The revolution will be mercantilized.

• Author: Ansari, Ali
• Position: Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

Some years back on a research trip to Iran, I met a young man who had been conscripted into the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Commenting on his obviously secular upbringing, I was both intrigued and sympathetic. Yet contrary to all expectations, I found him not only sanguine but also somewhat relieved. He explained that the Guards were not what he had expected. For all their very public piety, they were by far the most relaxed and laid back of the military organizations in the Islamic Republic. The Guards had even implemented a form of flexible work hours. God forbid, had he gone into the regular military he might have been expected to adhere to a strict work regimen. It was all highly unorthodox and reassuringly Iranian. The IRGC wasn't a disciplined military organization in the Western sense of the term; it was a network, a brotherhood, in which personalities and connections mattered far more than structures. This did not make it necessarily less effective or indeed less dangerous as an instrument of coercion-the lack of transparent rules might, in fact, make it more so--but it was certainly a different type of beast.

Though the IRGC started its life as a defender of the revolution, over time the organization has become increasingly involved in commercial interests. Divisions within the Revolutionary Guard, particularly between its veterans and their heirs, have deepened. Now in bed with an increasingly radicalized elite in Iran, the IRGC seems to be less about protecting the people of the country and more about protecting its own material interests. Iran is rapidly becoming a security state.

The IRGC was formed in the heat of the Islamic Revolution; a voluntary paramilitary force of revolutionary devotees dedicated to the defense of the ideals of this uprising against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was to be dethroned in favor of an Islamic republic. The Guards were intended to provide a popular counterweight to the regular armed forces, which were widely seen as a creation of the shah's government and loyal to his cause. Ironically, Mohammad Reza Shah never fully trusted the senior officers within his armed forces and took measures to ensure they could not launch a coup--with the consequence that when he failed to provide leadership, the ranks of the military found themselves adrift in the turmoil of the revolution. Though they were never quite the threat that either the shah or the revolutionaries perceived them to be, for the Guard Corps, the armed forces were an alien being, organized as it was with all the accoutrements of a tightly run military structure.

The new "military" organization of the IRGC was to be something quite different: a brotherhood of the Iranian sansculottes, an organic military force that shunned all the normal paraphernalia of the regular armed forces. It was a haphazard entity, making up for its lack of organization with revolutionary zeal. And indeed, when the Iran-Iraq war started, the IRGC was largely responsible for blunting Baghdad's attack and providing bitter resistance in the early months of the conflict. It was this image of resistance that soon translated into the mythology of the Revolutionary Guard both among the guardsmen and the public alike: defenders of a country at war, the only barrier between victory and defeat. Like their French revolutionary predecessors, this people's army became intimately identified with battle. It is a mythology the Guards have enthusiastically preserved and extended--for good reason.

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As the war fighting went on, the IRGC and the regular military had to work increasingly closely with one another. The Guards undoubtedly conducted themselves with great courage during the initial stages of that bloody conflagration, and were essential to the defense of the country at a time when the regular armed forces were in disarray following the desertion, purges and execution of many senior officers as the new Iranian state looked to free itself of the shah's sympathizers, but it soon became clear that the war could not be conducted effectively with the Guards alone. And this was true in spite of the fact that they were supported by Basij militia (composed of additional volunteers who, being either too young or too old, were not technically eligible for service in either the Guard Corps or the army).

Eventually, even the IRGC had to resort to conscription, which continues to refill their ranks to this day. And successful military operations against Iraq ended up coming from a growing collaboration between the two military wings and their newly drafted membership. While every effort was made to emphasize the role of the Revolutionary Guard, the truth had to be increasingly acknowledged that the regular military had a skill set which was both necessary and useful. At the same time, for the duration of the war, the Guards jealously protected their independence and grew in time to become a parallel military structure complete with their own naval and airforce section.

The end of the war for the Guards, as for much of Iran, was something of an anticlimax. Iran had not been defeated, but despite the best efforts of the authorities, it proved difficult to convince people that Iran had achieved a victory. This naturally rebounded on the mythology of the fighting forces, who responded to such social ambivalence by stressing that it wasn't the winning that mattered, but the taking part. The process of fighting itself was invigorating and purifying, highlighting, as it did, all the best qualities of the austere Muslim fighting man. Such mythologies were to become even more important in light of the changes that were to be imposed during the presidency of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997).

Rafsanjani incorporated the Revolutionary Guard into the regular military structure, and ranks were introduced. The changes were bitterly resisted; many veterans felt it detracted from the whole point of the Guards, which was supposed to be a volunteer organization lacking the professionalism and ideological detachment of a uniformed military. Yet like many of Rafsanjani's reforms, the long-term consequences were in direct opposition to his intentions. There is little doubt that Rafsanjani wanted to bring the Guard Corps within the military structure, so that the organization could no longer continue in its revolutionary mind-set...