Iran’s Quiet Coup

When Iran’s parliament confirmed 18 of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s 21 candidates for his Cabinet in early September, only those who sift the tea leaves of Iranian politics noticed the confirmation of Haidar Moslehi, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), as Minister of Intelligence and Security. For decades, the ministry represented a check on the IRGC’s rise toward becoming Iran’s most powerful institution: domestic intelligence was out of the guards’ reach. With Moslehi’s appointment, there is nobody left to guard the guards.

The guards’ ascendance, likened by some to a bloodless military coup, has been one of the most striking aspects of Iran’s recent development. It has come largely at the expense of the Islamic clergy; while Iran remains a theocratic state, the men in turbans now perhaps wield less temporal power — especially over the economy — than those in uniform.

(See the top 10 players in Iran’s power struggle.)

Formed in 1979 as Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini’s personal militia, the IRGC acquired a reputation for suicidal human-wave attacks in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. After Khomeini’s death in 1989, the government of then President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought to channel the guards’ fervor into reconstruction projects, allowing them to dip into the coffers of massive religious and charitable foundations known as bonyads; in time, the guards came to control the foundations themselves.

Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, continued to show the guards love, ensuring they got the latest military hardware and best facilities. They even set up their own university. Now the guard — sepah in Farsi — has evolved into what a study by the Rand Corp.’s National Defense Research Institute describes as an “expansive socio-political-economic conglomerate whose influence extends into virtually every corner of Iranian political life and society.” Its commercial interests run into the billions of dollars and range from massive infrastructure projects to laser eye surgery. And in addition to the Intelligence Ministry, guardsmen control the ministries of Defense, Oil and the Interior.

For the U.S., the IRGC’s rise presents both threats and opportunities. The sepah is responsible for the very things that most concern Washington: Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons and its support of terrorism. Guardsmen hold several key positions in the Supreme National Security Council, through which they are thought to control the levers of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. And an IRGC unit known as the Quds Force provides training and weapons to Hizballah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories and the Mahdi Army in Iraq. But some analysts think that growing commercial interests may have taken the edge off the guards’ religious zealotry, which, if true, might make them open to dialogue one day. “They are pretty practical; they use ideology as a tool,” says Mark Fowler of Persia House, which monitors Iranian developments. “They support the Islamic revolution because it has been good to them, but they are not raving fanatics.” Says Hillary Mann Leverett, a former director of Iran and Afghanistan affairs in George W. Bush’s National Security Council: “These people are not just shock troops for the regime. They are a much more sophisticated organization.”

See the top 10 players in Iran’s power struggle.

See pictures of Iran’s presidential elections and their turbulent aftermath.

Small but Powerful
Only about 120,000 strong, the IRGC is dwarfed by Iran’s regular military forces. But its leadership — including Mohammad Ali Jafari, the top commander; his deputy, Mohammad Hejazi; and the leader of the Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani — were personally appointed by Khamenei and mirror his deeply conservative views. The IRGC leadership has been consistently hostile to reformist politicians, partly because of its innate conservatism but also, conceivably, because its leaders are ferociously opposed to any reforms that could undermine their commercial interests. In 2004, when a Turkish contractor won a multibillion-dollar bid to expand Tehran’s airport, the guards simply shut down the airport until the job was given to them.

Ahmadinejad and the IRGC have formed a mutually supportive partnership. Some experts think the President was a sepah during the Iran-Iraq war; others say he was attached to a lesser, auxiliary militia. But whatever the history, after his victory in the presidential election of 2005, the guards’ leadership rallied behind him. “He was popular, a populist, incorruptible — a good front man for the IRGC,” says Alireza Nader, a co-author of the Rand study. Grateful for their support and determined to keep it, Ahmadinejad expanded the guards’ role in security, putting them in charge of the Basij militia, which has an estimated 3 million members. Ahmadinejad also showered the guards with lucrative government projects. If the jobs didn’t go directly to Khatam al-Anbiya — the guards’ construction arm — or one of scores of its subsidiaries, they went to companies run by a network of former guardsmen. Nader estimates the value of such contracts in “the tens of billions” of dollars.

(See the top 10 Ahmadinejad-isms.)

As Ahmadinejad’s first term came to an end this year, the guards knew which side their bread was buttered. “Ahmadinejad used the oil windfall to indulge [them], so they didn’t want to see him lose power,” says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Their commercial interests made the guards hostile toward Ahmadinejad’s main challenger, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, whose campaign promised economic reform. Sobhe Sadeq, the IRGC-owned newspaper, threw its weight behind the incumbent and, even before the vote, warned that any “velvet revolution” would be firmly suppressed. When Mousavi’s supporters took to the streets after the election, however, the leadership chose to deploy the Basij against them rather than send out the élite guardsmen. “Shooting into crowds of Iranians would tarnish [the guards’] reputation as protectors of the state,” says Persia House’s Fowler.

So far, the tactics used in the summer seem to have worked. Between them, the guards, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad appear to have warded off the most serious threat to the Islamic revolution. Still, there may be limits to the IRGC’s power. Its domination of the nation’s economy has been compared to the army’s in China in the early 1990s. But in 1998, alarmed by the corruption in companies run by the People’s Liberation Army, China’s then President, Jiang Zemin, ordered the army to sell its businesses.

Could that happen in Iran? Khamenei has called for greater privatization of the economy, but there’s no indication the IRGC or Ahmadinejad is paying him any heed: with the President now even more in their debt, the guards are likely to get larger slices of the economic pie. “The dysfunctional, closed nature of the Iranian economy suits the [guards]. There’s less competition,” says Fowler. It also allows them to strong-arm private businesses. “It’s gotten much worse in the past four years,” says a market analyst in Tehran. “They’ve become a mafia.”

Since the guards’ power is unlikely to recede, some Iranians have started wondering if it might be a virtue. The dream goes like this: when Khamenei dies, the guards are so thoroughly in control of political and economic levers that they don’t need the imprimatur of a Supreme Leader. So they send the mullahs back to their mosques and appoint one of their own as President, the better to protect their interests. In Iran, it is possible to see that as an improvement. The guards, some hope, would provide an efficient government.

But it is only a dream. The guards have it good: a tame President and a Supreme Leader who needs them at least as much as they need him. Better get used to them.

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