Iran's Deadly Ambition (4 page)

Within Iran, it is nothing short of an economic powerhouse, in control of numerous companies and corporate entities that stretch across broad swathes of the Islamic Republic’s economy, from transportation to energy to construction. This power was on display in May 2004, when the Guards shut down Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport rather than allow a Turkish consortium to operate it.
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The message was unmistakable: the IRGC, rather than the government, was the ultimate arbiter of acceptable commerce within the Islamic Republic.

It was also a testament to the enormous financial power amassed by the IRGC in recent years. In 2007, the
Los Angeles Times
estimated that the Guards had accumulated in excess of $12 billion in business and construction interests and possessed links to more than one hundred companies.
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That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. The IRGC, for example, is believed to be in control of practically all of the Islamic Republic’s $12-billion-a-year smuggling industry.
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Its reach extends to virtually every sector of the Iranian economy, from energy to trade to defense-industrial development. But it is in construction where the influence of the Guards is deepest. Khatam al-Anbiya, the IRGC’s construction headquarters, is Iran’s biggest corporation: a massive,
sprawling network of companies, comprising more than 800 affiliates, employing an estimated 40,000 workers, and in control of billions of dollars in assets.
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All told, the IRGC is believed to command as much as one-third of Iran’s entire economy.
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This web of activity has alternately been described as a “business conglomerate with guns,” a “huge investment company with a complex of business empires and trading companies,” and a “de facto foreign ministry” for Iran’s revolutionary forces.
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Yet these descriptions barely scratch the surface of the IRGC’s centrality in the Iranian economy and how much power it truly exerts over the Islamic Republic’s political direction. The full extent of the IRGC’s economic reach is simply not known outside of Iran, hidden as it is behind shell companies, middlemen, and cut-outs, as well as pervasive patronage networks and entrenched political interests. What is clear, however, is that the IRGC has become a state within a state in contemporary Iran.

The IRGC’s current prominence is largely the work of one man: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His ascendance to the Iranian presidency in 2005 ushered in a golden age of nearly unbridled influence for the Guards in Iranian politics. Ahmadinejad is himself a former Guardsman. He served a stint in the IRGC during the 1980s, working both as an army engineer and as part of the support team for a daring 1987 special forces operation in Kirkuk at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War.
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Ahmadinejad maintained his contacts with the Guards following his active duty service, and Iranian military officials and families made up an integral part of his constituent base during his ascent to political power. And once Ahmadinejad assumed the presidency, he wasted no time rewarding his former comrades-in-arms richly.

Within a year, the IRGC racked up an estimated $10 billion in sweetheart deals and no-bid government contracts
from the Iranian government.
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Within two, fully two-thirds of Iran’s twenty-one cabinet positions were occupied by members of the IRGC.
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By then, former Guardsmen and their sympathizers had taken over more than a fifth of the seats in the Majles, Iran’s unicameral parliament.
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By 2010, the situation became even more of a monopoly, with Guardsmen staffing Ahmadinejad’s cabinet almost exclusively and occupying roughly a third of all parliamentary posts.
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Observers likened this takeover to a “creeping coup d’etat,” in which Iran’s clerical elite slowly became overshadowed by its clerical army.
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Over the past several years, Iran watchers have taken note of this trend.
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So, belatedly, have administration officials. In September 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged the changing center of gravity within the Islamic Republic when, in a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations, she described Iran as having transformed into “a military dictatorship with a . . . sort of religious-ideological veneer.”
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But this realization did not contribute to greater clarity in Washington about how to respond to the Iranian regime’s rogue behavior.

That behavior, meanwhile, has intensified, commensurate with the IRGC’s power. The IRGC today is a global strategic force, and one that is currently active in virtually every region of the world.

The power of the Guards begins with its grip on the regime’s strategic capabilities. This includes the Islamic Republic’s arsenal of ballistic missiles—an arsenal which is growing rapidly. The centerpiece of that effort is the Shahab-3, a medium-range missile unveiled publicly more than a decade ago. In recent years, the Iranian regime has expanded the range, accuracy, and payload of the Shahab-3 and its variants, and today this class of missiles is estimated to be nuclear-capable and possess a range of between 900 and 1,200 miles,
putting all of Israel, the north of India, and parts of Eastern Europe within striking distance. Indeed, Iran is now the most formidable missile power in the Middle East, according to U.S. intelligence-community assessments.
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And these capabilities are just part of a much larger picture.

In 2005, Iran became the first space-faring nation in the Muslim world when it successfully launched a surveillance satellite into orbit from the missile base in Plesetsk, Russia. Since then, the Iranian regime has racked up a number of additional successful space launches. While these efforts appear to be civilian in nature, the potential military applications cannot be ignored, because the same rocket booster used to place a payload into low Earth orbit can be married to a two-stage ballistic missile to create one of intercontinental range. Iran, in other words, is building the capability to shift rapidly from being a regional missile power to being a global one, with the power to hold at risk Western Europe and beyond.

The control exercised by Iran’s clerical army extends to the regime’s nuclear program as well. When Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979, he rolled back Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s ambitious plan—sketched out during the 1970s—to make Iran a nuclear power, citing it as un-Islamic in nature. But the Islamic Republic’s devastating loss to regional rival Iraq during the subsequent eight-year Iran-Iraq War—and international assistance to the Iraqi war effort during that conflict—helped convince Iran’s ayatollahs of the need to revive the country’s nascent atomic drive. As a result, by the late 1980s, Iran’s nuclear plans were back on track, with the IRGC firmly in charge of their progress.
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So it has remained. Today, it is believed that if hostilities arose, the IRGC would “have custody over potentially deployed nuclear weapons, most or all other chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons,” and the ability
“to operate Iran’s nuclear-armed missile forces if they are deployed.”
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That means, as a practical matter, that no nuclear deal is possible which does not meet with the IRGC’s approval—something that represents a complicating, and perhaps insurmountable, obstacle to the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West.

Iran’s clerical army is also a significant naval power. Over the past several years, in keeping with its vision of itself as a global player, the Iranian regime has bolstered its ability to project military power abroad. This has included major upgrades to both its conventional navy, the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN), and its clerical counterpart, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN), with significant results.
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According to intelligence analyst Steven O’Hern, the IRGCN now totals some 18,000 men, making it a “force equal in size to the Iranian Navy,” and this force is in operational control of “all of Iran’s missile boats and land-based anti-ship missiles.”
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A decade ago, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iran was able to shut off tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical naval waterway through which one-fifth of global oil transits, for brief periods of time.
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Since then, concerted investments by the Iranian regime have made its maritime forces even more capable. They have also made Iran’s clerical army more adventurous on the high seas, something that was demonstrated in dramatic fashion in March 2007, when the IRGCN captured fifteen British sailors off the coast of Iraq. The Iranian regime claimed that the sailors had strayed into Iran’s territorial waters—a charge that the British government disputed. But Iran’s seizure also put members of the U.S.-led coalition on notice that the Islamic Republic was assuming an increasingly aggressive naval profile in the Persian Gulf, a reality the United States and its allies will inevitably face in the years ahead.

This fact was hammered home in March 2014, when CNN reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was in the process of constructing a large-scale replica of a U.S. naval carrier. Regime officials at first dismissed the construction as simply a movie prop, but the true objective quickly became clear. In a subsequent interview with the official FARS News Agency, Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, the commander of the IRGCN, confirmed that the mock-up was in fact a military target, and that it was necessary “because sinking and destroying US warships has, is and will be on our agenda.”
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The IRGC’s most visible, and potent, presence, however, is that of its elite paramilitary wing, known as the Quds Force (IRGC-QF). While the larger Guards are preoccupied with everything from territorial defense to economic expansion, the IRGC-QF has been dedicated to a singular aim since its formation in 1990: carrying out the “extra-regional operations of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
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In other words, the IRGC-QF is the vanguard of terrorism and insurgency in the name of the Islamic Republic. And while the size of the force is small—just 10,000 to 15,000 men, less than 10 percent of the IRGC’s total forces of more than 125,000
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—it would be hard to overstate its contributions to global instability. The Quds Force is, quite simply, the purest expression of the Islamic Republic’s belief that it “plays a key role in world affairs as the standard bearer of revolutionary Islam and the guardian of oppressed Muslims (and even non-Muslims) everywhere.”
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PIVOT POINTS

In September 1980, less than two years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fledgling regime found itself at war. The cause was an invasion by the neighboring regime of Ba
athist dictator Saddam Hussein, which sought to seize the advantage and strike an early blow
against what it saw as an emerging ideological adversary. The resulting conflict lasted for most of the ensuing decade, and when it finally drew to a close in the late summer of 1988, the toll on Iran was enormous.

Officially, Iranian authorities estimated that they suffered close to 300,000 casualties as a result of the hostilities.
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Western sources, however, put the figure at significantly higher: half a million souls, or more.
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More than 500,000 others were physically or mentally disabled either during the war or in its aftermath.
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In all, the conflict may have cost Iran as much as $1 trillion—a devastating economic loss to the fledgling regime in Tehran.
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Nearly as significant was the war’s psychological impact. Khomeini’s revolution gained popularity because its virulent version of insurgent Islam was a compelling alternative to the Shah’s secular and stale authoritarianism. Yet in their first military outing, Iran’s holy warriors were bested by a secular adversary. The conflict left the Islamic Republic deeply traumatized, but it also helped instill a sense of unity among Iran’s populace. Iraq’s aggression and the West’s support of Saddam Hussein during the conflict bred in Tehran the sense that it was alone against the world.
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