Public Comment

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, commonly known in Iran as the Pasdaran, was created in 1979 by the Islamic Republic’s founding leader, Ayatollah Rouhalla Khomeini, who wanted it to function as a separate armed force from the Iranian military, which was then suspected of loyalty to the deposed Shah. As such, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, was charged with defending, both internally and externally, the Islamic principles of the theocratic regime of the mullahs. 

During the so-called Green Revolution of 2009, when protesters demonstrated by the hundreds of thousands in favour of reformist presidential candidates Moussavi and Karroubi, the Revolutionary Guard worked behind the scenes to assure, most likely by tampering with election results, that the hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner and assumed Iran’s presidency. During Ahmadinejad’s term of office, the IRGC significantly increased its hold on political and economic power in Iran. Indeed, so strong is the IRGC’s influence on political power today in Iran that according to Abbas Milani, Director of Stanford University’s Iranian Studies Program, the Iranian regime “clearly…believed ({n 2009){ it was going to lose control, and the IRGC and the Basij saved the day. The result is that the IRGC now has the upper hand. Khamenei, {the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader} knows that without the IRGC he’d be out of power in twenty-four hours.” 

Given how much power now resides in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, it is important to consider what role they may play in the current popular protests against the regime of the Islamic mullahs. On one hand, they are the creation of the regime’s founder. On the other hand, they have evolved over recent years as a political and economic force that is somewhat separate from the strict Islamic clerical regime. If at some point in the present situation the IRGC determined that the Islamic mullahs had definitively lost the support of the overwhelming population of Iranian citizens, what would it mean if the IRGC came out in favour of abolition of the Islamic Republic? How would the IRGC, designated by the US as a terrorist organization, position itself as supporters of the aspiration for democracy of the rebellious Iranian population? And how would the Iranian population, now totally disabused of more than forty years of rule under the Islamic Republic, react to any attempt by the IRGC to assume political preeminence in post-revolutionary Iran? These are the questions that confront Iranians — and anyone who cares about the situation in Iran — as we enter the fourth month of nationwide political protests in Iran against the current regime.