“A lot of it is about ideology, but a lot of it is about money, too,” Mr. Nader said.

The election in June set off a wave of protests and national discontent, with many charging that the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stole the election from his main reform opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi. That conflict and the ensuing state crackdown accelerated a reordering of Iran’s political landscape that began with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s election four years ago. The old guard revolutionaries, like former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the reformers and the clergy have been largely shoved aside. The mainline conservatives have been divided.

But the Guards and its allies, including the president, have been emboldened and remain firmly in control. There have been some student protests since universities reopened, and small street scuffles, but nothing like the huge protests that rocked the nation right after the election.

“In a strategic sense, I don’t think Iran is in a fundamentally different place than it was before elections, not in the way it approaches negotiations or the way it looks at its foreign policy,” said Flynt Leverett, director of the Iran project at the New America Foundation and a professor of international affairs at Pennsylvania State University.

Since the protests, senior Guards officials and former officials have been moved into many important government positions. There is now talk that the Guards’ leadership is considering transforming the Basij militia, a volunteer force under its command, into a professional, full-time force. Another tool for extending the Guards’ reach at home has been privatization, initially intended as a means to improve the economy but criticized more recently as a shell game.

The takeover of Iran’s telecommunications system followed a familiar pattern. A private firm, initially approved by Iran’s Privatization Organization, was excluded as an eligible bidder because of a “security condition” one day before shares were put on sale. Mobin Trust Consortium, affiliated with the Guards, then won the bidding.

Image A satellite image shows what may be a recently revealed nuclear enrichment plant, built on a Guards base near Qum. Credit... GeoEye Satellite Image/IHS Jane’s Analysis, via Associated Press

Until this case, the most striking instance of the Guards’ muscling into a business involved management of the Imam Khomeini Airport. In May 2004 the Guards shut down the airport and evicted the Turkish company that had the contract to run it. The Guards then put its own firm in place. The Guards also appears to have defied an edict by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to privatize its many holdings, which run from laser eye clinics and car dealerships to control of oil and gas fields, according to the RAND report.