiders, Ottoman musketeers, or Mughal cannons. High mountains and the vast emptiness of the Iranian plateau were no longer sufficient to shield the Iranian government from the technologically-superior forces of the Russian army or British navy. 

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire wrested control of what today is Armenia, Azerbaijan, and part of Georgia from the Iranian state. The Shah lost much of his claim to western Afghanistan following the Anglo-Iranian War of 1856-1857. A boundary commission cemented Iran’s eastern frontier with what today is Pakistan between 1871 and 1873, and Tehran and Moscow only set Iran’s border with what is now Turkmenistan in 1894, after years of steady Russian encroachment. Only in 1970 did a United Nations-sponsored referendum end Iranian claims to suzerainty over the Persian Gulf island-nation of Bahrain, although senior figures in the Islamic Republic have recently reasserted Iran’s claim to the Arab island nation. While the Iranian border with what is now Iraq has been more or less constant for a century and a half, the Iran-Iraq war notwithstanding, many Iranians remember that in centuries past, Iranian rule stretched well past the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. 

Still, despite economic stagnation and military weakness, successive shahs kept Iran independent, even as every other country in the Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia fell to various European powers. Even as they preserved their independence, Iranians translated their territorial losses into a sense of victimization that has helped shape Iranian nationalism into the twenty-first century. Well before the United States became active in Iranian affairs, Iranian reaction to British and Russian activities created a mindset in which Iranians interpreted outside interests through a lens of conspiracy theories.

At the same time, Iranians—whether in favor of theocracy or opposed to it—feel that Iran’s importance transcends boundaries. While the country is large, Iranians consider their sphere of influence to be larger. When Western governments may complain of Iranian interference beyond its borders, the Iranian government convinces itself that it is merely exerting its influence in lands that were once its own, its near-abroad.

Iran’s strategic importance grew with the 1905 discovery of oil. This became as much a curse as a blessing, feeding both corruption and an addiction to easy riches, to the detriment of industrial development. Russia and Great Britain divided Iran into spheres of influence in 1907.  The Allied powers occupied Iran both in World War I and World War II. The Red Army’s refusal to withdraw from Iranian Azerbaijan after World War II sparked the first crisis of the Cold War. As the Cold War accelerated, relations between the United States and Iran grew tighter. Two years after the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq nationalized the oil industry in 1951 and showed signs that he might move Iran toward the Soviet orbit, the U.S. and British intelligence services helped manufacture a coup which deposed Mosaddeq and reasserted the primacy of the Shah.

The following decades saw the Shah both consolidate power and impose a rapid program of economic and social reforms. Iran’s economy grew, but so did disparities between rich and poor, urban and rural. Many clerics—including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—opposed such reforms as women’s suffrage and equality of all citizens under the law, regardless of their religion. The Shah expelled Khomeini as his denunciations grew more virulent and his incitement more violent. From exile Khomeini continued to agitate against the Iranian monarchy and for his concept of Islamic government. 

In the days before the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s Muslim clergy repeatedly slammed the Shah for spending billions on weapons while Iranian families went hungry. Several scholars argue that oil wealth fed the growing disparity between rich and poor and contributed to the Islamic Revolution. Ironically, the Islamic Republic—especially under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—has repeated many of the spending patterns that caused so much upheaval in the last years of the shah’s reign.

Demographics and Diversity

Geography has also influenced Iran’s political development. While kingdoms and empires rose and fell throughout what now is Iran, the mountainous terrain bred fierce independence among Iran’s constituent parts. Until the late nineteenth century, many roads between Iranian cities were at best rudimentary. With water a limiting factor for travelers, paths and camel tracks meandered widely across the Iranian plateau. The result was often internal isolation and weak central government rule. It could take weeks for a traveler to traverse Iran from its ancient capital of Tabriz to the border of what is now Pakistan. Local sheikhs and chieftains might have paid lip service to the central government, but hundreds of miles and weeks away from his court, they were in effect independent. Modernity may have bestowed the central government mechanisms to impose control, but underlying Iranian governance has often been a sense of vulnerability.

Iran’s size and topography have allowed it to weather intervention and invasion, and have given its leadership a sense of strategic depth which other regional states like Israel and the Persian Gulf emirates lack. External isolation and the delicate balance between center and periphery have shaped Iranian history and society. Behind its natural fortress, the civilizations of the Iranian plateau have planted deep roots.   As elsewhere in the Middle East, mountainous, rough terrain has provided shelter and safe-haven for minorities and indigenous cultures. This has transformed Iran into a heterogeneous country. Today, Iran is more an empire than a nation. While Iran is officially a Persian-speaking country, half of Iranians speak a language other than Persian at home. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, today the most powerful man in the Islamic Republic, is an ethnic Azeri. Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president so-often embraced by the West as a reformer, is half-Azeri. Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, Iran’s judiciary chief, is more comfortable speaking Arabic than Persian.

Azeris constitute the largest ethnic minority—approximately one-quarter of the population. More Azeris live in Iran than in independent Azerbaijan. While Iranian Azeris are scattered throughout the country, their largest concentration is in the Iranian provinces of West and East Azerbaijan; the capital of the latter is Tabriz–capital of all Iran during much of the fifteenth century–and for centuries after the seat of Iran’s crown prince.

Approximately eight percent of Iran’s population is Gilaki or Mazandarani. Concentrated along the Caspian littoral, these people speak a language related to Persian, but sharing major similarities with the Zazaki of Turkey. Perhaps seven percent of Iran’s population is Kurdish. While predominant in the Iranian province of Kurdistan, they are not limited to it. Iran often names provinces after an ethnic group, but either makes the province smaller than the concentration of that minority or, as in the case of Azerbaijan, divides it so as to undercut separatism. Arabs no longer predominate in the oil-rich Khuzistan province across the Shatt al-Arab from Iraq, but Arabic-speakers do make up approximately three percent of Iran’s population. Smaller minorities of Baluch live along the Pakistani border, while many Turkmen live in northeastern Iran, across from Turkmenistan.

The sensitivity of Iranians to separatism runs deep. Throughout the twentieth century, Iran experienced many separatist movements—often supported if not sponsored by foreign powers. Iranians remember British assistance to Arab and Baluch separatists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and Soviet support for separatist movements in Gilan, Azerbaijan, and Kurdistan. Often, Iranians and their government conflate calls for federalism or ethnic rights with separatism and suspect a foreign hand.

Despite Iran’s linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity, the Persian language is a unifying factor among Iranians. Arabic may be the lingua franca of the Middle East from the Mediterranean to the shores of the Persian Gulf, but Persian takes on that role from the mountains of Kurdistan through the bazaars of Central Asia and down into the river valleys of India. Indeed, the sixteenth century Moghul Empire made Persian the official language of India. Only in 1832did British army officers and colonial masters force the princes and rajas of the Indian subcontinent to conduct business in English. Nevertheless, Persian remains the language of culture and poetry throughout much of West, South, and Central Asia. School children well beyond Iran’s borders memorize the poetry of famous Persian poets like Rumi, Saadi, and Hafez. Many in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan speak Dari and Tajik, more dialects of modern Persian than languages in their own right.

Religious diversity

Iranians, both inside their homeland and in the Diaspora, cringe at the caricature of Iran as a land of firebrand ayatollahs and religious radicals. While Shi‘ism has had a spotty presence in Iran since its inception as a distinct theological movement, it only became Iran’s official religion in the sixteenth century. When the shah converted Iran to Shi‘ism, there were so few Shi‘a clerics in Iran that he had to import them from Lebanon. It was not until the eighteenth century that the majority of Iran’s population became Shi‘a. Today, almost ninety percent of Iranians are Shi‘a, but Sunni Islam still predominates in the mosques of Iranian Kurdistan, the plains of eastern Mazandaran (along the border of Turkmenistan), and in scattered towns and villages along the southern Strait of Hormuz and the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan. While Sunni Muslims can, in theory, exercise their religious beliefs without interference, the constitution of the Islamic Republic discriminates against Sunnis. Many Sunni Iranians complain about occasional harassment and oppression on the part of the central government. While Tehran, a city of over ten million people, has thousands of Shi‘i mosques, dozens of churches, an Armenian cathedral, and even a handful of synagogues, there are no Sunni mosques in the city, even though there are more than six million Sunnis in the country. 

Ninety-seven percent of Iranians are Muslim, but it would be a mistake to overplay religious identity. Many young people and the middle class, disgusted with the corruption of the ruling clerics, have abandoned all but the most superficial Islamic patina. Many Iranians drink alcohol, and young women constantly flout conservative norms of dress. Iranian Muslims who consider themselves religious often speak of din-e khodeman, “my own personal religion,” to differentiate themselves from the public religion imposed by the state.

Tens of thousands of Iranians practice religions other than Islam, although the population of non-Muslim Iranians has decreased significantly in recent years because of state-sanctioned discrimination. Between 1976 and 1986, for example, the number of Christians in Iran declined from 169,000 to 98,000. Isfahan has a large Armenian quarter, and tucked away along side streets in major cities are smaller Syrian Orthodox and Anglican churches. As evangelical Christians made some inroads by conversion in the late 1990s, the Islamic Republic increased persecution; government agents have since murdered several priests.

While Iran’s millennia-old Jewish community still numbers perhaps 20,000, this is but one-third of its population a quarter-century ago. Iranian Jews remain fiercely proud of their Iranian culture, but the disappearance, apparently at the hands of Iranian authorities, of nearly a dozen Jews fleeing the country during the Iran-Iraq War, coupled with the 1999 arrests of 13 Jews—one as young as 16—on trumped up espionage charges, has accelerated the Jewish exodus. Many Islamic Republic hardliners and ideologues also subscribe to Shi‘a interpretations of Jews as religiously unclean. While the Jewish community, as with the Christian and Zoroastrian communities, has one representative in the Majlis, the Islamic Republic’s parliament, most community members view these representatives as Quislings.

Iran does not keep official statistics on its Baha‘i population, but some Baha‘i claim their community in Iran numbers as many as 400,000. Baha‘i’s follow the teachings of the nineteenth century prophet Baha’ullah, himself a disciple of Ali Mohammad Shirazi, better known as the Bab (Arabic for ‘gate’). Shirazi, whom Iranian authorities executed in 1850, preached a doctrine of progressive revelations, and sought to foreshadow the coming of a new prophet. However, because Muslims consider Mohammad to be the “seal of the prophets” and the Qu’ran as God’s final revelation, ayatollahs and other Shi‘i clerics consider Baha‘is to be heretics. Discrimination against Baha‘is in the Islamic Republic is severe. Baha‘i children cannot attend Iranian universities without first renouncing their faith. The Islamic Republic does not allow Baha‘is to bury their dead in public graveyards. While Baha‘is once contributed disproportionately to Iran’s intellectual and governing class, they now experience wholesale discrimination in the workplace.

The only sectarian minority not to suffer a population decline in recent decades have been the Zoroastrians. The dominant religion of the ancient Achaemenid Empire, Zoroastrians follow the teachings of the pre-Islamic prophet Zarathustra, also known as Zoroaster, who preached the duality of good and evil. Zoroastrianism is today centered in the desert cities of Yazd and Kerman in central and southeastern Iran. Iran’s Zoroastrian population has for the past half-century remained around 60,000, although some casual estimates indicate an increase in recent years. Despite Iran’s sectarian diversity, religion has been a unifying factor. Iranians root their national identity in their pre-Islamic past, much to the chagrin of the ruling clerics. Every March 20, not by coincidence the Spring Equinox, Iranians celebrate Nowruz, the Persian New Year. The festival dates back to the empires of ancient Persia and Mesopotamia. Many of the traditional practices such as lighting of bonfires have origins in Zoroastrianism.

Current Situation in Iran

Power Centers

Governance in the Islamic Republic is convoluted. Ultimate authority rests with the Supreme Leader, first Khomeini and, after his death in 1989, Khamenei. In practice, the Supreme Leader wields near absolute power. He may not involve himself in every decision, but he exercises ultimate veto power. Iran’s multiple power centers serve as checks upon the emergence of any power base that could rival the Supreme Leader’s.

Normal institutions are matched by parallel revolutionary institutions. When Khomeini took power, he inherited institutions he did not trust. He resented the army for its past loyalty to the Shah, and formed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which he equipped with better weaponry and facilities. The result is a system with in which several parallel and, sometimes, overlapping institutions and power centers operate.

•  The Supreme Leader: In most systems, a president would be head-of-state, but in the Islamic Republic, the president’s power is more symbolic than real. The Supreme Leader and his office trump the president and his ministers. He appoints half of the Guardian Council, the head of the judiciary, the head of state television and radio, the supreme commander of both the Revolutionary Guards and regular military, as well as the leadership of the security services.

• The Office of the Supreme Leader: Four senior clerics, often selected after previous service in the Ministry of Information and Security, the Islamic Republic’s intelligence ministry, support the Supreme Leader. Not only do they arrange his appearances and manage his schedule but, in their capacity as his eyes and ears, they also reach down and involve themselves in almost any government, military, or security office in the state. These permanent advisors preside over several hundred consultants, clerical commissars, and employees that collectively serve as a parallel executive branch.

• President: The role of the president expanded after Khomeini’s death as constitutional reforms eliminated the parallel premiership. The President can appoint and dismiss cabinet members subject to parliamentary confirmation. He also controls the budgetary process but can be overruled by the Supreme Leader. Additionally, he chairs the Supreme National Security Council which coordinates defense, intelligence, and foreign policy, and appoints the director of the Central Bank.

• Cabinet: The 22 cabinet ministers preside over a number of portfolios ranging from high profile ministries like foreign affairs, defense and information and security (intelligence) to less prestigious posts like mines and metals, labor and social affairs and cooperatives. While ministers in theory report to the president, the Supreme Leader’s commissars ensure that ministry policies do not run counter to the Supreme Leader’s desires. The intelligence ministry, especially, operates shadow operations that perform functions desired by the Supreme Leader, and do not necessarily require presidential direction.

• Parliament: While the 290-seat parliament (majlis)is the seat of sovereignty according to the Islamic Republic’s constitution, and its debates can be vibrant, it has little ability to enact decisions. The parliament has, however, stymied ratification of the president’s ministerial nominees. On March 14, 2008, hardliners who, within the Iranian context call themselves “principalists,” won the majority of seats in an election marred by Guardian Council disqualifications of many candidates deemed too reformist or liberal.

• Guardian Council: The Guardian Council both determines the compatibility of parliamentary laws with Islamic law and also certifies the qualification of any candidate standing for elected office. As such, the Guardian Council enjoys veto power both over laws and personnel. The Supreme Leader appoints six clerics to serve on the 12-member council, while the parliament appoints six laymen. However, because the Guardian Council vets those standing for parliamentary elections, in some years eliminating more than 90 percent of contestants, there is not significant ideological difference between the Supreme Leader’s appointees and those nominated by the parliament.

• Assembly of Experts: The 86-member Assembly of Experts elects the Supreme Leader when a vacancy develops and, in theory if not in practice, can remove the Supreme Leader should he become unable to fulfill his functions. While the Assembly meets once per year, in practice they do not wield much power. After Khomeini’s death in 1989, a small handful of powerbrokers in the Islamic Republic selected Khamenei to be his successor before the Assembly of Experts formally met. On September 4, 2007, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani became head of the Assembly.

• Expediency Council: Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, formed the 31-member Expediency Council in February 1988, both to break stalemates between the parliament and the Guardian Council, and also to advise the Supreme Leader.

• Office of the Friday Prayer Leaders: Friday Prayer Leaders, appointed by the Supreme Leader, act as his representative in every city and major town. They deliver an official sermon every Friday which often outlines the policies of the Islamic Republic. They also propagate and enforce censorship at the local level.

• Revolutionary Foundations: The parallel, unelected revolutionary power structures extend even into the economic sector. The Revolutionary Foundations (bonyads) control upwards of 30 percent of Iranian gross domestic product. The Supreme Leader appoints their directors, often from the ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Foundations control their own banks, which are subject to far less oversight and regulation than parallel state banks. These structures together control foreign trade in order to enable the Iranian officials to maintain control over hard currency. The Foundations often allocate funds for terrorist groups, and so enable the Iranian leadership to maintain plausible deniability.