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.

Something is clearly rotten in the state of Iran, and effective U.S. policy can be based only on a clear understanding of the competing factions, intense rivalries and shifting balance of power in the regime. Today, there are four main factions struggling for control in the Islamic republic:

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