Iran's Deadly Ambition. Ilan Berman
Republic is now decisively transitioning beyond “decades of messianic fervour.”2 The unspoken message, reflecting the emerging political consensus on both sides of the Atlantic, is crystal clear: there’s no reason to fear the Islamic Republic any longer.
The lure of this idea is undeniable. If it could somehow be rehabilitated, Iran would become a powerful Western ally in the Middle East and a lucrative trading partner for the world. Yet the notion is as misguided as it is appealing. Although the Iranian regime is currently engaged in diplomacy with the West over its nuclear program, there is no indication that it has abandoned the core ideological tenets of Khomeini’s revolution, which emphasize antagonism toward the West. Indeed, Iran—like Russia and China—is a revisionist power that actively seeks to remake its immediate region and the world beyond. Thus, as political scientist Walter Russell Mead astutely observed, “Iran wishes to replace the current order in the Middle East—led by Saudi Arabia and dominated by Sunni Arab states—with one centered on Tehran.”3 Iran, in other words, possesses a distinct manifest destiny. And today, even as the international community is preoccupied with its nuclear program, the Islamic Republic is forging ahead with its quest for global influence.
A REVOLUTIONARY PEDIGREE
Iran’s contemporary, confrontational worldview dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when Ayatollah Khomeini languished in exile, first in Iraq and then in France. It was during this time that he codified his ideas about the need for Shiite empowerment and global Islamic revolution. The result, a slender volume entitled Islamic Government, went on to serve as the template for Khomeini’s Islamic Republic following the successful 1979 revolution.4
In short order, after Khomeini’s partisans seized power in Tehran, the ideas about domestic governance contained in Islamic Government became the foundation for his new religion-based state. Khomeini himself became both the country’s political leader and its spiritual model. A sea change took place in foreign policy as well. Iran’s new clerical rulers believed fervently that their government marked the start of a global caliphate and that Iran’s revolution would augur the dominance of Islam “in all the countries of the world.”5 Accordingly, the country’s constitution proclaimed that the Islamic Republic’s armed forces “will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God’s way; that is, extending the sovereignty of God’s law throughout the world.”6 Iran’s radical vision of Islamic governance, in other words, was intended from the start to be an export commodity.
During the tumultuous decade of the 1980s, as Khomeini’s revolutionaries consolidated power at home, the principle of “exporting the revolution” became a cardinal regime priority. Its importance was demonstrated in the fact that, despite the expense of a bloody, grinding eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the fledgling Islamic Republic sunk colossal resources into becoming a hub of “global resistance.” In keeping with Khomeini’s declaration that “Islam will be victorious in all the countries of the world,”7 the Iranian regime threw open its borders to a bevy of third-world radicals, from Palestinian resistance fighters to Latin American leftist revolutionaries. These disparate factions (many of which hailed from outside the Muslim world) gravitated to the Islamic Republic, where they obtained military, political, and economic support from an Iranian government eager to demonstrate its revolutionary bona fides and its commitment to a global Islamic order.8
Perhaps the most significant development during this period, however, was Iran’s creation of a proxy force in Lebanon to help spread its radical global vision. Forged from disparate Shiite militias fighting in Lebanon’s chaotic civil war, this “Army of God,” or Hezbollah in Arabic, became a powerful consolidated militia committed to Iran’s worldview. The group’s charter, published in 1985, pledged formal allegiance to Ayatollah Khomeini himself and, more broadly, to the Velayat-e Faqih, the “rule of the jurisprudent” form of government he institutionalized in Iran.9
Ever since, Hezbollah has served as a key prong of Iranian policy. At times working in tandem with—and at others, independent from—Iran’s formal revolutionaries in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Lebanese militia has sought to further the regime’s agenda of “resistance” against Israel and the West, most directly by targeting Israeli and Jewish victims. In exchange, it has been rewarded lavishly, with the Iranian regime bankrolling the militia to the tune of between $100 and $200 million annually for many years.10 This assistance has given the group global reach and has made it, in the words of former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, the “A-team of terrorists.”11
The death of Khomeini in the late 1980s and a period of sustained economic and political stagnation in the 1990s led many in the West to believe that Iran had entered a “post-revolutionary era.”12 That hope, however, turned out to be fleeting. Over the past dozen years, Iran’s revolutionary fervor has returned with a vengeance.
VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION
With the exception of Iran’s supreme leader, no political actor is more important in shaping Iran’s contemporary politics and its place in the world than the regime’s feared clerical army, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepāh-e Pāsdārān-e Enqelāb-e Eslāmi), also known as the IRGC. Originally conceived by Ayatollah Khomeini as a revolutionary vanguard capable of spreading his political model beyond Iran’s borders,13 the IRGC is today far more than simply a national army.
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.14 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.15 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.16 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.17 All told, the IRGC is believed to command as much as one-third of Iran’s entire economy.18
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.19 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.20 Ahmadinejad maintained his contacts with the Guards following his active duty service, and Iranian military