伊朗伊斯兰共和国建立的初衷是由神职人员治理。现在人们广泛承认，它正由其他势力掌管。但关于由谁掌管以及这种转变如何发生的故事，却被广泛误解了。
许多人认为，与美国和以色列的战争已将伊朗政府推入其强硬派安全机构手中。这是一个引人入胜的故事，但却完全不完整。伊朗政治的军事化并非始于当前的战争，也不是始于过去十年的危机。
我们今天目睹的不是一个世俗化安全国家的出现，而是其顶峰。要理解伊朗是如何走到这一步的，从一位新崛起的伊朗领导人穆罕默德·巴盖尔·佐尔卡德尔（Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr）的生涯入手，比从意识形态或地缘政治入手更有用。
任命佐尔卡德尔接替在3月中旬战争中丧生的高级安全顾问阿里·拉里贾尼（Ali Larijani），不仅仅是另一次官僚机构的人事改组。它标志着一种长期在幕后塑造伊斯兰共和国、而现在才更清晰地步入视野的人物悄然登台。
佐尔卡德尔并非任何传统意义上的政治家。他从未依赖过选举、公众吸引力，甚至从未维持过知名度。他的职业生涯几乎完全在可以被称为政权“硬架构”的内部展开：即伊斯兰革命卫队（IRGC）、情报系统以及将它们与国家联系在一起的密集网络。
他属于在国家完全成型之前就已造就的一代。他早期的政治家园是“曼苏伦”（Mansourun），这是一个秘密革命网络，其成员后来充斥在革命卫队的高层。在这个圈子里，意识形态、安全和组织并非独立的领域，它们三位一体。
两伊战争加固了那种构成。佐尔卡德尔在革命卫队一个名为“拉马丹总部”（Ramadan Headquarters）的单位中所扮演的角色，使他处于战争、情报和代理人行动的交[汇点]
The Islamic Republic of Iran was built to be governed by clerics. It is now widely acknowledged as being run by something else. But the story of by whom, and how that shift occurred, has been widely misunderstood.
Many have suggested that the war with the United States and Israel has pushed the Iranian government into the hands of its hard-line security establishment. It is a compelling story, but radically incomplete. The militarization of Iranian politics did not begin with the current war, nor with the crises of the past decade.
What we are witnessing today is not the emergence of a secularized security state, but its culmination. And to understand how Iran arrived here, it is useful to begin not with ideology or geopolitics, but with the career of a newly ascendent Iranian leader, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr.
The appointment of Zolghadr to replace Ali Larijani, the senior security advisor who was killed in the war in mid-March, is not just another bureaucratic reshuffle. It marks the quiet arrival of a type of figure who has long shaped the Islamic Republic from behind the scenes and who is only now more clearly stepping into view.
Zolghadr is not a politician in any conventional sense. He has never relied on elections, public appeal, or even sustained visibility. His career unfolded almost entirely within what might be called the regime’s “hard architecture”: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the intelligence system, and the dense networks that link them to the state.
He belongs to a generation formed before the state fully took shape. His early political home was Mansourun, a clandestine revolutionary network whose members would later populate the upper ranks of the IRGC. In this milieu, ideology, security, and organization were not separate spheres—they were one and the same.
The Iran-Iraq War hardened that formation. Zolghadr’s role in an IRGC unit called the Ramadan Headquarters placed him at the intersection of warfare, intelligence, and proxy operations. This was not simply battlefield experience. It was also training in a particular way of exercising power: indirect, networked, and embedded across borders and institutions.
After the war, he did not transition into politics. Instead, politics gradually came to resemble the world that he already inhabited. Over more than a decade at the top of the IRGC, including as deputy commander, Zolghadr accumulated influence not through public authority but through institutional depth. He became, in effect, a man of the system’s internal wiring.
Zolghadr’s trajectory only makes sense in the context of a broader shift, one that began in the late 1990s. The presidency of Mohammad Khatami briefly opened the political field. Reformists spoke of civil society, the rule of law, and political pluralism. For a moment, the Islamic Republic seemed capable of evolving.
That moment triggered a reaction. During the student protests of 1999, senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is
