AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI, THE founder of the Islamic Republic, was essentially an anarchist. Having been persecuted by the shah’s secret police, he despised state structures. Yet after grabbing power he quickly realised that the gains of the revolution could be cemented only with the help of permanent institutions. So he set out to build them, lots of them, sometimes with the explicit intention that they should keep an eye on each other: the army held in check by the revolutionary guard, justice dispensed by clerics as well as by civilian judges in separate courts, militias performing some of the same functions as the police, an elected president facing an appointed supreme leader. Khomeini mimicked America’s Founding Fathers, creating checks and balances and occasional gridlock.Three and a half decades later, Iran’s political system is neither a free-flowing democracy nor a monolithic dictatorship. As one dissident says, “We have freedom of expression, just not freedom after expression.” Public debates are fierce, but often amount to little more than shadow-boxing by an elite that makes decisions behind closed...
from The Economist: Special report http://ift.tt/1tlQxRO
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