The Revolutionaay Guard: Gaining Power in Iran? - T 4E http://www.time com/tim&world/article/O, 8599, 1915918,00,html?xid—r..
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The Revolutionary Guard: Gaining
Power in Iran?
By TIME STAFF Thursday, Aug. 13, 2009
Reprints 1 diggit
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Members of the Iranian
revolutionary guards shout
anti-Israel and anti-US slogans at
the weekly Friday prayer sermon
at Tehran University.
ATTA KENARE / AFP /Getty
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The shadowy Revolutionary Guard already oversees a 130,000-
strong parallel army and run large swatches of Iran's economy,
from dentist clinics to the cou ntry ‘s controv ersial nuclear program.
But signs have emerged in recent weeks that the elite military arm
isn't satisfied: it may just want to run the entire Islamic Republic.
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The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
(IRGC), or Sepah for short in Farsi, is widely
believed to have played a large role in
orchestrating the crackdown on political
dissidents and protesters following the disputed
presidential election. Its political influence
within the regime has always far exceeded the
actual army's and has increased exponentially
since President MahmoudAhmadinejad was
elected to office in 2005. But the speculation
among Iranian opposition sources is that, these
days, the IRGC's powerful patron, whose second
term began officially last week, has now
become its puppet, falling under the influence
of a gang of security chiefs (the so-called “New
Right”) that harbors schemes to further
radicalize the regime, or to topple it in a
military takeover.
(What's ahcad lorlram's protesters?)
The IRGC's maneuvering has been quite public.
On August 9, it was a top Revolutionary Guard
commander who escalated the ongoing
confrontation with the opposition leadership by
calling for their arrest. ‘What is the role of
[ former President Mohammad] Khatami,
[ former prime minister and presidential
candidate Mir-Hossein] Mousavi and
[ presidential candidate Medhi] Karroubi in this
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8/13/2009 10:20 AM
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