The IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp) is the most important part of the military. It’s supposed to guard the revolution: put down any internal revolts or coups. But it’s also the primary arm involved in places like Syria and Lebanon.
Among the information coming out after the fall of Assad one of the most interesting bits was on internal tensions inside the IRGC. It seems that the younger members are far more radical than the older guys currently in charge of the Republic. Khameini changed recruiting to invite only and upped indoctrination to 50% of training time, and, well, it worked. The younger members are true believers. They wanted to go into Syria and save it. They want more military action against Israel and find the missile strikes inadequate and pathetic.
Iranian leadership is renowned as cautious and conservative. They move slowly and think everything thru and risk little.
But the people who keep them in power aren’t like that: they’re happy to smash heads because they are true believers.
To make things worse, Khameini is 85. He has to arrange for a transition. And if he picks someone the youngsters won’t follow, Iran’s regime will be in great danger.
I’d say that the great problem with Iran during this last year and a half has been that it has been too cautious. Caution has served Iran well, but there are times for caution and there are times when for swift and decisive action. Iran has fumbled the war. They proved their missiles forces can break through Israel’s defenses, but have barely used them. They could have taken out Israeli air defenses and airfields directly if they were willing to be involved and not just operate thru proxies. Once they did so, Hezbollah’s strikes would have been much more effective.
The youngs were chomping to go fight and so were many of the Iran supported Iraqi militias, but they didn’t allow that. Khameini has repeatedly refused to get a nuclear deterrent, and Iran needs one. All along they have let Israel, the US and Turkey hold in the initiative and choose when and where the fighting would occur, only reacting, not forcing their tempo on the enemy. The result has been the massive weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah and the loss of Syria.
The youngs are right, and the olds are wrong. Iran needs to fight because just sitting their letting its proxies be taken out makes it look weak and untrustworthy and has degraded its actual strategic situation.
The best thing for Iran would be for the generational change to happen sooner, not later. Iran has enemies and it needs to fight, because those enemies are re-shaping the Middle East to massively reduce its power.
bruce wilder
The motivating idea or principle of U.S. hegemonic power as practiced is arrogant and self-righteous beyond the point of madness. It has no realistic or moral sense of the politically practical. Effectively, it pursues chaos as both a means and an end in itself.
I would not fault Iran for wanting to avoid being destroyed. Or for calculating that much of Iranian society and infrastructure would be destroyed in an all-out war with the U.S. and Israel. This is how normal people think, people who are not mad, as in morally insane.
The U.S. and Israel are very, very good at this hybrid war approach overall. Two and a half years since Russia began the SMO and more since Russia seemed able to calm the Syrian civil war “the Resistance” is struggling on many fronts. Romania, Georgia, Moldova are experiencing political destabilization. Syria is descending into chaos and the U.S. and Israel are opportunistically destroying infrastructure and military capability.
If you are morally rational country — possessed of enough elite leadership integrity for leaders to want to protect the general welfare and interests of a population — then the most immoral thing you can do is commit to a war you cannot reasonably expect to win. And I do not mean to say piously that nearly everyone involved end up losing in most wars, though that may be a true claim.
Iran is vulnerable to political destabilization as well as missiles and drones. They have been taught that their intelligence services and militias are vulnerable. Their economy, even in isolation, is vulnerable.
I suggest that we consider the possibility that Iran is cautious because Iran feels weak and vulnerable.
Ian Welsh
They probably do, though every war game of U.S. vs. Iran has shown Iran winning. But the cost would be huge.
But they themselves have noted that if you let the US take out other nations, well, they’ll eventually come for you…
Jessica
Interesting information.
I can’t blame the Iranian leadership if they are not willing to have their major cities levelled. Or to be the one to find out how little it might take to get the Israelis to turn their nukes loose.
Same way that no county in the EU is willing to be the one to bell the cat in Brussels (finance, not military).
And Russia has been very careful to not provoke the US.
Carborundum
Two key differences between the new firebrands and the oldest generation – they’ve never seen a regime overthrown and they’ve never been on the receiving end of really serious ordnance. They’d do well to spend some time reflecting on their stunning unpopularity and the extent to which the populace is openly talking about a life after their demise.
bruce wilder
War games showing Iran “winning” a battle scenario are not dispositive or even all that relevant. The U.S. has “lost” every war it is has fought basically since the invasion of Grenada, and it hasn’t mattered. The U.S. stopped trying to win wars with Vietnam. The “war on terror” initiated at the beginning of the 21st century was just about creating chaos, as I said above. The Narrative of “the Good War” (WWII) had been fully co-opted as a cover story and a means to new and sociopathic ends.
In some very important ways — at least this is what I hope and expect — we are nearing the end-game for the neoliberal decadence of a collapsing Empire, an Empire created by the success of WWII and the subversion of the idealism that animated the economic and political reform program in which WWII was embedded. Taking the long view, WWII was fought against a coda of the final decay of the reactionary international order that had held since the Napoleonic Wars had exhausted the idealism of the French Revolution.
Lots of us are confused by the hold that The Narrative has on us. I keep making this point, but it bears repetition I think: the vacuum of factual information and deep analysis makes people try to make sense of events by fitting to favored narrative templates. Encouraging this has become the technique of professional propagandists. It is very confusing, I am sure, to have to find off accusations of being pro-Assad or a Putin-lover because you are horrified by seeing the chaos ensue as Al-Qaeda destroys even a barely functioning authoritarian government while Israel (Jews!! the iconic victims of WWII) perpetuates a genocide.
Putin is not “a good guy”. It is really not a politically healthy development that morally rational international behavior has become the responsibility of authoritarian leaders. But, here we are. I am appalled that the U.S. is depending on Trump, but many of my friends are still drowning in their TDS and their love for a rancid version of “normal”. They refuse to see Obama or Biden or, say, Hillary Clinton as what she objectively is: a horrible, corrupt political actor and agent of chaos.
I really still think WWII was, in objective fact, “the good war” in important ways, fought as it had to be, to secure an unconditional surrender and the demolition of a decayed political order that had risen like a vampire from the grave of feudal empires dug by the First World War. That doesn’t mean that I think it would be wise for China and Russia and Iran — again a crazy casting choice for the hope of humanity — to exchange patient restraint for open confrontation with regimes which appear to be in the hands of a sociological class of people, many of whom have lost their grip on moral rationality. It is a very dangerous business to apply game theory to confrontations with people who have lost their sense of moral responsibility.
footnote: the one good thing I can say about Trump is that he has expressed the only morally valid sentiment about the War in Ukraine: he has said he just wants the killing to stop. I don’t believe he has the integrity or the strength of will to follow up on that sentiment and overcome his advisors, etc. But, I credit him for saying it. And, I think it is very revealing about many other commenters that his is a lonely voice in articulating this view.
Tallifer
Most Iranian youth (as well as their parents) want a second revolution to bring true freedom and equal rights: this toxic minority of Islamist young men want only death and destruction. If (cross fingers) Syria can make the transition to the first democratic and open Arab society, the Arab spring will bloom again (along with many non-Arab Muslim countries)
marku52
Enough already. Build the nuke. Test it in the desert. It is the only thing the US respects.
different clue
I would tend to support the cautious note that Carborundum offers. Just because a nation’s goverstate opposes another nation/goverstate which one oneself also opposes or feels opposed to . . . does not make that opposing goverstate liked by its subjects or not-nasty in its own right.
From way over here in my position of relative safety in SouthEast Michigan, I can say that I did not mind seeing the Syrian Arab Republic’s goverstate forces barrel-bombing mass quantities of civilians because those civilians were pro-CLEJ and if the Syrian Arab Army and Syrian Arab Air Force had to kill anywhere up to a million pro-CLEJ civilians in order to get through them and reach the CLEJihadis and eliminate them, then those million civilians were regretable but necessary.
That doesn’t mean the Assad Dynasty government wasn’t nasty and attrocious. More and more stories of the level of recreational torture and murder conducted in all the Assad Dynasty’s torture dungeons will be coming out. It will be hard for supporters of the Axis of Resistance to pretend those stories are just propaganda.
The same may well be true for Iran. How many Iranians now consider themselves to be unwilling and unhappy subjects of the Isamic Republic? Early in its history, the Islamic Republic mass murdered many thousands of Iranian Communist Party members ( Tudeh), for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudeh_Party_of_Iran ) How many of them left behind family members who remain unhappy campers to this very day? How many other Iranians have been turned into unhappy campers by the Islamic Republic’s ” Islamic behavior and dress code” enforcement nastiness?
At what point do foreign sympathisers with the Axis of Resistance find themselves wanting to fight to the last Iranian, the last Syrian, etc? And how might the unhappy-camper Syrians and Iranians feel and respond if they decide they are being proxy-volunteered for a war-to-the-death by foreign sympathisers of the Axis of Resistance?
Especially if they overthrow or overwhelm their own unpleasant rulers?
Ian Welsh
If no one’s required to take the hit required to stop a genocide, then the genocide will succeed.
Carborundum
I’m having this flashback to 2004-2007 when all the cool kids were absolutely over the top with their condemnation of R2P doctrine. I would wonder if they have any buyer’s remorse if I thought their memories were that long. Bitchy of me? Probably.
I terms of nuclear Iranian nuclear capability, I think actually assembling and testing a weapon would be a much worse strategy than maintaining their currently reasonably robust breakout capability.
This is not 1974 and they are not India – the aim points required to very significantly degrade their capacity are quite well known and *very* reachable (comparing what the IAF already hit with old IAEA pubs speaks volumes about messages being sent). That would absolutely only buy an adversary time, but the regime is on treacherous enough ground that they should be very wary of taking [another] major hit in an area they have previously sold as a strength. Any aspiring young IRGC strategist would be well advised to internalize the notion that committed resources are inherently less valuable than uncommitted resources.
Forecasting Intelligence
Read an interesting piece the other day saying that many in Iran now want to end the revolutionary Islamism doctrine and shift to a nationalistic foreign policy based on interest.
Essentially Iran will become like India or Turkey.
That’s the smart thing to do but it would involve shifting to a two-state solution on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, something that most of the world is signed up to (including China, Russia, Gulf States etc).
Looks like it can only happen once the Supreme Leader dies (which should be soon).