Is Iran Heading Toward A Military Coup? - by Abbas Milani
The Iranian regime is currently facing one of the greatest challenges of its 30-year history. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei--whose rule has been absolute and whose words have been the law of the land--is facing the most public challenge to his authority. His two decades since succeeding Ayatollah Khomeini have been defined by a tendency to keep his options open, a verbal dexterity that allowed him to skirt tough political positions, and an appearance of impartiality in Iran's fierce factional feuds. His caution has been the key to his success and survival. But Khamenei has thrown this caution to the wind by unabashedly favoring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.The ayatollah failed to recognize the mounting tension over this month's presidential election--what former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani described in a pre-election letter to him as a seething "volcano" of discontent. Even Sobhe-Sadeq, the political organ of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, warned in a lead editorial that the opposition's use of the color green had become dangerously similar to the kind of "color revolution" that dethroned governments in Ukraine, Lebanon, and Georgia.
If Khamenei wants a crackdown on the Green movement, he will have to turn to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)--a move that brings its own political costs. It is difficult to imagine the IRGC quelling the current protests and then simply turning power over to the clergy. If a political compromise cannot be reached between the regime and the opposition, and the IRGC is used in suppressing the protests, its commanders would likely expect a bigger role in the government. It is even conceivable that faced with irresolution among the clergy, they will act on their own, and establish a military dictatorship that uses Islam as its ideological veneer--similar to Pakistan under Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
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