by Amir Taheri
Another organ of the revolution, the Supreme Judicial Council (Shuray e Ali Qaza’i) is the equivalent of a supreme court, and should normally be regarded as an organ of the state. In practice, however, it has acted as a revolutionary organ and has sought to promote the revolutionary tribunals as a parallel judicial system alongside civilian courts of law inherited from the ancien régime. Its president, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, an Iraqi-born Shiite militant, has repeatedly said that in any conflict between the law and the interests of the revolution, the latter should have priority. To underline its revolutionary credentials, the court has intervened in a wide range of matters, from cases of national security to those of corruption and embezzlement. Since Ahmadinejad’s election, the court has adopted a critical posture towards the government. Hashemi Shahroudi has specifically targeted Ahmadinejad’s economic policy on the grounds that it has led to a massive flight of capital from the country.
The Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution (Shuray e Aali Enqelaab Farhangi), another key organ of the revolution, was created by Khomeini in 1979 with the task of purging the Iranian universities of all Western influence. In the past three decades, the council has become a locus of organization for militant Khomeinist intellectuals and university personnel dedicated to the doctrine of the Supreme Guide. The council plays a major role in the internal debate of the revolutionary establishment both directly and through various student organizations that it uses as fronts. Before Ahmadinejad’s election, the council had faded into the background. Its chairman, Ayatollah Muhammad-Ali Taskhiri, appointed by Khamenehi, had focused his energies on promoting “convergence” among Islamic sects. In 2006, however, Ahmadinejad declared a “second Islamic cultural revolution” to purge the nation’s institutions of higher education of “Zionist and satanic influences.” Between 2006 and 2008, an estimated one thousand lecturers, professors, faculty deans, and other academics were expelled or forced into early retirement. A number of academics were arrested on their return to Iran from conferences abroad. In December 2006, student anger exploded with an unprecedented show of defiance when President Ahmadinejad visited Tehran’s Amir Kabir University. Pictures shot on cell phones showed angry students chanting against the president, calling him a fascist and murderer. They held portraits of Ahmadinejad upside down with cries of “Death to the dictator.” Using the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution, Ahmadinejad retaliated by having hundreds of students expelled on spurious grounds. At least forty student associations were dissolved and court cases were filed against some seven hundred student activists.
In a show of defiance, Ahmadinejad appointed Ayatollah Amid Zanjani as chancellor of Tehran University, the nation’s largest institution of higher education, with over 120,000 students. This was the first time that a turbaned head was put in charge of an institution that had been created by Reza Shah Pahlavi in the 1930s as the advance guard of secularism in Iran. Incensed by the coming of a mullah to their university, students demonstrated against Zanjani and simulated strangling him with his own turban. The ayatollah retaliated by retiring forty-five professors he claimed were “too old to teach,” although every one was younger than himself. The students and their allies in the faculty scored a victory when the council decided to replace Zanjani on the grounds that protecting him would disrupt normal life at the university.
The most important of the parallel organs created by the Khomeinists is the so-called Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a paramilitary outfit with its own ground, air, and naval forces. At the same time, the IRGC is the country’s biggest holding company, controlling hundreds of businesses, notably Iran’s rapidly growing armament industry. For a quarter of a century, the regime established by Khomeini has been labeled a “mullahrchy,” a theocracy dominated by the Shiite clergy. Today, however, it is safe to say that the dominant force within the ruling establishment in Tehran is the IRGC. This was perhaps one reason why the Bush administration decided to brand the IRGC a “terrorist organization” in 2007. The problem, however, is that the IRGC is not a monolith, and to label all of it as “terrorist” may make it difficult to cut deals with parts of it when an opportunity arises.
Any analysis of the IRGC must take into account a number of facts. First, the IRGC is not a revolutionary army in the sense that the ALN (national Liberation Army) was in Algeria or the Vietcong in Vietnam. Those two were born during the so-called revolutionary wars in which they became key players. The IRGC was created after the Khomeinist revolution had succeeded. This fact is of crucial importance. Those who joined the IRGC came from all sorts of backgrounds. The majority were opportunists who wished to board the gravy train. By joining the IRGC, an individual would not only obtain revolutionary credentials, often on fictitious grounds, but also secure a well-paid job at a time that economic collapse made jobs scarce. Joining the IRGC enabled many who had cooperated with the ancien régime to rewrite their CVs and obtain a new “revolutionary virginity,” so to speak. Membership also ensured access to rare goods and services, from color television sets to more decent housing. One popular Iranian satirist has a poem about a young man who joins the IRGC to get a color television set so that his parents can see in Technicolor the blood he sheds in the streets in defense of Khomeinism.
As the years went by, IRGC membership provided a fast track to social, political, and economic success. By 2005, more than half of Ahmadinejad’s cabinet ministers were members of the IRGC, as was the president himself. After the general election of March 2008, IRGC members held nearly a third of the seats in the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majlis), which made the IRGC the largest party in the ersatz parliament. Twenty of Iran’s thirty provinces had governors from the IRGC. Under Ahmadinejad, IRGC members also started capturing key posts in the diplomatic service. In 2008, for the first time, the Islamic Republic’s ambassadors in such important places as the United nations in new York and embassies in a dozen Western capitals were members of the IRGC.
More importantly, perhaps, the IRGC acts as a business conglomerate with interests in many sectors of the economy. By some accounts, the IRGC is Iran’s third corporation after the national Iranian Oil Company and the Imam Reza Foundation in Mash’had. In 2004, a Tehran University study estimated the annual turnover of IRGC businesses at $12 billion. The privatization package announced by Ahmadinejad in 2007 increased the IRGC’s economic clout. Almost all the public sector companies marked for privatization, at a total value of $18 billion, ended up in the hands of the IRGC or its individual commanders and their front men.
The IRGC also controls the lucrative business of “exporting the revolution,” estimated to be worth $1.2 billion a year. It finances branches of Hezballah in at least twenty countries, including some in Europe, and provides money, arms and training for radical groups with leftist backgrounds. In recent years, it has emerged as a major backer of the armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas and both Shiite and Sunni armed groups in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The Islamic Republic is believed to have invested some $20 billion in Lebanon since 1983. In most cases, the Lebanese branch of Hezballah is nominally in control. A closer examination, however, reveals that in most cases the Lebanese companies are fronts for Iranian concerns controlled by the IRGC. Hezballah’s business empire, the source of much of its power in Lebanon, is like a house of cards that could collapse with an adverse breeze from Tehran.
The crown jewel of the IRGC’s business empire is the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, which has cost the nation over $10 billion so far. It is quite possible that even senior officials, including the president of the Islamic Republic, were not always properly informed about the true ambitions of the clandestine nuclear project. In 2007, the project became the central issue in the confrontation between the Islamic Republic and the United nations. For years, a former oil minister and IRGC officer, Ghulam-Reza Aqazadeh, has led the nuclear project, reporting to the Supreme Guide. It is part of a broader scheme of arms purchases and manufacture, accounting for almost
11 percent of the annual national budget.
At the end of the war with Iraq in 1988, the leadership in Tehran engaged in a major debate about possible future threats and ways of countering them. The debate produced what was labeled the “national Defense Doctrine,” with the IRGC at its core. Under this doctrine, the Islamic Republic decided to base its defenses on three pillars: a massive land army, a large arsenal of missiles, and a nuclear surge capacity. The idea of a massive land army had originally come from Khomeini in the early stages of the war against Iraq. The ayatollah had seen how masses of Iranian teenagers had effectively committed suicide by using their bodies to stop Iraqi tanks. At the time, Iran’s demography—with annual growth rates of more than 3 percent, the highest in the world—could be regarded as a weapon. Khomeini also assumed that his regime’s strongest potential enemy, the United States, would not be able to sustain casualties on the scale that his Islamic Republic, using its ideology of martyrdom, was able to sell to the Iranian people.
Khomeini had dreamed of “an army of twenty million,” providing a virtually endless supply of cannon fodder. To build such an army, he created the Mobilization of the Dispossessed (Baseej Mustadafeen) to handle national conscription under IRGC supervision. Every male Iranian age sixteen or over must perform a six-month national service through the Baseej, which could place him with the IRGC or the regular armed forces or in one of the paramilitary organizations created in recent years. Demographically, the nation could supply the Baseej with half a million recruits each year. Soon, however, it became clear that the national budget could not support such a large number of recruits. Thus, the Baseej has been issuing exemptions to almost half of those who qualify for national service. At the same time, the restoration of the family planning program, scrapped by Khomeini as a “Zionist-American plot against Islam,” has halved the annual population growth rate. Today, the Baseej is a force of around 400,000 at any given time, providing the IRGC with its manpower needs.
While they had to scale down their dream army of twenty million, Tehran decision-makers exceeded their expectations with regard to turning the Islamic Republic into a “superpower in missiles.” The signal for this project was given as early as October 1985 by Rafsanjani: “What I wish to say openly is that Iran is determined to become a major missile power. It is possible that we won’t be able to rival the superpowers in this domain but we shall become the world’s second missile power after them.”1 A few months later, Rafsanjani made a similar boast in front of an Iranian audience: “We have made such innovations in radar defense systems and hawk missiles that if the Americans learned about our success they would have a fit of jealousy.”2 The decision to go for missiles was dictated by necessity. When the mullahs seized power, Iran’s air force was almost entirely U.S.-equipped. The severing of ties with the United States meant that the new regime in Tehran would no longer have access to American suppliers. Building a new air force from scratch, assuming that other manufacturers of military aviation were prepared to sell materiel to a revolutionary regime, was simply too costly for a nation facing economic meltdown and war. The cheap solution was to go for missiles, the “weapon of the poor.”
As early as 1984, the IRGC, using American and British models, started manufacturing crude missiles with limited range for battlefield use. At the time, the only country prepared to help the Islamic Republic was north Korea, which soon emerged as Iran’s principal partner in developing a missile program. Iranian money, north Korean technology, and Soviet and Chinese models produced the generation of missiles named Shahab (Meteor). By 2008, three generations had been designed, tested, manufactured, and deployed, with technical and scientific input from India, Pakistan, China, Russia, and Brazil, in addition to north Korea. Initially, the IRGC’s objective had been to possess short-range missiles to use in theater. This objective was achieved in 1988, when the war with Iraq was about to end. The IRGC’s next objective was to produce longer-range missiles capable of hitting most targets in the Middle East. By 1998, this objective had also been achieved. In 2008, the consensus among military experts was that the Islamic Republic was manufacturing a new generation of missiles, designated as Shahab-III and Shahab-IV, with ranges of 1,500 to 2,500 kilometers, and thus capable of reaching all targets in the Middle East and, if fired from Iranian bases in Syria or Lebanon, several members of the European Union as well. Tehran tested another of its short-range missiles, known as Zalzal (Earthquake), with deadly effect through the Lebanese branch of Hezballah against Israel in the summer of 2006.
Missiles and rockets play a central role in the IRGC doctrine of hojum ezdehami, which, translated literally, means “attacking by crowding.” The idea is to attack an enemy position or asset, such as an aircraft carrier, with a large number of men armed with small but deadly weapons. An American aircraft carrier, for example, could be attacked suddenly by scores of small IRGC speedboats on a suicide mission, firing an endless barrage of missiles and rockets—like Gulliver at the hands of the Lilliputians. American land positions, say in Iraq, could be overrun by wave after wave of suicide attackers firing rocket-propelled grenades and an assortment of short-range missiles. In 2007, Ahmadinejad announced that the Islamic Republic had developed “the fastest underwater missile in the world,” an apparent threat to U.S. warships in the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
But it was the second pillar of the defense doctrine that was meant to provide the Islamic Republic with ultimate insurance against the United States, the only power capable of posing a military threat to the Khomeinist regime. In its time, the USSR had secured a similar insurance against being attacked in its homeland by becoming a nuclear power in the 1950s. With that insurance in its pocket, as it were, the Soviet Union had embarked on a global “anti-imperialist” campaign that included fomenting revolts, fighting proxy wars, and projecting political power throughout the world. The Islamic Republic wants to be in the same position—immune to attack in its home base, and thus free to challenge the Great Satan all over the world. Thus, there could be little doubt that the ultimate aim of the Khomeinist nuclear program is the creation of an arsenal of weapons.
With a two-year interlude in 2003-2005, the Islamic Republic has been enriching uranium as a high priority, although it has no nuclear power station where this could be used as fuel. The only nuclear power station under construction in Iran, in the Bushehr peninsula on the Persian Gulf, was designed by Germans in the 1970s and is being built by a Russian company that constructed Chernobyl. The Bushehr plant is designed to use a specially graded and codified fuel that is produced only in Russia; it cannot use the uranium enriched by Iran. Russia has contracted to supply the fuel needed in Bushehr for ten years and has announced its readiness to provide the needed fuel for the entire lifespan of the plant, which is estimated at thirty-seven years. Thus, Tehran’s insistence on maintaining its uranium enrichment program at the cost of Un sanctions and other diplomatic and economic pressures appears suspicious, to say the least. There is one more reason to suspect that the Islamic Republic is trying to become a nuclear power. It is building a heavy water plant at Arak, west of Tehran, supposedly producing fuel for a nuclear power station using plutonium. However, the Islamic Republic has no such plant, nor has it even planned to build one. What is produced in Arak, therefore, could only have a military use.
In any case, Iran, owning the world’s second largest oil and natural gas reserves—enough to supply its needs and provide it with export margins for at least four more centuries—has no need of costly and potentially hazardous nuclear energy. Furthermore, a study by a group of Tehran University scientists in 1999 warned the government that building nuclear power plants in Iran, one of the world’s most active earthquake zones, was “irresponsible.” The Bushehr nuclear plant is designed to resist earthquakes of up to magnitude 7.3 on the Richter scale. The area where the plant is being built has already experienced earthquakes of magnitude 7 on at least three occasions since the 1920s.
If the plant is destroy
ed in an earthquake, the environmental effects could be catastrophic not only for Iran itself but also for its neighbors in the Persian Gulf. The whole population of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, along with more than 20 percent of the populations of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, live within 180 kilometers of the dangerous peninsula. The Islamic Republic’s dogged determination to pursue its illicit nuclear program in the face of such dangers could be understood only if it had a purely military purpose.
nevertheless, it is possible that the program as it stands today is aimed only at securing what is known in technical jargon as “surge capacity”—the scientific, technical, and industrial instruments necessary for building the bomb without necessarily doing so immediately. Several countries, notably Germany and Japan, have that “surge capacity” without wishing to build nuclear warheads.
One other factor may explain Tehran’s readiness to risk war on this issue. It is possible that the IRGC is determined to secure this third pillar of the defense doctrine around which it has built all its plans for rolling back American power and establishing the Islamic Republic as the “regional superpower” in the Middle East. President Khatami’s decision to suspend the nuclear program in 2003 as a sign of goodwill towards the European Union provoked a bitter reaction from the IRGC, some of whose commanders implicitly threatened to kill “those responsible for this shame.” Let us also recall that it was Khatami, and not Ahmadinejad as it is commonly assumed, who resumed the program in 2005, ostensibly to pacify the angered IRGC leadership. The nuclear issue showed that the IRGC, although it may be more of a franchise chain than a corporation controlled by a board of directors, is united when it comes to the fundamental issues of military strategy.