I'm a bit late in posting this, but Ali Ansari, one of the world's leading experts on Iran and a professor at St. Andrews University, has written
an excellent expose on the Revolutionary Guard/Basij paramilitary. He finds the argument that the Islamic Republic has transformed from a theocratic state into a military dictatorship as "far too black and white," arguing instead that...
...the IRGC has come to be in bed with a hard-line establishment made up of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and his clique, and even some journalists and clerics, meaning that the Right has coopted the IRGC as much as the IRGC has coopted them. This relationship between the hard-liners and the IRGC is long in the making, though it has been made far worse by Ahmadinejad’s arrival on the scene. We must remember this was started by Rafsanjani, when the moves into the political economy of the country were not initiated by the Guards though they have undoubtedly become enthusiastic participants. But what this means is that the IRGC is not a military junta. The Iranian state does not face a military coup in the traditional sense of the term. A more accurate categorization of Iran might be to call it the securitization of the state around the needs of an increasingly bloated business conglomerate, which confuses its own interests with those of the nation. This was in effect not the garrison state Hajjarian had warned about, but instead a mafia state writ large.
[...]
Yet what remains striking about this repression (to date) has been the unsystematic and eclectic manner in which it has been implemented. The aim appears to have been to inculcate a sense of fear and anarchy rather than order (as evidenced by the widespread destruction of property by security forces), the idea apparently being that a widespread fear of anarchy will itself lead to order as ordinary Iranians grow anxious about the consequences of chaos. But this is not a military strategy born of a disciplined organization. On the contrary, this is a strategy born of paranoia. It is also a tactic which seeks to maximize the real limitations on power through the use of terror. It does not reflect an organization that is either cohesive or united, but one in which pockets of ideological fanaticism exist. Moreover, where this fanaticism has wavered, it has been reinforced by large amounts of money; money which, as on previous occasions, is tied to performance and which can only be paid in times of crisis. This perverse paradox has not gone unnoticed. Such are the realities of the mafia state.
