Why It s Obvious Iran Approved Hamas s Attack – WSJ

n the U.S., elected officials and political appointees make policy, and permanent bureaucrats implement it. In the Islamic Republic, the opposite is true. Elected officials and political appointees implement the policies of the permanent state. Mohammad Khatami, a former president, once referred to himself as the system s logistics officer.

Iran s permanent state begins with Mr. Khamenei, whose every decree supersedes the law. Military and administrative chains of command are determined by access to power, not laws. The chief of the general staff is the highest-ranking military officer, for instance, but the head of the Quds force calls the shots. The Quds Force is the unconventional-warfare branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, one of the regime s two military forces.

Javad Zarif, a former foreign minister, made this clear in a leaked interview two years ago. He suggested that he wanted to pursue diplomacy but since the permanent state s preferred strategy was the battlefield dictated by Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, diplomacy was sacrificed for the sake of the battlefield.

Understanding this structure is crucial in investigating the extent of Iran s involvement in the war. If journalists sources in the Islamic Republic s government aren t in Mr. Khamenei s policy-making circle, they are unlikely to have known about Tehran s involvement. In the same vein, the intelligence community is unlikely to uncover crucial information by intercepting communications among people outside Mr. Khamenei s office.

via www.wsj.com

Nasty, nasty way to constitute a regime. Those darn Iranians. (I refer to the country’s leaders, not its people. Iranians the people, many of them, would toss the monsters out if they got the chance.)