A Different Perspective on What Is Going On in Iran

From a Stratfor source inside Iran. There is no way to verify if this is at all true but it is interesting:

The real situation in Iran is not the way it is being portrayed in the Western media. It is not a fight over ideology. Rather, it is a battle between rival economic elites, the old one led by the regime’s second most influential cleric, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and the emerging one led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rafsanjani and his reformist allies (former President Mohammed Khatami, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and former Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karroubi) have been losing ground to the Ahmadinejad camp, and their businesses have been suffering.

Rafsanjani has been using his vast network outside the country to counter the growing power of Ahmadinejad at home. Because of the 30-year-old sanctions, the regime has had to develop international partners to engage in trade overseas. All those contacts were developed by Rafsanjani and he continues to control them. Ahmadinejad, since he has come to power, has tried to develop his own contacts for doing business with the outside world. Rafsanjani, through his associates outside the country, has provided the information on the people and groups that Ahmadinejad has been working with to U.S. and British intelligence in order to block outside deals. In response, Ahmadinejad has made it difficult for his opponents to get loans from banks at home.

This is the real fight, and the old elites are trying to retain the special privileges they have enjoyed for years. Both sides need to be able to reach a compromise over who controls which monopoly (meat, sugar, rice, copper, iron, etc). But for this they need to be honest about the fact that both sides have economic interests they seek to protect, and must reach a negotiated settlement that entails a divvying-up of the control over resources. The problem is that they can’t admit this publicly because they would lose all credibility as the religious guardians of the Islamic republic.