Is Reuel Marc Gerecht Persian/Iranian?

I know, he is not but it seems as though he is the only expert who knows and undrestands the deeply rooted ideological underpinning of the preceived kleptocracy, which is responsible for the hegemonic aspirations of both ruling elites, the reformers and the hardliners, the way most Iranian do. Here I give you the most relevant paragraphs of RMG's best work I have read so far by an American expert on Iran:

It is Still Khomeini's Iran--The Myth of Moderate Mullahs

...Is this perception correct? Has the clerical regime sufficiently moderated to quell the worst fears? Are the "realists" right when they suggest that we can negotiate with the mullahs--at least more intelligently and successfully than we did in 1979, 1985, and 1999-2000, when President Bill Clinton and his secretary of state Madeleine Albright downplayed Iranian responsibility for the deaths of 19 American servicemen and the wounding of 372 others at Khobar Towers in the hope of reaching out to moderates within the regime? Or is such an opening conceivable, a real possibility for pragmatists willing to offer the right incentives to the clerical elite?

The CIA and the State Department absolutely didn't foresee the short-lived "Tehran spring" of Mohammad Khatami, a clerical reformist who rose to the presidency in May 1997. Perhaps the U.S. government is again blind and doesn't see the possibility of a "grand bargain" with a regime that understands the revolution is over and now just wants to be recognized as a regional great power. Nixon's détente with the Soviet Union looks rather thin in its achievements when compared with Ronald Reagan's rhetorical and occasionally covert policy of armed confrontation. But the Islamic Republic and the Soviet Union are not the same country. Perhaps there might be a successful détente with the mullahs, a modus vivendi that would neutralize the menace of their nuclear weapons, their terrorism, and their dubious dealings with the Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, Iraq's militant Shiites, and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.

Let us look at the religious dimension of this problem, and then at its more mundane aspects. Are the clerical elite and their praetorians--the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the thuggish Basij, and the killers of the Ministry of Intelligence--still running a revolutionary enterprise within which they see themselves as the ideological vanguard of the nation and Islam? Yes, absolutely. To a striking degree, the ruling elite has maintained its sense of religious mission, while the Iranian people, especially the young who don't remember the charisma of Khomeini, have gone cold. That the Iranian people remain faithful Shiite Muslims is beyond doubt. A majority may even remain vaguely faithful to the Islamic revolution and still believe that clerics as a class, no matter how despised for their postrevolutionary greed and despotic manners, retain a special, didactic place between God and man. But for the vast majority of Iranians, an Islamic missionary spirit is no longer happily married to the national identity. For the ruling mullahs and their supporters, just the opposite appears true. The clerics still seem quite determined to see themselves as the elite of Islam, faithful inheritors of Khomeini's most sacred legacy--political power. Yahya Rahim Safavi, the head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the radical clergy's indispensable guarantors of the religious order, who in great part shaped the manhood and ethics of Ahmadinejad, put it well when he said: "The geographic heart of the Islamic world is in Mecca and Medina. But, the political heart of the Islamic world is in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] is the flag-bearer of the front of the Islamic awakening and the fronts of the awakening of third-world nations." This is a basic point, often not seen by Western "realist" commentators on foreign affairs: The seizing of power by Khomeini and his clerical minions was a sacred act, proof that God isn't dead. The maintenance of clerical power in Iran is a sacred mission: It is what separates the revolutionaries from the detested traditional clergy, who wanted to hold government to high ethical standards but also to keep their distance from the corrupting institutions and exercise of power.

For the revolutionary clergy, and its loyal minions like Ahmadinejad, power is Allah. In clerical eyes, the new mullahs, led by Khomeini, drove the revolution.

They--not the people, who often were unreliable servants of God against the shah and counterrevolutionaries--are the engine of progress. Khamenei and the ruling clerical elite will always thwart the exercise of meaningful democracy in Iran, in part because the people, repeatedly, have shown themselves unfaithful to the religious revolution. Iranians, whose capacity for ferocious religious zeal is undermined constantly by a desire for happy lethargy and little sins, cannot be trusted. The superiority of theocracy over democracy derives not only from the clergy's greater knowledge of the Holy Law and its special, frequently charismatic role in Iranian history (Khomeini was not the first magnetic mullah in modern times), but also from the Iranian people's craving for satellite dishes and morally debased Western programming. This is one reason the early revolutionary reflex to label all Iranians and foreigners who opposed any aspect of clerical rule "criminals against God" or "enemies of Islam" came back with vigor in the late 1990s, when reformist pressure, partly unleashed by the presidential election of 1997, threatened the regime. The Iranian reform movement in the 1990s was, among other things, a self-conscious embrace of the Western conception of civil society. As weak as the reform movement actually was, it was enough to provoke Safavi to warn that the Guards Corps would "rip the tongues" out of reformers who threatened the Islamic Republic's God-ordained order.

During Khatami's presidency (1997-2005), leading clerical dissidents like Ali Montazeri, Khomeini's former favorite, and his disciple, Abdullah Nuri, the former interior minister who'd become a provocative newspaper editor, were corralled; Nuri, a faithful child of Khomeini who became the boldest clerical dissident, was arrested in 1999 and mentally ruined in prison.

It's worthwhile to note that one of Nuri's most egregious sins, which he committed during his nationally televised trial (the last time the regime would be so stupid as to give a dissident a national platform), was to mock on religious grounds the regime's refusal to restore relations with the United States. Was God's Islamic revolution so weak, Nuri implied, that it could not sustain the reopening of an American embassy in downtown Tehran?

It is astonishing that some Western analysts of Iran, and some senior U.S. government officials, actually believe that Khamenei and his kind--and there are many influential mullahs who are even more perfervid in the belief that America is diabolical--would be willing to restore relations with the United States. Such a restoration would be, as Nuri correctly implied, an end to the revolution as we have known it. For the mullahs and for God, this would be an unbearable defeat. Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and Rafsanjani have no intention of letting this happen.

Although they can be obstreperous, and are politically becoming a force to be reckoned with, the Guards Corps, like Iran's much-feared intelligence service, has been loyal to the clerical regime. There is simply no information anywhere--not even fifth-hand recycled gossip--that suggests the Guards, or as they are known in Persian, the Pasdaran, are amenable to the idea of restored relations with the United States. Just the opposite. Read Pasdaran publications and the speeches (or outbursts) of senior members of the Corps, and the revolution still seems hot and under siege. It's doubtful there is a single mullah in Iran who would dare tell the Pasdaran to abandon its continuing occupation of the U.S. embassy and stand to attention before a raised American flag.

The guardians of the revolution--among whom one counts first Khamenei and Rafsanjani--struck hard against Iranian liberals as well as dissident clerics during Khatami's presidency. These attacks confirm the unchanging religious nature of the regime. Liberals, though they posed no organized threat to the status quo, were regularly murdered, often brazenly. In religious terms, they were seen as a cross between atheists and apostates who openly admired and emulated Western ways.

One has to be enormously careful analyzing the commentary of the intrepid and fearless dissident journalist Akbar Ganji, but his suggestion that Rafsanjani had a controlling hand in the organized crackdown in the last four years of Khatami's presidency should be treated seriously. Rafsanjani, the great revolutionary pragmatist, who has probably done more than any other mullah to ensure clerical dominion, needed to ensure the Islamic Republic's balance, which was being unsettled by men and women who wanted to transform the country into something like a democracy.

This is why more Iranian dissidents were murdered abroad during Rafsanjani's first three years as president (1989-92) than during the previous ten years under Khomeini.
There's more...