My favorite writer, Graeme Wood, has filed a short dispatch from Iran that offers valuable perspective on the recent unrest.

I would very much like to know how to tell whether the weekend’s protests indeed herald a Ceausescu moment for the clerical regime, or whether the government is as sturdy as it so recently seemed. One measurement, I suppose, might be the atmosphere, such as it is measureable, outside Tehran. I spent most of my trip in Tehran, Qom, and Mashhad. The last two are exceptionally conservative towns, and surely colored my impression of the regime’s durability. But even when I was in Isfahan — a relatively mercantile and liberal city — the feeling was not one of inexorable movement toward revolution. Rather, the young people I met whined of the corruption of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Islamic revolutionary who became a rival to Ahmadinejad. Their specific complaint: that Rafsanjani had sucked the province’s rivers dry to water his pistachio orchards. They alleged that he had made a billion dollars off pistachios, and that the city of Isfahan (known for picturesque bridges over a the Zayandeh river) suffered as a result.

Even if the Iranian unrest promises some broader shift, Iran’s deeper problem is a paranoid political culture that emphasizes conspiracies over structural problems. Given that Iran is ruled by a series of overlapping conspiracies, this paranoia is excusable. Yet obsession with the corruption of an individual like Rafsanjani is a distraction from the deeper corruption of a highly illiberal, statist regime that systematically favors clerical favorites and the military over Iran’s impoverished majority.