Status Updates From Iran's Grand Strategy: A Po...

"The IRGC has funded a growing music industry around popular 'raves'." 🎤🎶💃🕺🕌

"The years betwewn 1989 and 2005 were an intense struggle between three elements of Iranian society: ideological fervor, technocratic management, and democratization. For a time, it looked that an alliance between technocrats and democrats could isolate the ideologues gathered around the supreme leader. But by 2005, it was the ideological faction that was co-opting technocracy to marginalize calls for democracy."

"The war with Iraq compelled Khomeini to abandon Islamic universalism and focus on the patriotic goal of defending Iran. Even as his rhetoric remained steeped in religious language, Khomeini quickly transformed into a leader of the Iranian nation under siege. ... In the first phase of the war, Khomeini crossed what now seems an unthinkable divide: he sought to collaborate militarily with Israel."

"Secular opposition to the Shah refused to view Khomeini and his followers as anything but benign fellow travelers, who would move to the sidelines after the revolution ...Leftist intellectual Homa Nateq dismissed all talk of the imposition of the hijab, saying 'In Iran there is no hijab issue. And if the price of getting rid of dictatorship and imperialism is donning the hijab, all Iranian women will do so gladly.'"

"In Iran's case, the Islamization of society took the form of social engineering that not only reflected religious edicts but also a vision of social organization that would produce a more resilient state. Religion was not just a matter of morality and ethics but the path to realizing secular ends too: geopolitical independence and power projection."

"Whereas the Shah's grand strategy was to protect Iran from Communism and the Soviet Union, for the revolutionaries who succeeded him, taking their cue from Mossadegh, a grand strategy had to protect Iran from the West and its interference in Iran's politics."