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The Myth of Moderate Mullahs: It's Still Khomeini's Iran

[Weekly Standard] Reuel Marc Gerecht - Are the clerical elite and their praetorians - the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the thuggish Basij, and the killers of the Ministry of Intelligence - still running a revolutionary enterprise within which they see themselves as the ideological vanguard of the nation and Islam? Yes, absolutely. To a striking degree, the ruling elite has maintained its sense of religious mission, while the Iranian people, especially the young who don't remember the charisma of Khomeini, have gone cold. For the vast majority of Iranians, an Islamic missionary spirit is no longer happily married to the national identity. It is astonishing that some Western analysts of Iran, and some senior U.S. government officials, actually believe that Khamenei and his kind would be willing to restore relations with the United States. Such a restoration would be an end to the revolution as we have known it. For the mullahs and for God, this would be an unbearable defeat. Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and Rafsanjani have no intention of letting this happen. Rafsanjani's voluminous writings show him, just like Khamenei, to be deeply impregnated with the idea of an Islam-destroying, globe-trotting, American tyranny.
2007-03-14 01:00:00
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