The Struggle of Three Bureaucracies: Civil, Military, and Religious in Iran

Power in Iran is embodied in three bureaucracies: civil, military, and religious. The leadership apparatus, the Revolutionary Guard, the clergy, and the government play significant roles in these bureaucracies and compete for their resources. These three bureaucracies have expanded so much and their costs have skyrocketed that they are plundering the country's natural resources and driving it to bankruptcy. The military bureaucracy and its ambitions are primarily defined today by the Revolutionary Guard, which holds power beyond the government. The basis for the expansion of this bureaucracy is the regime's need for a repressive machine and imperialistic ambitions that align with the aspirations of the Supreme Leader. This is why we hear statements from influential military officials, mostly from the Guard: "Today we are a soft superpower in the world." (Head of the Civil Defense Organization, Tabnak, February 11, 2015); "An unparalleled power has been created that we do not want to test in reality, but if God forbid such a day comes, the Sea of Oman, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Persian Gulf will be completely under the control of Iran's naval forces" (Commander of the Guard, Tasnim, February 25, 2015); "We started from the Sacred Defense and are daily conquering lands that were under the control of imperialism" (Deputy Commander of the Quds Force, Fars, February 13, 2015). Hassan Firouzabadi, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, in response to a question about the possibility of an agreement with the US says: "I am responsible for the war with America, not negotiations, and I cannot comment on them" (Fars, February 22, 2015). Those who make these statements are serious and act based on them, but there are others who downplay these remarks. In the early years of the Syrian war, the Islamic Republic tried to refer to its military forces engaged in the wars in Syria and Iraq as "Defenders of the Shrine," but recently they no longer use this title and simply say "Iranian fighters" (Martyrdom of two Iranian fighters by terrorists, Fars, February 14, 2015). The term "Defenders of the Shrine" limits the scope of intervention to the graves of Shia Imams. One of the serious problems of the Islamic Republic's ambitions in the region and the world is that the Islamic Republic is a sectarian government, and sectarian governments cannot have long-term allies of a different kind. Hezbollah in Lebanon or Badr Brigade in Iraq are long-term allies of the Islamic Republic because they carry the same Shia sectarianism. The Islamic Republic wants Syria because of Hezbollah in Lebanon and to exert pressure on Israel and has no other interests in this country. Alawites, Houthis, and the Muslim Brotherhood (the intellectual fathers of Hamas) would certainly be prosecuted by the Islamic Republic and their religious rights would be violated if they were in Iran. The Islamic Republic's alliance with leftist governments (like Cuba or Eastern European countries before the collapse) has also experienced serious ups and downs and has not led to long-term cooperation. The religious bureaucracy and its overwhelming expansion are in pursuit of expansion because the officials of this bureaucracy believe that without expansion and a greater appetite, it will wither away. The expansionism, which has an ideological aspect in religious governments, also benefits the religious bureaucracy. Today, Qom has become a pit for absorbing government budgets in training clerics for propaganda abroad. Al-Mustafa University is just one of the institutions doing this, with about 30,000 foreign clerics. According to some estimates, there are about 130,000 clerics (Rasoul Ebrahimi, Deputy of the County Management Center of Women's Seminaries, IRNA, July 12, 2011) and about 200,000 to 300,000 clerics in Iran. According to reports from Iranian government officials, the number of Imamzadehs in the country has increased from about 1,500 in 1978 to 10,500 in 2012 (Tabnak, April 10, 2013). The religious bureaucracy, in addition to receiving a budget from the leadership apparatus (which has been allocated to elevate Khamenei to the position of marja' and protect the loyalty of clerics to him), also receives thousands of billions of tomans in government budget annually. These are apart from the hundreds of factories and companies that have been handed over to the clerics of Qom after confiscation or privatization. The government or executive branch in Iran actually represents the majority of the civil bureaucracy, with 8.5 million people receiving pensions from the government. In addition to these, one must consider municipal employees and institutions under the leadership apparatus, which increases the total number of government and state pensioners to about 10 million. This ten million salary receivers means that the government has about 40 million dependents (with an average household size of about four). It can be said that there are 3,601 executive agencies operating in the country. The military or military bureaucracy, like the religious bureaucracy, welcomes expansionism and ambition because when these matters become programs, they increase budgets, resources, and personnel salaries. However, the civil bureaucracy resists both, although this resistance has not yielded significant results. For example, the civil bureaucracy sometimes allocates its limited resources to support the ambitious goals of the military bureaucracy, such as granting scholarships to hundreds of Syrian students in difficult economic conditions. According to the Minister of Science, Research, and Technology, "The request for 80 scholarships for students from Syria at various levels has been approved... Currently, 468 Syrian students are studying at various levels in Iranian universities, of which 66 are pursuing doctoral degrees" (Fars, February 25, 2015). In conditions where the country's resources cannot meet the needs of these three monsters or where there is no agreed-upon distributing power among them, tensions will rise among them. For this reason, the monster that will bring down the Islamic Republic is not the military powers of the West but the insatiable appetite of the two religious and military bureaucracies (without any added value) and the size and inefficiency of the civil bureaucracy. The civil bureaucrats see that to preserve the regime, they must limit the expansion of the military and religious bureaucracies (the Khatami government did this in some years), but under pressure from the leadership, the Guard, and the clergy, they have constantly increased their budgets. They talk about the 42% unemployment rate among university graduates (Speaker of Parliament, Mehr, February 25, 2015) and nearly zero foreign investment (the net inflow of foreign investments into Iran's economy was equal to 0.8% of GDP in 2014, Economic News quoting the World Bank, February 24, 2015). Some believe that the civil bureaucracy should also be downsized. The Deputy Speaker of the Parliament says: "One-third of our government employees are surplus, and the government cannot manage and pay salaries and benefits to all of them" (Tasnim, February 3, 2015). However, these statements cannot be taken seriously because there is neither the practical possibility of dealing with them nor a plan for such action.