ABSTRACT

For both Iranians and outsiders alike, understanding the politics of the Islamic Republic is a confounding process. Once considered an ideological state seeking to tempt Iranians and others in the region into the embrace of revolutionary fervor espoused by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran today is a pragmatic regime struggling to moderate factional disputes and extend its regional influence. Indeed, in the aftermath of Khomeini's death in 1989, raison d’état has become one of the most salient features of the regime's politics. Often perplexing, especially to countries in the Western hemisphere, is that Iran's pragmatism is both disguised and mired by ideological rhetoric and confused by radical elements seeking to obstruct policy through domestic terror and international violence. Those actions and words, in turn, define the factional struggle that dominates Iran's political landscape more than three decades after the Islamic Revolution—a factionalism enshrined in the nature of the political system and the history and evolution of ideology within the Islamic Republic.