I'd like to hear your thoughts on this pendarenik.. I think Badran is right to point out the division between the people, the army, and the "resistance," but he exaggerates the transformative potency of Iran's ideology.

1) The resistance forces supported by Iran abroad contend with counterbalancing forces within national and secular political frameworks. In Yemen, Syria, Iraq, none of these resistance forces can actually revolutionize the political landscape because Iran's revolutionary model does not fit those countries' social and demographic contours. In the best case scenario, Iran can replicate the success of Lebanese Hizballah in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen and gain a significant power base in all. But even in Lebanon, Hizballah is very much shaped and constrained by ideas of national legitimacy and pressured to put Lebanon's interests ahead of Iran's when the two contradict each other. Iran has succeeded in controlling these forces abroad because it can persuade them that its regional agenda accommodates their individual national goals of having power.

2) Iran's sway over the resistance forces, or simply its ability to tell them what to do, is predicated on a logic against a US-Israel-Saudi axis which implicitly supports authoritarian Sunni regimes oppressive of Arab Shia populations. Iran's power is based on a real regional imbalance of power that gives Iran room to support the underdogs and undermine its adversaries. The really interesting question to me is to what extent do the national leaders of Iran's resistance forces follow the command and word of Iran's supreme leader? Is it a direct chain of command, or do they simply respect his strategy and accept the state's largesse of aid? I've read some literature by Chatham house suggesting that Yemen Houthi political elite are enamored of Iran's revolutionary Islamic government, they have, as the media is quick to point out, studied at Iranian hawzas. Nasrallah and most of the paramilitary heads in Iraq also seem to follow of taqlid of the supreme leader. But this ideological affinity doesn't seem to trickle down into their popular base.