Has there been a military takeover in Iran?

Ex-CIA middle east field agent Bob Baer and Newsweek editor, Fareed Zakaria, (who is something of an expert on the subject of Iran) seem to believe it's likely.

Both agree that the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps seem to be in charge of everything that's happening in Iran at the moment. The tell was the speed at which the Basij (a volunteer military/police auxiliary force) was employed to quell dissidents. The Basij is directly controlled by the IRGC and in past years the IRGC has been spending a great deal of money and energy arming this particular group.

Baer also pointed out last week that it is entirely possible that Ahmadinejad actually won the election and that Ahmadinejad is actually leading a hard-line take over, ousting the mullahs.

Before we settle on the narrative that there has been a hard-line takeover in Iran, an illegitimate coup d'état, we need to seriously consider the possibility that there has been a popular hard-line takeover, an electoral mandate for Ahmadinejad and his policies. One of the only reliable, Western polls conducted in the run-up to the vote gave the election to Ahmadinejad — by higher percentages than the 63% he actually received. The poll even predicted that Mousavi would lose in his hometown of Tabriz, a result that many skeptics have viewed as clear evidence of fraud. The poll was taken all across Iran, not just the well-heeled parts of Tehran. Still, the poll should be read with a caveat as well, since some 50% of the respondents were either undecided or wouldn't answer.

In that same article Baer, who knows Iran well, points out that there is something missing from the so-called popular uprising in Tehran.

Most of the demonstrations and rioting I've seen in the news are taking place in north Tehran, around Tehran University and in public places like Azadi Square. These are, for the most part, areas where the educated and well-off live — Iran's liberal middle class. These are also the same neighborhoods that little doubt voted for Mir-Hossein Mousavi, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rival, who now claims that the election was stolen. But I have yet to see any pictures from south Tehran, where the poor live. Or from other Iranian slums.

Even the great Twitter revolution is centered on a specific group of Iranians with both access to and comfort with the internet.

For too many years now, the Western media have looked at Iran through the narrow prism of Iran's liberal middle class — an intelligentsia that is addicted to the Internet and American music and is more ready to talk to the Western press, including people with money to buy tickets to Paris or Los Angeles.

Add to all this that the west has next to no reliable window into Iran. Diplomatic missions are sparse and the Basij has been rounding up western reporters and Iranian workers at the British embassy.

The government's arrest of nine Iranian employees of the British Embassy was a significant escalation in its conflict with Britain, which Tehran has sought to cast as an instigator of the unrest since the disputed June 12 election. Tehran also continued to charge journalists with working as agents of discord, publishing one editor's "confession" while continuing to detain others without charge, or barring them from working.

The whole idea, if Ahmadinejad has suborned the IRGC in a take over, would be to continue to accuse Britain and the U.S. with interference, and continue to arrest western journalists and embassy staff in the hopes of provoking a response. It would suggest that Ahmadinejad did win and now commands enough popular support to suppress the power of the clerics and take control of the country. He can point at any rhetoric or threats from either the U.S. or Britain (or both) and declare an even greater emergency on the basis that his accusations are correct.

That will likely translate into even greater suppression of anything which looks like opposition or an uprising. The government will transform into a military dictatorship (as opposed to a religious one) led by former IRGC member Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the support of the IRGC.

The thing is, we're not likely to know what is really happening for some time to come but the chances of the uprising in Iran resulting in something good are very slim indeed.