War, diplomacy and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

The Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran), created by Ayatollah Khomeini in May 1979 to protect the world’s only Shia theocracy from the risk of a military coup by remnants of the ousted Pahlavi Shah’s regime, has evolved into the most formidable economic and political force in Iranian politics. The Pasdaran veteran vote bank helped elect the hardline Mayor of Teheran, Mahmud Ahmedinijad, as President of the Islamic Republic. Pasdaran units planned and fought the epic Karbala–5 offensive in the Iran–Iraq war, assembled the waves of human minesweepers who were slaughtered in the tens of thousands to become modern icons of the ancient Shia ethos of martyrdom. Pasdaran special units trained and supplied the laser guided missiles with which Hezbollah sank an Israeli warship in last year’s war in Lebanon. A Pasdaran naval platoon abducted the 15 Royal navy sailors and marines off the Iraqi coast, supplied Iraqi militias and insurgents with the roadside bombs and rockets used against American combat troops. Pasdaran operatives maintain liaison between Teheran and Iran’s clients and proxy militias in the Arab world, Pakistan, Central Asia and even North Africa. Above all, the Pasdaran created the clandestine infrastructure and offshore ghost companies that enabled Iran to enrich uranium and become the Gulf’s only imminent nuclear power.

The Iranian revolution would probably not have survived without the ruthlessness and vigilance of the Pasdaran’s intelligence and volunteer (Basij) networks. Pasdaran agents slaughtered the Tudeh (communist) leaders who sought to seize power in the political vaccum after the fall of the Peacock Throne. The Pasdaran haunted down and executed thousands of members of the Mujaheedin-e-Khalq, sworn enemies of the regime. The Pasdaran helped build Iran’s domestic weapons arsenal, including the homemade tanks, torpedoes, APC’s, radar avoiding missiles and even fighter jets displayed in a Teheran military parade on the eve of Ahmedinijad’s visit to New York to address the UN General Assembly.

Like China’s Peoples Liberation Army, the Pasdaran are not only the iron fist of the regime but also a vast business and financial conglomerate that acts as a sovereign state within a state in its quest for power, influence and riches. The Pasdaran blocked a Turkish company’s contract to operate the new Imam Khoemini airport in Teheran by closing the runways to prevent any flights cleared to land. The Pasdaran established the hundreds of front companies in Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia that enabled Iran to avoid the US Treasury’s international financial squeeze and the White House’s arms embargo and export controls. Pasdaran owned companies have muscled into $10 billion in contracts to develop Iran’s aging oil and gasfields. Pasdaran operatives run Iran’s multi billion dollar gasoline and cigarette smuggling trade. Pasdaran financiers manage the state’s huge bonyads (foundations) that dominate Iran’s economy and crowd out the merchant elite, the Teheran bazaaris who financed the street protests that culminated in revolution against the Shah’s regime in 1979. Pasdaran veterans outnumber the Shia clergy two for one in the Iranian Majlis (parliament).

The United States will soon declare the Pasdaran a “a global terrorist organisation” and thus threaten the international financial, banking and procurement lifelines that are mission critical to its corporate existence. Washington argues that Pasdaran agents have trained and armed the militias who kill American troops in Iraq, have armed Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas/Islamic Jihad in Gaza, have led Iran’s nuclear program, have subverted the regimes of America’s conservative Arab allies, Pakistan and Turkey for decades. Mahmud Ahmedinijad’s failure to respond to the EU or the OIC’s attempt to mediate a diplomatic rapprochement with the west stems from his dependence on the hawkish commanders of the Pasdaran, who view Iran as the natural imperial power in the Gulf, the historical successor to the Achaemenian, the Sassanid, Safavid, Qajar and Pahlavi shahs.

Unfortunately, Washington’s insistence on declaring the Pasdaran a “global terrorist organisation” will make a war with revolutionary Iran inevitable. The hardliine factions that include the Pasdaran, radical clerics and the Supreme Leader Khomeini are now the dominant voices in Iranian diplomacy. Their Manichean, zero sum, even apocalyptic and messianic view of Iran’s international relations will be vindicated if Israeli F-16’s or American cruise missiles streak across the Persian night skies to gut the nuclear reactors at Natanz and Bushire.

The impact of any preemptive Israeli or American strike on Iran, no matter how limited, will be catastrophic for the Gulf. Iran has threatened to attack America’s command and control military infrastructure in the Gulf, mine the tanker routes in the Straits of Hormuz, subvert the regimes of America’s Arab allies and unleash “thousands” of Pasdaran naval boats in suicidal kamikaze attacks against western targets. In Iraq, the sectarian fault line of Arab politics, the Mehdi Army and the Badr brigade will launch full scale attacks against an American military besieged by Sunni jihadists who infiltrate, ironically, from the Syrian and Saudi, not Iranian, borders. In Lebanon, an American strike against Iran will trigger another Hezbollah rocket attack against Israeli settlements in the northern Galilee, a confrontation that could easily escalate into war with Syria, Teheran’s sole ally in the Arab world since the 1980’s.

It is therefore imperative that American diplomats negotiate with the commanders of the Pasdaran, not brand them as terrorist, not make war, tensions and sectarian slaughter in the Middle East inevitable. The USSR would never have been transformed by Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost if the Reagan White House had branded the KGB as “terrorist” and refused to deal with the spymasters of Lubyanka. After all, an elite military force impoverished as the Americans found out the hard way when Paul Bremer, their viceroy in Baghdad, stripped Saddam’s Baathist armed forces of their livelihoods and inadvertently midwifed the Sunni insurgency. The geopolitical status quo in the Gulf is untenable. The Gulf Arab states should pressure Washington to view Iran from the cold prism of realpolitik, not the bombast of neocon ideology. After all, the rhetoric of ‘Great Satan and Axis of Evil’ benefits only the psychopaths on both sides whose conscience are immune to human suffering, to the wholesale destruction of innocent lives and the palpable risk of nuclear Armageddon in the Middle East.

Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and economic analyst