by Amir Taheri
The IRGC is divided into five commands, each of which has a direct line to the Supreme Guide Khamenehi, who was himself one of the earliest members of the force in 1980. As deputy defense secretary and then president of the republic, Khamenehi played a key role in building up the IRGC and using it as a political base for himself. Later, he projected the IRGC as a force with a global mission: “Today, the IRGC has a determining effect on all international political balances and calculations,” Khamenehi told an audience of IRGC officers in 1984. “If one day this corps ceases to exist in our society, the authority of our Islamic revolution shall collapse, and the calculations of global politics will be upset.”3
To minimize the risk of coup d’état, IRGC’s senior officers are not allowed to engage in “sustained communication” with one another on “sensitive subjects.” Of the five commands in question, two could be regarded as “terrorist” according to the U.S. State Department’s definition—which, needless to say, is rejected by the Islamic Republic. One, which includes the so-called Jerusalem (Quds) Corps, is in charge of exporting the revolution. Apart from Hezballah and Hamas, it runs a number of radical groups across the globe. It is currently devoting most of its energies to Iraq in preparation for an American withdrawal. The idea is to put the Islamic Republic and its clients in Iraq in a position to claim credit for having “expelled the American infidels.” The second command that could be targeted deals with internal repression. It operates through several auxiliary forces, including the notorious Karbala brigades charged with crushing popular revolts in Tehran and other urban centers. Many Iranians see these as instruments of terror.
The IRGC’s officer corps, including those in retirement, numbers around 55,000 and is as divided on domestic and foreign policy as the rest of the society. A few former IRGC commanders who did not share the Islamic Republic’s goals have already defected to the United States. Hundreds of others have gone into quiet exile, mostly as businessmen in the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, and Turkey. An unknown number were purged because they refused to kill anti-regime demonstrators in Iranian cities. Many prominent IRGC commanders may be regarded as businessmen first and military leaders second. Usually they have a brother or a cousin in Europe or Canada to look after their business interests and keep a channel open to small and big Satans in case the regime falls. A few IRGC commanders, including some at the top, do not seek a major military conflict with the United States that could wreck their business empires without offering victory on the battlefield.
There is no guarantee that, in case of a major war, all parts of the IRGC would show the same degree of commitment to the Islamic Republic. IRGC commanders may be prepared to kill unarmed Iranians or hire Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi radicals to kill others. But it is not certain they would be prepared to die for Ahmadinejad’s ambitions. In 2007, these concerns prompted Khamenehi to announce a Defense Planning Commission controlled by his office.
A blanket labeling of the IRGC, as opposed to targeting elements of it that do mischief against the Iranian people and others in the region and beyond, could prove counterproductive. It could unite a deeply fractious force by leaving it no door through which some of its members could walk out of the dangerous situation they have helped create. This is all the more so now that the IRGC, with ambitions similar to those of most armies in the “developing world,” is trying to recreate itself as a political party. Its domestic critics already call it “the party of the barracks.” Having captured the presidency, the IRGC, faction-ridden though it is, will continue seeking an even greater share of power at all levels.
Islamic history is full of instances of the caliph’s praetorian guards getting wise to the possibility of jettisoning their master and ruling for themselves. One day, Khamenehi may realize that his alliance with the IRGC against his rivals might not have been such a brilliant idea.
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Six Rival Centers of Power
The six centers of revolutionary power are paralleled with six other centers of state power in a system that continues to vacillate between them. Despite their new appellations, all the six centers of state power are holdovers from the ancien régime, often continuing the same bureaucratic culture tinged with a bit of nationalism but always moderated by a certain realism. While hardcore revolutionaries still regard these institutions with deep suspicion, those who run them feel that the revolution has run its course and must now take the backseat as far as strategic decisions are concerned.
The principal institution among the six rival centers of power is the presidency of the republic. The use of the term “president” has been the source of much confusion in recent years. In reality, the president has the same powers and responsibilities that prime ministers had in the former regime. Despite his title, he is not the head of state. The use of the term “president” to designate an official who heads a council of ministers is not peculiar to the Islamic Republic. It was also used in the Fourth Republic in France to designate the prime minister, and likewise in Spain today. In the Khomeinist system, the president nominates the members of the cabinet but cannot appoint them without the approval of the Supreme Guide and the Islamic Consultative Assembly. Although directly elected through universal adult suffrage, the president is not confirmed in his position unless he receives a written “letter of appointment” from the Supreme Guide. He could not stand for more than two consecutive four-year terms as president. Candidates must be of Iranian parentage and of the Shiite faith. The president also needs the approval of the Supreme Guide and the parliament to apply his policies.
All this does not mean that the president of the Islamic Republic is nothing but a puppet in the hands of the Supreme Guide, or irrelevant, as Senator John Kerry has claimed. To start with, the president has a say on every single major decision that commits the resources of the Iranian state. He controls the national budget, including the secret budget allocated to the office of the Supreme Guide. He is also head of a bureaucracy that, directly or indirectly, employs almost two million people. Through the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, he also controls a vast network of police, gendarmerie, and secret services, whose members look to him for budgets, policies, and promotions. Because of the dominating role the public sector plays in the Iranian economy, the president also enjoys endless opportunities for distributing favors to secure political support. More importantly, perhaps, the president—unlike the Supreme Guide, who is appointed by a college of mullahs—enjoys the unique advantage of drawing his legitimacy from direct universal suffrage. A strong president could easily assert greater authority as someone who represents both the will of the people and the interests of the state. It would be hard for any Supreme Guide, let alone one as weak as Khamenehi, to veto a package of popular reforms presented by a strong president. The presidency is a bully pulpit that, if used effectively, could mobilize public support for policies that the revolutionary organs might regard as not radical enough or even as counterrevolutionary.
As the principal spokesman for the machinery of state, the president has often come into conflict with revolutionary organs. Regardless of who is president, this office is also influenced by the inherent moderation of the bureaucracy that, over centuries, has learned to pursue its goals through consensus rather than conflict. In that sense, all but one of the five presidents of the Islamic Republic before Ahmadinejad proved to be relative “moderates” in their different ways because they came to represent the interests not of the revolution but of the state.
The first five presidents of the Islamic Republic adopted different strategies vis-à-vis a revolution to which they owed their position in the first place. The first of them, Banisadr, tried to govern against the revolution, believing that Iran needed to close the revolutionary chapter and start building a new nation-state. Caught in a bitter power struggle with the mullahs and facing the Iraqi invasion, he did not last long enough to test his theories in practice. His successor, Rajai, had just a few weeks a
s president before being assassinated by counterrevolutionaries. In that brief spell, he showed that he saw the presidency as another “revolutionary bunker.” Had he survived, he would have governed for the revolution. The third president, Khamenehi, the first of three mullahs who successively occupied the position, did not try to govern at all. During his eight-year reign, Khomeini took all the key decisions as Supreme Guide, while the day-to-day matters were handled by the prime minister, a post that still existed, and the speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. Khamenehi’s style as president did not reflect his lack of interest in politics or absence of political ambitions. It was based on the belief that in a system already bedeviled by factional feuds, open conflict between state and revolution could prove suicidal for both.
The fourth president, Rafsanjani, a businessman-cum-mullah, was intelligent enough to recognize the need to restore and, when possible, strengthen the machinery of state that had been damaged by the revolution. In his eight-year tenure, he tried to govern alongside the revolution. This allowed the Iranian state to regain part of its self-confidence and rebuild some of its institutions alongside similar revolutionary organs. For example, Rafsanjani did not abolish the Islamic tribunals and the revolutionary courts, but he did enable the civil courts of the ancien régime to resume work alongside them. This created an à la carte system of justice in which people could take their litigations either to revolutionary tribunals applying the Shariah, or to civil courts operating with laws derived from the napoleonic Code. Rafsanjani did not stop the various revolutionary organs from generating vast wealth for the mullahs and their associates. In fact, he and his family benefited immensely from the system. But he did allow the public sector of the Iranian economy to make a comeback, restoring part of the economic role that the state had lost to the revolution. Ultimately, however, he failed because he was unprepared, or unable, to close the chapter of revolution and let the nation rebuild its state.
Rafsanjani’s successor, Khatami, another mullah, decided to govern away from the revolution by pretending that it did not exist, while doing nothing that might provoke its assertion of existence. During his presidency, Khatami spent a good part of his time traveling abroad, visiting more than forty countries and attending a string of conferences in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. At home, he talked of reform, without ever introducing a single reform project. Abroad, he tried to put a smiling face on a regime whose highest officials had been indicted for terrorism by criminal courts in Europe and Latin America. When it came to choosing between the state and the revolution, however, he sided with the latter, especially in its brutal repression of dissent.
The election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005 heralded an entirely new experiment with a position caught between state and revolution. His predecessors had tried to govern against, for, alongside, or away from the revolution. Ahmadinejad, whose campaign slogan was “We Can,” has tried to fuse the two and govern for the revolution. We shall discuss his original approach in more detail later on.
It is through the Council of Ministers or the cabinet that the president, as head of the executive, exercises power. The council consists of up to twenty-five portfolios dealing with the different tasks of government under the direct supervision of the president. Because the state directly or indirectly controls almost 70 percent of the gross domestic product, the government, headed by the Council of Ministers, wields immense practical powers that are often neglected by observers bedazzled by the light and fire of the revolutionary organs. It is through the Council of Ministers that the powerful octopus of Persian bureaucracy exerts much of its influence in the decision-making process, at times quietly overruling even the Supreme Guide himself. The council also controls the Central Bank and thus the fixing of interest rates and the volume of money in circulation, thus playing a key role in shaping the regime’s overall economic policies.
Legally, the Council of Ministers is answerable to the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majlis Shuray e Islami). This is a 290-seat unicameral parliament directly elected by universal adult suffrage once every four years. The Majlis has often been identified as a hotbed of radicalism. In reality, however, only the second Majlis, where leftist Islamists held a majority, sided more with the camp of the revolution than with that of the state. The Majlis is dominated by a conservative majority that is less revolutionary, in Western terms, than Ahmadinejad. In 1997, the speaker of the Majlis, Ayatollah Ali-Akbar nateq-nuri, stood as a presidential candidate and was defeated by Khatami. The outside world saw nateq-nuri as a radical “revolutionary” and Khatami as a reformist “moderate.” Khatami won because he was the unknown “outsider,” not because nateq-nuri was a radical revolutionary. In terms of both economic and foreign policies, in fact, nateq-nuri was more conservative than Khatami, who models himself on Western leftist figures.
The Majlis is the legislative power that must approve all government bills before they become law with the approval of the Council of Constitutional Guardians and the assent of the Supreme Guide. It also has the right to propose legislation, and often does, much to the chagrin of the ministers. The Majlis can remove ministers it regards as incompetent or worse. Because its members are in direct contact with their constituencies, the Majlis, regardless of the peculiar circumstances under which it is elected, often acts as a barometer of public opinion. The general election of 2008, spread over March and April, produced a two-thirds majority for radical candidates from the IRGC, giving rise to fears that the Majlis may abandon its traditional role as a defender of Iran as a state and join the institutions of the revolution. nevertheless, the Majlis is unlikely to do this. The new IRGC majority is divided into three factions, at least two of which appear to want the revolutionary phrase of Iran’s history to be closed as soon as possible, albeit with the IRGC in power. In May 2008, only one faction loyal to Ahmadinejad, and accounting for about 40 percent of the seats, appeared determined to redefine the role of the Majlis in the context of the president’s plans for “global and permanent revolution.”
Just as almost every revolutionary organ has a state double, the IRGC is doubled by the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran (niruhay e Mossllah e Jumhuri Islami Iran). These consist of the regular army, the gendarmerie, the urban police, the border police, the forest guard, the industrial guard, and the oil industry protection guard. The organ as a whole accounts for 600,000 men, including civilian ancillary personnel. The armed forces are under the command of the Supreme Guide. nevertheless, their esprit de corps, traditions, and objective interests keep them closer to the state rather than the revolution. Themes of Iranian nationalism, such as the purification of the Persian language, are emphasized by the armed forces in opposition to the revolution’s efforts to bring Iran closer to the Arab and Islamic worlds. The backbone of the armed forces consists of men from middle-class backgrounds with relatively high levels of education and technical expertise compared with the IRGC. Many traditions established during the years of Iran’s close association with the West, especially the United States, have survived in the armed forces, notably some knowledge of the English language in contrast with the IRGC, where Arabic and Russian are favored.
For the past three decades, the regular army has played the “grand dumb one,” as the French say, careful not to become involved in anything remotely political. There were two reasons for this. First, the army knew that in 1979 and 1980 it came close to total destruction by Khomeini. In fact, had it not been for the Iraqi invasion, the ayatollah who had executed thousands of officers and NCOs, often without trial, would not have allowed the army to remain in existence in any form. Even after the Iraqi invasion, many revolutionary mullahs continued to campaign for the destruction of what they saw as “the Shah’s army.” Thus, any dabbling in politics by the army would have given its enemies the excuse they needed for a new wave of purges and massacres. The second reason for the army’s quietist posture was a well-established tradition under which the Iranian military did not int
ervene in politics. In 1978-79, that tradition had prevented them from staging a coup, dismissing the shah and crushing the revolt led by the mullahs. Since then some Iranians have continued to look to the army, as a national institution and not an instrument of revolutionary repression, to emerge as the leader of Iran’s renaissance as a nation-state. But if Iran is to have a Bonaparte, he is more likely to come from the IRGC than from an apolitical army.
As a rentier state, the Islamic Republic depends heavily on oil revenue. At the center of the industry that produces those revenues stands the national Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) (Sherkat e Melli naft e Iran), created by Mossadeq in 1951 after he wrested control of Iran’s principal wealth from the British. Although under the nominal control of the minister for petroleum, with a seat in the cabinet, the NIOC and its offshoots—which number at least a hundred companies, notably in the petrochemical industry—must be regarded as a powerful autonomous organ of the state. In 2008, the oil industry accounted for some 40 percent of the Iranian GDP and provided 65 percent of the government’s income and some 90 percent of the nation’s export earnings. The NIOC’s voice is thus a powerful one within the decision-making process. That influence is augmented by the fact that the NIOC spends billions of dollars inside and outside the country each year, purchasing services and equipment. The NIOC and its affiliates have lobbied for a moderate foreign policy for years. Their key argument is that, as a result of decades of underinvestment, Iran’s energy industry is heading for a crisis. In 2008, Iran’s maximum oil-producing capacity was estimated at 3.8 million barrels a day, compared with almost 8 million in 1978. Many oilfields, old and tired, were in need of rejuvenation through gas injection and a process known as secondary recovery. Iran itself, however, lacks the technology and the massive investments needed. Most of NIOC’s oil and gas exploration projects have remained on hold, with no prospect of finding the estimated $150 billion they would need in investments over the next two decades.