Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
It's really hard to say; the amount of conflict involved will likely depend on the republican guard. It sounds like this new political coalition is going to bring to the forefront a lot of ideas about Iranian politics that have been discussed in the shadows for years: that the Supreme Leader is too powerful, and should perhaps not even be a single leader but be a council of clerics. You can bet that they also feel that the supreme leader should not have his own personal army.
Let's say, hypothetically, that they call for massive overhaul, the AoE dismisses Khamenei, he peacefully steps down, and new elections are planned. Even in that situation, would the republican guard simply accept this and cease to exist and merge with the regular army, or would they attempt a coup of their own?
It makes me think of 'I, Claudius' where Claudius was thrust into power by the military, in part because they realized that if Rome were to return to a true republic with no caesar, then the military would lose much of their influence.
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Here's the problem and its two fold.
You can't believe that Khamenei will peacefully step down, This is a guy that survived the excesses of the Shah and was a key part in the last revolution. He's a saavy political animal and he has the republican guard firmly behind him and the de-facto president firmly behind him. He's certainly not going to step down peacefully. He's going to consolidate his power and attempt to crush this possible revolution in the crib.
The army doesn't like the Republican Guard, they never have and treat them with a great deal of suspicion. In fact the Iranian government doesn't even trust their military thats why you see occassional officer purges to keep the rest in line. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the army was deployed to deal with the dissidents because to this point I don't think we've seen a huge army presense. So the military has now become the thousand pound elephant in the room, who's side are they going to fall on when the crap hits the fan. I'm betting both sides of this mess have reached out to individual commanders to guage their loyalty.