Analysis of the Iranian post-election situation

I know very little about Iran, so I depend on informed folks to provide me with sufficient information to understand some of the issues at stake. This is a very interesting look at what may come next, and why:

What we can see in Iran today are two simultaneous struggles, one from below (people with legitimate grievances against their government), and one up above (a power struggle between factions).

Although many had hoped that the post-electoral struggle in Iran would be a one act play, this one seems more likely to be headed into a saga that is four or five acts long. Like many previous social movements throughout history, this has turned from a hundred yard dash into a marathon.

The dynamics of this struggle are also very different than those that have occurred in other countries. The Iranian system is kind of "a state within a state." There is an elected part of the government — the president and parliament — but they are answerable and subject to a Supreme Leader and the various bodies of Islamic clergy that choose him and that, on paper at least, serve as a check and balance to his powers.

That dual state apparatus, although designed to maintain those in power, has caused the regime of Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad — very much joined at the hip — the problem of having to defend itself on two fronts at once. If it loses control of only one of those institutions, it loses everything.

It's a fairly long article, and I'm not sure I agree with some of the interpretations, but it's well worth reading in full.

Update: Christopher Hitchens looks at the odd phenomenon of "My Uncle Napoleon" and the degree of detachment displayed by Iranian religious leaders:

Fantastic as these claims may have seemed three years ago, they sound mild when compared with the ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn't even heard that his favourite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and gibberings have real-world consequences, of which at least three may be mentioned:

1. There is nothing any western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's foreign affairs.

2. It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.

3. The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers, would have been able to avoid the embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our "experts."