Editor's Note: FMSO’s Operational Environment Watch provides translated selections and analysis from a diverse range of foreign articles and other media that analysts and expert contributors believe will give military and security experts an added dimension to their ...

Upon the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led Friday prayers at Tehran University. His sermon would carry the weight of an American State of the Union address. With time, Khomeini and his successor Ali Khamenei designated a substitute prayer leader from amongst the regime hierarchy.

Background on the Islamic Republic's first supreme leader.

Despite these criticisms, the book can be a useful read. For those who agree that Obama should have done more to extend a hand of friendship to Tehran, it will be a satisfying exercise in self-affirmation.

Moammar Qaddafi's rule might be crumbling, but the colonel refuses to quit. On the evening of August 23, Qaddafi loyalists launched Scuds at the rebel-run town of Misrata. Western policymakers should not ignore them, for reasons that have less to do with Libya and far more with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Absent outside intervention, Iran in 2025 will be an increasingly ideological and militaristic nuclear power, and it is foolhardy to assume that any nation can accommodate the extraordinarily dangerous Islamic Republic as it will be in 15 years.

Hossein Khomeini has now joined the long list of regime critics suffering at the hands of the professional killers and torturers whose prime mission is to break the democratic opposition.

More than three decades after the Revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran Army and the IRGC remain entangled in a rivalry which the Army — should the hitherto trend continue — is bound to lose.