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In the wake of the contested 2009 presidential elections in Iran, a popular consensus has taken shape among scholars, commentators, and Western government officials on the immense role in the Iranian economy of a single government organization: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Abbas Milani, for instance, states that the IRGC, an elite branch of the Islamic Republic's armed forces, is akin to a "military junta" and controls "minimally about 60 percent of the economy."1Said Arjomand describes the situation as a "military-industrial-commercial complex" with the IRGC's "economic empire" at its commanding heights.2And at a speech in Riyadh in February 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed her government's belief that the IRGC was, "in effect, supplanting the government of Iran" and "moving toward a military dictatorship" with firm control over the economy.3In this view, often informed by scandals in the Iranian press, accusations by opposition elites, and boasts by former Guards members themselves, the IRGC's praetorian status in the country's postrevolutionary order has allowed it not only to consolidate its political position within the state but also to centralize the domestic economy under its charge. The relative institutional cohesiveness of the IRGC, compared to other state agents, is assumed to transfer to the economic sphere.4
In contrast to this interpretation, which perceives the main tendency as centralization of economic control under a militarized state apparatus, the popular consensus among political elites within the Islamic Republic, no matter where they lie on the ideological spectrum, is that massive and rapid privatization of state-owned assets is needed as an economic panacea for the country's woes. (Ali Khamenei, Iran's leader and supreme jurist, decreed in 2006 that 80 percent of the public sector should be privatized, declaring the effort a "kind of jihad."5Since the pronouncement, Iran's government has claimed that this is precisely what is occurring. A glossy report for foreign investors, entitled The Business Year: Iran 2011, announced that Iran had "conducted one of the most effective and wide-ranging privatization efforts seen in the region in recent years." In 2010 alone, it stated, more than 300 state-owned enterprises (SOEs), including petrochemical plants, banks, fuel refineries, airlines, insurance...