The Iranian Government Has No Sway Over the Revolutionary Guards

“The International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] was of the opinion that at first the [Iranian] military wanted to enrich uranium but then the civilians joined them. In early November 2003, when I was in Vienna, Mohamed ElBaradei [the IAEA’s Director General] told me in a private meeting that if we publicly confirmed this he promises he would settle the issue. I responded sharply and said that these were baseless fantasies. ElBaradei said that maybe they have been doing things that we knew nothing about.”

Hassan Rouhani, “National Security and Nuclear Diplomacy,” 2011

 

In the last few weeks, the war of words between the United States and Iran has reached its most tense point in three decades, with the US accusing Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of attacking oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman and Iran denying the charges and publicly insulting US officials. One question, however, stands out: Is the Iranian government actually aware of the full range of the Revolutionary Guards’ activities?

The Iranian government has said that it had no reason to attack the tankers. The Guards Corps has also denied being involved, but the American government has ignored these denials. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have supported the American claim and the UK has stated that it has no reason to doubt the American conclusion that Iran was behind the attacks.

The IRGC’s long history of taking action and commenting on issues that fall outside the remit of the conventional armed forces of a country means that when anything unusual happens in the Middle East, the IRGC is the prime suspect. And Islamic Republic officials’ repeated insistence on denying involvement, even when facts emerge to prove the opposite, also puts Iran and its leaders under suspicion. 

The truth is that the government of the Islamic Republic holds no sway over the Revolutionary Guards. The government, as the official representative of the Islamic Republic in the international community, cannot escape responsibility for the actions of the Revolutionary Guards, but it plays no role in decisions the IRGC takes. At least the last six administrations in Iran have not been able to claim to be fully informed about the IRGC’s actions outside the borders of Iran, or, if they have been informed, they have approved of these actions. For instance, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was in tune with Ayatollah Khamenei’s policies and views more than any other president in the history of the Islamic Republic, was against Iran’s military presence in Syria, and he was still ignored [Persian link]. Not only did the operation continue, it was upgraded from an advisory role to full military engagement.

With the help of the Russian military and remnants of the Syrian army, the Revolutionary Guards’ expeditionary Quds Force succeeded in taking back most of the Syrian territory occupied by ISIS, although then the IRGC’s bases came under aerial attacks by the Israeli air force. At first the Iranian government denied its attacks in Syria, but then IRGC confirmed it. This showed that either the government was not informed of the situation or the Guards did not want the government to officially react to its extraterritorial activities.

After the Guards confirmed the attacks, Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, mocked Israel, saying that one of the targets that the Israelis had hit was a carpet warehouse, not a missile site [Persian link]. And in January, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country was "more determined than ever to act against Iran in Syria," General Mohammad Ali Jafari, head of the Revolutionary Guards, vowed that Iran would stay in Syria as long as necessary and as long as the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad wanted the forces to remain.

The government’s ignorance about the Guards’ activities has been so dire that when the Syrian president visited Tehran in February 2019, President Rouhani was not aware it was happening until, according to his chief of staff, Assad stepped into the courtyard of Rouhani’s office [Persian link]. The meeting between the two was so unexpected that there was not enough time to place a Syrian flag in the room or to invite Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to the meeting. Zarif never met Assad while he was in Iran and was so offended that he threatened to resign.

This was not the first time that Syria emerged as a point of contention between the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guards. After the Guards’ missile attack on ISIS positions in Syria in retaliation for the terror attacks on the Iranian parliament and Ayatollah Khomeini's mausoleum, Mahmoud Alavi, the Minister of Intelligence, claimed it was his ministry that had supplied the Guards with coordinates for the targets. But the IRGC issued a statement denying Alavi’s claim, saying that the Quds Force agents on the ground in Syria were the “only” people who identified the targets.

Occasionally the government has chosen to remain silent as a sign of protest when the IRGC takes action or makes claims that the government knows nothing about but considers to be detrimental to its policies. For instance, in June 2016, after the nuclear agreement was signed but before it came into effect, the Revolutionary Guards seized two US Navy boats and 10 American sailors whose vessels had strayed into Iranian waters and then released a humiliating video of the captured Americans on their knees. “I was very angry. I was very, very frustrated and angry that [the video] was released," US Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN. "I raised it immediately with the Iranians. It was not put out by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the government directly; it was put out, I think, by the military over there, [the IRGC] who is opposed to what we are doing."

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump pointed to the humiliation of the US sailors as a means of criticizing President Obama’s policy on Iran. In May 2018, Trump first withdrew the US from the nuclear agreement and then re-imposed the old sanctions against the Islamic Republic, as well as adding new ones. And on the anniversary of the withdrawal, he declared the Revolutionary Guards to be a terrorist organization, the first time that part of the armed forces of a country has been designated as terrorists.

The Revolutionary Guards’ arrest of environmentalists is another example of the Iranian government opposing its actions — and the IRGC simply ignoring the government. After Kavous Seyed Emami, one of the arrested environmental scientists, died in suspicious circumstances at Evin Prison, numerous governments accused the Islamic Republic of violating the most basic human rights. Isa Kalantari, Vice President and the head of Iran’s Environmental Protection Agency, said that the Intelligence Ministry had dismissed the charges of espionage against the detainees and the Supreme National Security Agency, headed by the president, agreed with the Intelligence Ministry, but the Revolutionary Guards chose not to listen to the government and kept the environmentalists in custody.

The IRGC is part of the Islamic Republic’s armed forces, but not only it is not accountable to the government, in the last two decades it has been used by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei as a tool to control and sidestep the government. In the first decade after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a member of the IRGC held a ministerial role in the cabinet and relations between the Guards and the government were more rational. But since the constitution was revised and after 10 years of Khamenei’s leadership, the situation has changed completely.

One very early example of the Revolutionary Guards’ disdain for the government was the attack on a Soviet ship in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. At the time, Ali Khamenei was the president and he was not informed about the attack beforehand. So that is perhaps why, during one of the latest examples, Bashar al-Assad’s recent Tehran visit, Hassan Rouhani opted for silence rather than voicing an opinion, which would have further highlighted that the government is out of the loop when it comes to the Revolutionary Guards.

Rouhani himself has practically confessed to this. In his book National Security and Nuclear Diplomacy, originally published in 2011, he talks of government ignorance as being something that happens regularly. He wrote that when he was Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, he witnessed that the government lacked enough information about “certain crises” affecting the country and if plans were made “somewhere else,” the government had not been informed about them, with high-level government officials being caught off guard. He describes this ignorance as a “structural challenge” to the Islamic Republic.

In a situation where the Iranian president is ignorant about the actions of the Revolutionary Guards or opposes them, how can one expect other countries to believe it when the government denies those actions took place?

 

Related Coverage:

Why the US Cannot Believe Iran's Denials, July 1, 2019

Sanctions Against Zarif: How Far Will They Go?, June 27, 2019

Sanctions on Ayatollah Khamenei are Much More Than Symbolic, June 25, 2019

The Revolutionary Guards: The Usual Suspects in the Persian Gulf, June 24, 2019

Guards Fear Internal Turmoil as Much as US Attack, June 21, 2019

Does Iran Really Want to Negotiate with the US?, June 21, 2019

Will Iran Violate the Nuclear Deal on June 27?, June 17, 2019

Decoding Iran’s Politics: The JCPOA Ultimatum, May 16, 2019

Iran's Partial Withdrawal from the Nuclear Agreement: What are the Consequences?, May 8, 2019

How did Countries Deal with Iran During Previous Sanctions?, August 7, 2018

Decoding Iran’s Politics: The 12-Point US Ultimatum, July 6, 2018

Can Iran Legally Close the Strait of Hormuz?, July 5, 2018