Understanding Iran

The neo-conservative governments of the United States and Iran are on a collision course, but the diplomatic crisis sparked by the mullahs' nuclear programme has only served to highlight how little we really know about the balance of forces within the Islamic Republic. Since the election in 2005 of Iran's fundamentalist new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the rising drumbeat of warrior reporting in the Western media has almost created the illusion that a US military attack is inevitable. The reality is more complex. This paper warns that both sides are in danger of talking themselves into a war. It argues that the West's failure to engage successfully with Iran is due to a failure to understand the structure of the regime and the background to recent political changes. Therefore it provides a map of the various power bases, political and theocratic, using diagrams as well as text, and assesses the strength of the opposition and of civil society in order to ask whether the real divide in Iran lies between the hardliners and the reformers or between the people and the regime.

Foreign Policy Centre: Policy Brief: Understanding Iran: a solution to the nuclear crisis?, 2006 http://fpc.org.uk/fsblob/710.pdf

---