Since the June 12 Iranian presidential election stirred massive anti-regime demonstrations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his inner circle of hard-liners have used the armed forces -- particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) -- to suppress dissent. Western observers have commented on the country's slide toward military dictatorship. Fareed Zakaria, for instance, devoted his Sunday news show to it this past week. But what was once a theory now seems commonly acceptable fact, as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's latest appointments to the IRGC demonstrate.
Khamenei's new appointments to the IRGC leadership give hard-liners unprecedented power. The appointees also include some of the most feared and brutal men in Iran -- implying the IRGC will become an even stronger anti-democratic tool in the state's hands and making any mediating dissent from its ranks far more unlikely.
Consider the appointees. The new commander of the Basij, a paramilitary group under the IRGC's control, is Mohammad Reza Naghdi.
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