Inside Iran's Fractured Regime

For weeks, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has insisted that there are no fissures in the Iranian regime. Any allegations of such tensions are simply part of a U.S. propaganda war against Tehran, he declared. But then last Monday, at what was billed as a "unity lunch," Khamenei asked 28 of the country's most powerful leaders -- mostly mullahs -- to put aside their differences and coalesce around a single cause: preserving the system.

• » Michael A. McFaul
• » Abbas Milani

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