The clerical establishment and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corp (IRGC) have been two powerful but non-democratic political actors in post-revolutionary Iranian politics. Their relationship over the last three decades has been both fluid and multi-faceted. During the first decade of the revolution, the IRGC was a "political factor" but not a major "political player" independent of the clerical establishment. This was to a large extent due to two main factors: Ayatollah Khomeini's formal stricture forbidding the military personnel from becoming involved in partisan politics and the preoccupation of the military with the Iran-Iraq War. With the end of the war, the IRGC commanders -- who see the Guards as a Praetorian force and themselves as the self-appointed guardians of the revolution -- began to flex their muscle in the economic as well as the political domain. Today it is impossible to present a panoptic view of the Iranian state or evaluate the degree of its stability without considering the role of the IRGC. This fact became obvious in the aftermath of the June 2009 election turmoil which demonstrated that the IRGC has inveigled itself into the elite structure in such a way that it cannot be eliminated. Neither the Supreme Leader nor the president is able to ignore their demands, overlook their power, repudiate their actions or refuse to curry favor with them in Iran's increasingly muscular politics. Furthermore, while the IRGC commanders still constitute a minority of Iran's political elites, their increasing power base and game of musical chairs is causing more consternation among the clerical elite. This paper will examine the following two hypothesis: (a) The clerics' declining electoral success in particular and the overall process of declericalization has paved the way for individuals with IRGC credentials to enter the political scene en mass thereby leading to the militarization of the Iranian political landscape; (b) As it is becoming an increasingly more powerful player in Iranian politics and economy, the IRGC is beginning to act less like an ideological army and more like a rational actor trying to safeguard its institutional interests. By drawing heavily on the literature of "civil-military relations," the paper will also try to address the following questions: (a) Are the Iranian military leaders following in the footsteps of their counterparts in Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey by opting for the policy of ruling but not governing (b) What are the prospects of "praetorianism," in Irane