What’s the Counter-Revolutionary Guard Strategy?

What’s the Counter-Revolutionary Guard Strategy?

By Michael Rubin
04.02.2015
Commentary Magazine


President Obama’s belief that a popular mandate motivates the Iranian regime’s desire to negotiate is naïve. After all, sovereignty in the Islamic Republic of Iran comes from God, not ordinary people. Still, among the true believers for the current outreach to Iran, Iranian politics is an important aspect of strategy. In private, Obama administration officials who push the current diplomacy track argue that this is a Deng Xiaoping moment, that is, by engaging with a supposed reformer like President Hassan Rouhani, the United States and the rest of the P5+1 can help him overcome his own internal adversaries and consolidate reformism within the Islamic Republic. Let’s put aside that this is a tremendous misreading of Rouhani, a regime loyalist whose career shows he is the supreme leader’s fixer and a man close to the intelligence ministry, an element clearly reflected in Rouhani’s cabinet picks. And let’s also put aside the fact that, on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the American Embassy, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned the United States not to play this game. “[Reformists] can’t roll out the red carpet for the United States in our country,” he declared.

The biggest gap in the logic of Obama’s nuclear talks and the broader strategy—if one exists—surrounding those talks has to do with the Revolutionary Guards. On one hand, if Obama really believes that the nuclear talks can bolster reformism inside the Islamic Republic, he must recognize that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is the regime’s Praetorian Guard, charged with defense of the revolutionary ideology against all enemies, foreign or domestic. This means that for muddle-through reform to occur, the IRGC must first be defeated or its power significantly diminished.

On the other hand, the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program are likely controlled by the IRGC and should the Iranian government choose to develop a nuclear weapon, it would be the IRGC which would likely have command and control over any resulting arsenal. Then, too, it behooves the United States to have a strategy to degrade and defeat the IRGC.

Herein lies a major problem: While the Obama administration focuses upon (and perhaps misanalyzes) what we know about Iran, it ignores what we don’t know. Obsessed as American diplomats are with the spectrum of hardliners and reformers across the Islamic Republic’s political spectrum, they ignore the fact that they have little to no insight into the factional divisions within the IRGC. Now, such factional divisions do exist. Some Iranians anecdotally join the IRGC for the privileges membership bestows, but may not be true believers. Others, however, may truly subscribe to the xenophobic, paranoid, and aggressive ideology which the IRGC preaches. Other divisions are possible upon pragmatic rather than ideological fault lines. During my first trip to Iran in 1996, for example, it quickly became apparent that there was a major problem within the Iranian military broadly and the IRGC specifically with regard to the regime’s care for wounded warriors from the Iran-Iraq War.

Regardless of one’s reading of Iranian politics, and regardless about whether Iran cheats on any deal, it is going to be necessary to devise a strategy to exacerbate divisions within the IRGC in order to weaken and, hopefully, defeat that organization. Alas, here the Obama administration has fallen asleep at the switch. The true tragedy is, of course, that without a more coherent strategy to undercut the IRGC, any diplomatic deal limited to Iran’s nuclear program will backfire.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/04/02/whats-the-counter-revolutionary-guard-strategy/

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