A Change of Guard in Tehran

On September 1st, Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei announced a change in the leadership of Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami (IRGC). Brigadier (now Major) General Mohammad Ali (Aziz) Jafari was given a new star and appointed as sepah’s new commander while Yahya Rahim Safavi who had led sepah for the past 10 years became the leader’s military advisor, occupying a newly created and probably ceremonial position.

Given the recent news about the possibility of the United States placing sepah on the list of terrorist groups, the move led to speculations about it being a reaction to American pressures. Chances are, however, that it had very little to do with the possible designation, the news for which, from what I now understand, was in any case inaccurate as the contemplated designation was apparently regarding the Qods force, a part of sepah that is said to be engaged in operations in Iraq.

Indeed, in response to direct questions in this regard both commanders in separate news conferences suggested that the decision for change was made about two months ago. Safavi went as far as to say that Ayatollah Khamenei simply does not like anyone serving at any position for more than 10 years. The move nevertheless reveals a couple of interesting points about the role of military in Iranian politics which is usually overlooked.

First and foremost is the tight civilian control that exists over the military in Iran. In the past couple of years, since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 2005 election, there has been a lot of loose talk about the increasing importance of the military in Iranian politics. The reality is that sepah (as well as the regular military) as an institution remains under the constitutionally sanctioned tight reign of the leader’s office. And for years Ayatollah Khamenei has taken that job very seriously, rotating leaders and demanding institutional changes depending on perceived needs and circumstances.

This is nothing new. Iran simply does not have a historical tradition of military prominence in the way for instance Turkey has had. This does not mean that since the inception of modern military in the 20th century, various civilian leaders of Iran, particularly when under pressure, have not used the military arm to “take care of the country’s problems,” by bringing “discipline” to the country or building its roads and pipelines. As Masoud Behnoud, one of Iran’s most astute journalists now living in exile, points out in his Persian blog, even during the Shah’s reign many of the tasks seen as too difficult for public institutions or the private sector were handled and managed by the military. As such, under the current circumstances of sanctions and international pressures, Behnoud I think is right to say that it is not the institutional or internal urge by sepah to grab power that has increased its role in Iranian politics and economy but circumstances. Once circumstances change, so will sepah’s role.

In his press conference Aziz Jafari, the new commander of sepah, was totally unapologetic about this predicament. He acknowledged sepah’s economic role in various construction projects, welcomed them, and in fact defended them as part of sepah’s mission, not to make profit, but to build the country. He identified sepah as a “precautionary force at the service of the commander in chief in order to rush to the help of other organizations wherever help is necessary.”

The second point that the new appointment reveals is about the individuals that have come to constitute the core of sepah’s leadership and the role they are playing in contemporary Iran. It is important to understand that sepah is different from Iran’s regular army in so far as it came into being during the revolution as a people’s army. It is constitutionally expected to “guard the revolution and its achievements,” (unlike the regular military which is given the task of “guarding the independence, territorial integrity, and political order of the Islamic Republic), and found its character during the war with Iraq, a war in which Iran was clearly out-resourced and had to rely on tactical innovations to counter Iraq’s technological superiority.

Many of the men who joined this people’s army to fight in the war and ended up being its commanders were very bright university students in their early twenties. Many of them died, some survived but left sepah during or immediately after the war to turn into politicians, diplomats or bureaucrats (of reformist, centrist, or hard-line kinds), and some remained to make sepah a more professional institution with various branches. These men who stayed on are now in their late forties or early fifties and as individuals see themselves as capable leaders who, precisely because of the experience they gained during the war and afterwards, can influence the direction of the country, in the same way, I would say, ex-IDF generals have seen themselves in relation to Israeli politics.

A number of them, like Mohmmad Baqer Qalibaf (the current mayor of Tehran who has presidential aspirations) and Mohsen Rezaie (the secretary of the Expediency Council, also with presidential aspirations) eventually left their military posts and are making their marks as politicians. Other high ranking officers like Mohammad Baqer Zolghadr and Alireza Afshar are now powerful hard-line bureaucrats in the Interior Ministry (which is in charge of internal security as well as conduct of elections).

Others like Aziz Jafari, who is from the province of Yazd and reportedly a good friend of another Yazdi, the former president Mohmmad Khatami, continue to serve in sepah but are playing a critical role in the transformation of the institution itself. A closer look at Jafari’s biography reveals why it is in the continued commitment of people like him, a man reported to be very genial and well liked within sepah, that one must locate the strength of the Islamic Republic.

He was a student at the very prestigious and difficult to get into architecture school at the University of Tehran during the revolution. According to his official bio he was instrumental in the establishment of the Islamic association at his school, was a representative of his school to the university wide association, and “was active in the takeover” of the American embassy. As such, he must have been friends with many others involved in the event who later became prominent reformist leaders (e.g., Mohsen Mirdamadi who is currently the secretary general of the reformist Islamic Iran's Participation Party) or journalists (e.g., Abbas Abdi). He went to war as a member of the basij militia, immediately joined sepah, and “out of the necessities of the war” soon ended up in command positions. After the war he managed to finish both his architecture degree as well as go through the military leadership training programs. Later he became the commander of sepah’s ground forces. It was as the commander of sepah’s ground forces in 1999 that he signed, along with several other sepah commanders, a threatening letter to his friend and the then President Khatami expressing concern about student riots and the latter’s inability to maintain order.

But the job that qualified him for the current leadership of sepah came in 2005 when Ayatollah Khamenei appointed him to be in charge of setting up sepah’s Strategic Center, a center tasked with drawing up a new command structure and military strategy, preparing the country for the changing regional environment and the kind of foreign military confrontation it may have to face.

In his news conference with the Iranian press, Jafari was very blunt about his task. Pointing out that the threats to Iran have changed, he identified sepah’s role as one of deterrence and defense. He also identified it as a “learning organization” that because of its popular roots and organic ties to the population is very flexible in the kind of asymmetrical war – “similar to the one Hezbollah fought against Israel” - Iran needs to be prepared for just in case it is attacked.

His response to a question regarding the recent American threats against Iran was equally blunt:

The enemies have intensified the tune of threats but they should know that an organization such as sepah that is revolutionary and popular cannot be destroyed and they must show more deliberation in their threats…. The presence of the enemy in the region is causing problems for them and every path they take ends in an impasse. I suggest that they end their presence and interact with Islam and countries of the region form afar. This will surely be to their benefit and I suggest that they leave the region as soon as possible.

The appointment of Aziz Jafari seems to be yet another signal that the Iranian leadership takes the American threat seriously enough to prepare for the kind of fight it feels it might have to fight but undoubtedly prefers not to. Read more on this article...

Potential Designation of Sepah-e Pasdaran as a Terrorist Organization: Reactions from Tehran

I did not comment earlier about the reported designation of Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami (translated as the Islamic Revolution’s Guard Corps or sometimes even more carelessly as Revolutionary Guard Corps while the word sepah means army and the correct translation is the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution) mostly because over the past five years of closely monitoring the fate of Iran’s nuclear dossier, I have become skeptical of newspaper leaks, plants or commentary that hint at the possibility of eventual military action (either by the United States or Israel) against Iran right around the time or in the midst of negotiations among permanent Security Council members and Germany (P5+1) about the extension of sanctions against Iran.

This time around the story made headlines in both the New York Times and Washington Post as Iran was about to begin the third round of negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over an “action plan” and timetable for Iran to address the remaining “unresolved questions” over its nuclear program (that agreement, the text of which was revealed today and can be found here, has already been announced as inadequate by the US even before its content was known).

The United States is also pushing for a third set of economic sanctions through the UN Security Council and as far as I can tell even the smallest hint of US military action (and the potential terrorist designation of the national army of another country is certainly a hint) has become a very useful tool not only in the process of persuading countries freaked out about yet another Middle East war that sanctions are the way to go but also in framing the Iran policy discussions domestically in the US.

Once military action becomes a possibility, then most of the energy is spent discussing why this is a terrible option while the issue at hand, which is really whether or not sanctions are good policy options, are not adequately reflected upon. In an either/or frame, sanctions or what is sometimes, I guess, euphemistically called “coercive diplomacy” in fact become the “good option” upon which a consensus can be reached. Ultimately the fundamental premise of the Bush Administration that Tehran needs to be dealt with through coercion, unless Iran agrees to US pre-conditions, and the implications of the sanctions policy for Iranian politics and Iranian people and whether sanctions will fulfill the stated objectives are rarely discussed.

The US has been sanctioning Iran in significant ways since the first term of the Clinton Administration and hopefully in a later post I will talk about how sanctions have strengthened non-transparent networks of economic middlemen in Iran whose lucrative activities during the Saddam era sanctions against Iraq (yes Iraq) as well as close ties to various state institutions have enriched them enough to influence Iranian politics in significant ways, particularly since Iran’s borders with neighboring countries (now all American allies) are so porous.

But here I want to talk specifically about the impact of the recent news about the placing of Sepah on the terrorist list on Iranian politics. In the words of David Ignatius of Washington Post, through this designation, which he suggests is part of a new post-Iraq strategy, the Bush administration hopes to “squeeze the guard and all of the businesses it owns -- banks, trading companies, tech companies that are part of the nuclear program -- and seek to divide President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, himself a product of the guard, from Iran's less fanatical majority."

A close look at the reaction from Tehran, however, clearly encapsulates how such moves push the whole array of political forces to the right of the political spectrum and in fact strengthen precisely the same forces that the publicized policy presumably intends to weaken. This, I think, is the story of American foreign policy vis-à-vis Tehran; a story that very few people in the Bush Administration or the US Congress (which since 1990s has done everything possible to outdo the executive branch in this sanctions game) are willing to confront.

Now let’s see what happened in Tehran once the news hit the headlines. The government did not respond officially. In fact, only a Foreign Ministry official who wished to remain anonymous (yes the Iran has them too!), characterized the publicity as part and parcel of the “psychological war” in which the US has engaged in the past couple of years in order to intimidate Iran.

The conservative organizations and newspapers did respond but they did so with either a yawn or their usual bombast and ridicule about American failures in Iraq and how these failures leave the US no other options but to find scapegoats. In an August 23rd editorial entitled “Paper Presence,” this is how Kayhan, Tehran’s most important hard-line daily reacted to the news:

If the news is correct, it is another sign that the Americans neither have sufficient intelligence for the correct understanding of their problems in the Middle East nor do they have much wisdom for addressing them. The excuse, they say, is that Sepah is helping Hezbollah, Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad and other similar groups…. The US imagines that these groups have modeled their fighting after Sepah and further claims that Sepah trains or arms them; claims that are repeated for years without an ounce of evidence ever presented to support them…. It is understandable that it is difficult for Israel and the United States – and the shame associate with it even harder – to accept and for the world to believe that with all their claims and pride they have been humiliated in front a few hundred Kalashnikov carrying youth. This is why in their own minds they have found a solution … by enlarging their adversary they want to belittle their own defeat or at least find an excuse for it. But let us say that the Jihadi groups in the Middle East region were created by Sepah and are now under its protection – which they are not and America knows this truth better than anyone else, is the solution to take a torn piece of paper and write on it that Sepah is terrorist? Will this solve the American problem?... The Americans imagine that the solution to the strategic defeat that has beleaguered them in the Middle East is paper play and issuing of declarations and resolutions. Sepah, if we accept America’s ridiculous claims, has taken America to the point of desperation on the boiling sands of Iraq, expansive plains of Lebanon, and swarming cities of Palestine. If there is a response to Sepah, then it must be given there. Apparently, however, there is no response and members of Sepah, by traversing time and place, are in a position that the US must await a new wonder from them at any given moment…

But ridiculing the significance of the US decision, if it happens, does not prevent hard-line or conservative forces from using the proposed terrorist designation in their attacks against domestic opponents. Suggesting that the idea of placing Sepah on the terrorist list can be associated with a few members of the Iranian exile community in the United States with past links to the reformists, Baztab, a website associated with Mohsen Rezaie, the former commander of Sepah, in an August 21st piece subtitled “A Test for the Patriotism of the Reformists” demands:

Now that the hard-line American circles are pretending that in confronting Sepah-e Pasdaran they have the reformists on their side, time has arrived for well-known leaders of that array of groups to defeat this plan through a clear statement of their position… Time has arrived for organizations such as Association of Combatant Clerics, The National Confidence Party, Servants of Construction, Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution and Participation Front and figures such as Khatami, Karrubi, Mir Hossein Mussavi, Mohtashamipour, Karbashchi and others, who despite critical positions regarding certain issues have also shown their support for their territorial integrity of the country to enter the fray and prevent any kind of western pretensions on behalf of the reformists.

And the call has not gone unheeded. Almost every reformist organization has since come out with a written statement in support of Sepah, echoing what Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s former reformist president, said in an interview with ISNA (Iranian Students News Agency) against the potential move:

If the hard-line war mongers in the United States do not know, I am sure the wise and just of that country know that Sepah has risen from the main beliefs and longings of a nation, is one of the main pillars of national authority and security, is the protector of the nation’s rights, values of the revolution, and territorial integrity, and form the spiritual point of view has a special place among the people of Iran. No nation can accept being subjected to aggression or even insult against the backbone of its authority and security and guardian of its territorial integrity, honor, and independence.

Khatami goes to hope that “illogical extremists” will be prevented from steering American foreign policy and calls on the “wise” in both countries to prevent another crisis, while posing a question about which people will benefit from the leakage of such a news in the midst of US-Iran discussions of and Iran’s attempts to respond to the unresolved technical questions regarding its nuclear program.

To be sure, Khatami’s interview along with written statements issued by political groups such as the National Confidence Party, Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution and Participation Front all include an implicit and at times even explicit criticism of hard-line posturing against the United States and lack of prudence on the part of the Iranian government in its dealings with the United States. But make no mistake, the mere reporting on the possibility of terrorism designation of Sepah has had a rallying effect on the significant players of the Islamic republic and once again has made it easier for had-line forces in Iran to make the case that conciliatory moves towards the United States (either in relation to Iraq or more significantly in relation to Iran’s nuclear file) are of no use since US policy objectives in Iran are not behavior change but regime change. Read more on this article...