Reza Kahlili (an alias) recently wrote the book, A Time To Betray, a portrayal of his double life as a Revolutionary Guard member and CIA Agent. Go to original article.

Following the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini controlled the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) by assigning personal representatives and commissars to IRGC units and offices. Initially, the system was dysfunctional because of multiple commissars and parallel control structures with overlapping responsibilities, but at the beginning of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s rule, the commissars consolidated their positions and exerted enough power to help stymie political reforms. Today, the system is again weak, and, increasingly, the commissars act more as spokesmen for the guards than as agents overseeing the IRGC and ensuring that the supreme leader holds power over the IRGC. This change undermines Khamenei’s authority over the IRGC and has allowed the IRGC greater autonomy to the detriment of outsiders who would engage the regime.

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Key points in this Outlook:

• The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is slowly taking over Iran.
• While commissars should represent the supreme leader to the IRGC, today it seems they are speaking for the IRGC instead of overseeing the guards and ensuring the supreme leader’s power.
• This has given the IRGC more autonomy within the country, a change that may hinder outsiders’ efforts to engage the regime. Go to AEI.

Associated Press

As U.S. President Barack Obama intensifies his efforts to garner international support for fresh U.N. sanctions against Iran, Tehran is quietly putting its own measures in place for renewed confrontation with the West. Watching how a conventionally armed Iran manages to destabilize the entire region only serves to underline how dangerous a nuclear-armed Iran would be.

For all of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s public bluster, the Iranian regime likely feels threatened by the prospect of further sanctions—so much so that it has now embarked on a well-organized and coordinated effort to attack or undermine Western interests throughout the region. The most sinister trend is the revival of Iran’s international terrorist infrastructure, which is evident in neighboring Afghanistan where NATO intelligence officers have reported a marked increase in cooperation between Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Taliban insurgents.

…With so much Iranian activity taking place throughout the region, the message is clear: Any attempt by the West to increase the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program will result in an explosion of violence throughout the Middle East and beyond. The problem is that doing nothing about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions would be even more dangerous.

Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of London’s Daily Telegraph. The updated edition of his book “Khomeini’s Ghost” has just been published by Ecco.

Go to WSJ.

Emphasizing the supreme leader’s areas of concern, Rahim Safavi, who was speaking at a conference organized for the so-called cultural experts of the IRGC, said, “The supreme leader have identified soft war, and because the IRGC must combat both soft war as well as semi-hard was and hard war, it must have the tools for each kind of war.

The former IRGC chief noted that the “goal of soft war is to change the culture, values and beliefs of the youth,” adding, “Our weakness is in this very issue of culture, which our enemies have identified before we did.  Therefore we must battle against and overcome the attacking culture with our soft and cultural power.”

Noting that “Our population was 36 million during the revolution and72 million now, therefore 50 percent of our country’s population are youth under the age of 30,” ayatollah Khamenei’s advisor noted his concerns with the “huge cultural war against Islam and the Islamic Revolution.”

Rahim-Safavi’s statements contradict last week’s remarks by Kamran Daneshjoo, Ahmadinejad’s science minister, who said, “The majority of the country’s university community are aligned with the revolution, and whoever cannot move in that direction must leave the community without pleasantries.”

Kamran Daneshjoo also made an implicit reference to the university professors who have been fired or dismissed, noting, “We have enough caring individuals in the science ministry to afford removing misaligned individuals from the community and aren’t ashamed of doing that.

Following the June 12 presidential election, a large number of professors from various universities across the nation have been arrested, dismissed or forced into retirement.  At least 5 students from various universities have been killed by police or paramilitary forces during popular protests and many others are under arrest or have been barred from continuing their education.

Following criticisms by ayatollah Khamenei in recent months that the “non-Islamic character of universities” and his insistence on “undertaking fundamental reform of the country’s educational system,” the supreme leader’s deputy in educational affairs has set up “supreme leader’s demands” post in universities, launching the overhaul of the country’s educational system towards a more Islamic approach.

Go to Rooz Online.

Tehran’s master of clandestine operations, Qassem Suleimani, could hold the key to Iraq’s future—if he were not so busy back in Iran.

The text message was cryptic and sent through an intermediary, but its spookiness has become legendary among the Americans tasked with trying to stabilize Iraq. The moment was May 2008, and once again all hell was breaking loose. Shiite militias had gone to battle against each other. The fighting threatened to spread to Baghdad. Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker were scrambling to find somebody to broker a truce. Then the text message was passed to the American commander. “General Petraeus,” it began, “you should know that I, Qassem Suleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.” Within days it was Suleimani who brokered the truce.

What surprised Petraeus and Crocker was not the Iranian’s role. They knew that already. It was the blunt confidence with which Suleimani stated it. As the head of the infamous Quds Force, he commands all the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operations outside Iran’s borders—whether covert, overt, or outright terrorist. In the fractious politicking almost certain to follow Iraq’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, this 53-year-old Iranian general could pull the strings that make or break the new government in Baghdad.

Long before America’s troops occupied Iraq, Suleimani’s forces occupied the shadows. In the buildup to the U.S.-led invasion, he was the go-to guy for much of the Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite opposition to Saddam Hussein. Suleimani’s networks of agents, collaborators, military advisers, client militias, and secret informers give him a degree of power that is difficult to gauge, but it often seems proconsular: “I, Qassem Suleimani,” his text read, like an emperor’s decree. And his real message in 2008 was that he could turn up the heat, or turn it down, at will.

Crocker often used to tell his colleagues that what Suleimani probably wanted to do in Iraq was to “Lebanonize” it. The idea would be to build up as many networks and agents in Baghdad as Iran has in, say, Beirut, so that it could create a crisis—and then solve it, at a political price. As Petraeus described it, Suleimani might say, “We’ll stop the crisis immediately, but of course, you know, we’d like to have one more vote in the council of this and that.” A talented extortionist knows how to set a price that will be met. Through the accretion of such little victories, the Iranians can eventually gain a veto over everything from economic policy to foreign alliances. In the case of Iraq, they also want to make sure that Baghdad will never again challenge them as a regional power.

But today Suleimani doesn’t seem to be paying as much attention to Iraq as he once did. For the last nine months, ever since apparent election fraud in Iran sparked mass protests and continuing unrest, the head of the Quds Force has been drawn back into the treacherous politics of his own country. And what he tries to do in Iraq—indeed, the success or failure of its democratic experiment—may well be a factor of his success or failure in Iran.

Petraeus, who painted this picture when speaking in January to the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, said the unrest following “the hijacked elections” in Iran last year has forced Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to rely on the IRGC and its Quds Force internally as well as externally. “That has enabled them to then expand their already considerable influence beyond just the security arena, but ever more greatly into the economic arena and even into the diplomatic arena,” said Petraeus, who now heads the U.S. Central Command, the military body focused on the region.

According to people who have followed Suleimani closely and prefer to remain anonymous, the spymaster and many other senior figures in the Quds Force actually supported the presidential challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, against incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Supreme Leader’s anointed favorite. But because of Suleimani’s record fighting the regime’s enemies abroad, he still has Khamenei’s confidence, and he has a demonstrated range of skills, whether persuasive or coercive, that are useful in squelching protests and more subtle kinds of dissent. Go to Newsweek.

Freedom Isn’t Free. The Revolutionary Guards Are Finding That Repression Isn’t, Either.

After being blindsided by widespread protests last summer, Iran’s paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps resolved to cut off the reformist Green Movement’s social networking resources. In October, Tose’e Etemad Mobin, a company controlled by the Guard, acquired 51 percent of Iran’s major telecommunications firm.

During protests last month to mark the anniversary of Iran’s Islamic republic, the Revolutionary Guard was able to handicap demonstrations with a nationwide shutdown of Internet and cell phone access. After being scattered into smaller groups, unable to spread word of their organizing destination or warnings about arrests, the opposition became an easy target for thousands of riot police.

But while the Guard’s cyber-dominance proved effective at helping to tamp down the protests, outside observers question whether such measures are economically sustainable or technologically feasible. Iran has a more tech-savvy populace than other regressive regimes, like North Korea, which cybersecurity consultant Greg Garcia argues will help undermine the government’s ability to sustain a pitched cyberwar against its own people.

“I think it’s a fool’s errand, and they’re doing it more for a show of force,” said Garcia, who served as the Homeland Security Department’s assistant secretary for cybersecurity in the Bush administration. “They have a very sophisticated populace that could be instrumental in setting up an underground wireless network of proxy servers to get around firewalls and other restrictions. I would think efforts to stop all that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Although the IRGC was originally created as the military of the theocracy, since the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad it has become a political and economic oligarchy that rivals the government, explained Rand Corp. international analyst Alireza Nader. “The Revolutionary Guard can’t jam Iran’s communications indefinitely, since the government also relies on the Internet and the costs would be prohibitive,” Nader said. “However, I also believe that the Guards do not want competition in the telecommunications field, or any economic arena for that matter.”

One key competitor is Google’s Gmail — which was shut out the day before the Feb. 11 independence anniversary in another effort to prevent protesters from organizing. Since then, the regime announced it was part of a plan to replace foreign sites with a national e-mail server. Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, said this move could indirectly bolster the Green Movement if it pesters the Guard into limiting more communication.

“If you shut down Gmail, protesters will use Twitter, and if you shut down YouTube, then protesters will use Vimeo, and then they’ll have to go down the line,” said Shirky, also the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. “And to replace these sites with a national e-mail service, they would need world-class talent that they don’t have.”

Already, protesters are using proxy server software like Freegate to gain access to the Internet from an international connection. Shirky said that as the Guard tightens its grip on communications, limiting access to phones is a much larger liability. “You can’t be an advanced economy if people can’t use their phones,” he said. “They shut down 90 percent of their own network and daily life grinds to a halt.”

Censorship and the use of police has long been a part of Iranian life, but Thomas Mattair, executive director of Middle East Policy Council, said this has accelerated beyond traditional levels since last year’s election. “It’s not just reformist but also conservative papers are being shut down,” Mattair said. “They’re not even tolerant of minor criticism, and there are reporters and editors that don’t like Ahmadinejad that still support [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] who are being arrested.”

Reza Aslan, a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, argued that if restriction of phone and Internet use increases, then the damage to the economy will turn people against the Revolutionary Guard.

“The merchant class and business classes are already suffering from the atrocious management of the economy, and using more of these nuclear options of shutting down day-to-day operations of the country will make it worse,” said Aslan, also author of How To Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror. “The government is willing to commit economic suicide to stop these demonstrations, which shows just how weak and rattled the government is by this movement that leaves them with so few options to stop it.”

But for all the challenges to the regime, it has so far stood up to the protest movement and retains control of the world’s third-largest oil reserves. Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institute, said that while Iran has undergone an extensive “brain drain” of educated professionals leaving the country, the regime can still afford these expensive crackdowns.

“Even if oil prices crashed as low as they did last year, they could still sustain it,” said Maloney. “I have no doubt the government will continue down this path at the continued cost to the freedoms people were permitted in Tehran before last June.” Go to original article.

A number of high-ranking commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps have made statements following the February 11 demonstrations declaring victory for the government and calling it a defeat for the opposition camp. IRGC generals claimed that the opposition camp was no longer posing a threat to the Islamic Republic, thanks to the efforts of the Basij and the IRGC. These remarks were made to imply that the IRGC was in firm control of security matters in Iran and has successfully dealt with “troublemakers” who took on the streets in the past eight months, following the disputed June 12 election.

Brig Gen Ali Fazli, the deputy commander of Basij forces, said on Wednesday, “If those involved in the sedition came to create riots and chaos on the sidelines of the [official] demonstration, they were smacked in the face so badly that most people in the demonstrations did not even notice their presence.” Fazli was referring to IRGC’s tactic of isolating anti-government protestors and separating them from main crowds who had gathered for the official demonstrations.

According to ISNA, Iranian Student’s News Agency, Fazli said, “The foreign media was covering the events of February 11 live, but when they saw large waves of people who had come to show their support for the Islamic Revolution, they [the foreign media] left the scene altogether” implying that the foreign media has been a main instigator of unrest in Iran in the past eight months. Confirming Fazli’s claim that the IRGC defeated the foreign propaganda machine against the Islamic Republic, Brig Gen Masoud Jazaeri also declared that foreign media companies were defeated on February 11. Jazaeri had previously asked the government to pass tougher laws against Iranians who cooperate with foreign media sources.

One of the most radical commanders of the IRGC went on the record yesterday and conformed IRGC’s role in suppressing demonstrations following the June 12 election. In an interview with Sepah News, the official website of the IRGC, Brig Gen Yadollah Javani, deputy IRGC commander for political affairs, claimed on Wednesday that there is an orchestrated effort by the IRGC to scare people. Javani added, “The real reason behind this IRGC-scare tactic must be found in the enemy’s failed seditions, because the IRGC’s blows against seditionists were very effective and the [enemy] understands this very well now.”

Javani went on by accusing former President Mohammad Khatami of having met George Soros, and said, “In that meeting Soros said that democracy cannot be achieved with the government of clerics.” The Iranian government accuses George Soros of providing material and spiritual support to the opposition in order to implement a soft revolution in Iran. Javani also accused Mir Hossein Moussavi of having planned to cause riots in Iran, suggesting that riots were not organic, rather they were pre-planned by Moussavi and his camp prior to the election. Go to Inside Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently suggested that the Islamic Republic of Iran is moving toward a “military dictatorship.” Karim Sadjadpour suggests that, over the past decade, the political and economic influence of the Revolutionary Guard has eclipsed that of the clergy. The Revolutionary Guard is shaping Iran’s foreign policy in important arenas, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. The Revolutionary Guard should not, however, be seen as working against or outside of the regime. Iran is moving increasingly towards a repressive dictatorial system with the Revolutionary Guard, the Supreme Leader, and President Ahmadinejad all working together.

The American domestic political reality no longer gives President Obama the luxury of patience in seeking to moderate Iran’s nuclear position. After a year of engagement, few significant gains have been made. However, the administration’s efforts to engage have demonstrated to the international community that it is Tehran, not Washington, who is the intransigent negotiator and have halted complaints about Washington’s unwillingness to engage and shown the nature of the hardliners in Iran.

Iran’s foreign policies are intimately connected to its domestic policy. The Iranian regime is currently facing its biggest existential crisis since 1979. In order to ensure their power, “Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad may welcome a [military] attack on the nuclear facilities, because it could heal the deep internal political rifts in Iran. Any military action in Iran could severely dampen or even kill the opposition movement,” notes Sadjadpour. Go to Carnegie.

Iran is reacting sharply to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s remarks that the Persian state is becoming a military dictatorship. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, accuses Clinton of spreading “lies” and the United States of turning the region into a so-called “arms depot.” But several Washington-based analysts on Iran back Clinton’s assertions.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard was formed in 1979 to protect the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution from the Shah’s army.

Now U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the Guard is leaving Iran vulnerable to proposed U.S. sanctions against Iran for pressing ahead with its uranium enrichment program.  Clinton spoke to VOA during her recent visit to the Persian Gulf.

“It appears as though the space of decision making for the clerical and political leadership is shrinking and that for the Revolutionary Guard seems to be growing,” said Secretary Clinton.”They are deeply involved in the commercial, business and investment activities of Iran,” said Clinton.  “They own major institutions like the airport for example. So there is a lot they are doing which is very troubling.”
Go to VOA.

“The argument that Iranian politics have become militarized makes the issue far too black and white,” suggests Ali Ansari of the University of St. Andrews in a recent essay. “The Iranian state does not face a military coup in the traditional sense of the term. This is a security state, not a military state.”

The difference, Ansari says, is that the Guard is not a threatening presence for the government, but a symbiotic partner. Go to original article.

Since its birth in 1979, the IRGC has been the hardest of the hardcore of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. It thrives in confrontation with the United States and Israel, and does even better when Iran is at war. The IRGC looks at the 1982-2000 war in Lebanon as its most glorious moment, when its proxy Hizballah forced the West and Israel out of Lebanon. It left Hizballah with the enviable reputation of being the only force in the Middle East to have beaten both the West and Israel. Not to mention that it’s now the de facto government in Lebanon. No wonder the IRGC would like an encore in the West Bank and Gaza, where it’s been arming militants for more than a decade.

It may make us feel better to label the IRGC as terrorists, but it’s more instructive to look at it from the IRGC’s perspective. The IRGC truly believes that its brand of asymmetrical warfare can defeat a modern, well-equipped force in a limited war. It did so in Lebanon, and given the right circumstances, it will in other parts of the Middle East. But the real point is that in a limited war with the United States and Israel the IRGC could predominate, or at least wear us down to the point that we would decide it’s better to settle.

With inflation and unemployment running at 30% in Iran, with oil markets shaky, and unending demonstrations, the Obama Administration should be considering the distinct possibility that the IRGC would welcome an open conflict with the U.S. (and Israel), its coup d’etat solidified.

The Administration is talking about putting more sanctions on the IRGC, hoping that a reluctant China might be willing to sign on to a more targeted effort. But this is a silly and hollow gesture — the IRGC are the best sanction busters in the world. What Washington should be thinking about, now that crazy mullahs have been replaced by cunning generals, is how you negotiate with a military dictatorship. Unlike faith-based regimes, military ones have objectives, ones they are willing to negotiate and compromise on. We’ve certainly been though it before. The question is whether this administration understands that punitive strikes don’t intimidate beasts like the Revolutionary Guard. Go to Time.

The Revolutionary Guard now has more power than the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader.

At first glance, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei might seem a happy man. The pro-democracy movement had promised that last Thursday, the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, would be a turning point for the cause of freedom. But Mr. Khamenei’s regime contained the mounting opposition.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) controlled Tehran with the help of tens of thousands of club-wielding street fighters shipped in from all over the country. Opposition marchers, confined to the northern part of the city, were locked into hit-and-run battles with the regime’s professional goons. An opposition attempt at storming the Evin Prison, where more than 3,000 dissidents are being tortured, did not materialize. The would-be liberators failed to break a ring of steel the IRGC threw around the sprawling compound.

For the first time the regime had to transform Tehran into a sealed citadel with checkpoints at all points of entry. The IRGC was in total control. Code-named “Simorgh,” after a bird in Persian mythology, its operation created an atmosphere of war in the divided city. Warned that his life may be in danger, Mr. Khamenei was forced to watch the events on TV rather than take his usual personal tour.

Even the most successful Islamic dynasties—such as the Umayyids, the Abbasids and the Fatimids—came to depend on mercenaries known as the Mamluks, who were recruited from pagan tribes of Central Asia. Often the Mamluks seized power by murdering the caliph or keeping him as a puppet.

The IRGC is a modern version of the Mamluks. Their leaders are more strident than many of the regime’s leaders, vetoing countless attempts by mullahs and politicians to reach a compromise with the portion of the opposition still calling for reform rather than regime change. Revolutionary Guard generals frequently appear on television to call for mass arrests and show trials. A weak and indecisive caliph, Mr. Khamenei has so far refused to endorse the kind of “final solution” the generals demand.

Mr. Khamenei has other reasons to be unhappy. According to the Ministry of Labor more than a million jobs have “vanished” in the past 12 months thanks to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s populist policies. In the same period, the nation’s currency, the rial, has lost a quarter of its value against a basket of other oil-based currencies in the region.

Even so-called realists must concede that the Khomeinist establishment, under the emerging leadership of the IRGC, is not the only actor on the Iranian scene. There is another actor: the popular movement for change. To ignore the democrats and fail to support them in clear and strong terms would be a sign of poor political judgment—even under the most cynical version of realpolitik. Go to WSJ.

It is impossible to gauge its share of Iran’s GDP, but western estimates range from a third to nearly two-thirds.

The extent of the Revolutionary Guards’ control over the Iranian economy is ­apparent as soon as you enter the country. They run the main international airport, and the manner in which they acquired it was a bruising demonstration of the way big business is now done in Iran.

The contract for managing Imam Khomeini airport, south of Tehran, was given to a Turkish-Austrian consortium in 2004, but on 8 May, the day it was supposed to open, guardsmen took it over, blocking the runways with their vehicles, and closing it down. Inbound flights had to be hastily diverted.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) declared that the involvement of foreigners posed a security risk because of an alleged link to Israel, but it was clear that the foreign consortium’s biggest mistake was to try to cut the IRGC out of its business model.

Ever since, excluding the guards has been exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, from Iran’s economy.

“The IRGC is really a corporation. It is a business conglomerate with guns,” said Ali Ansari, an Iran expert at St Andrews University. It was misleading to call Iran a military dictatorship, he said. “This is not a military junta. I see it as a collection of business and religious interests. I don’t think they have the cohesion to move as one unit.”

However, arguably the most powerful IRGC body today is Khatam al-Anbiya, which started life as the HQ of the corps’ construction arm but is now a giant holding firm with control of more than 812 registered companies inside or outside Iran, and the recipient of 1,700 government contracts. Last week, the US treasury froze the assets of its head, General Rostam Qasemi, and four subsidiary companies.

With the active support of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s president, who has handed Khatam al-Anbiya a succession of huge no-bid contracts, its economic influence has ballooned exponentially over the past few years into just about every aspect of economic life.

Go to Guardian.