The Warriors Of Islam

Iran's Revolutionary Guard

Kenneth Katzman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000306965
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book shows that the revolutionary guard has resisted professionalization on the key aspect of war decision making. It explains how the Guard was able to resist ideological dilution despite its need to adopt a rationalized and complex organizational structure.

1 The Guard as Revolutionary Institution

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution in Iran, died on June 3, 1989, but his regime not only survived his death but apparently achieved a relatively orderly transition of power. This is largely because Khomeini institutionalized the Islamic revolution in Iran. One of the most important institutions the revolution has produced is the Islamic Revolution ary Guard Corps (IRGC; Pasdaran Enqelab-e-Islam). The Revolutionary Guard is one of the strongest institutions the Islamic revolution has produced; a primary instrument for promoting the goals of the Islamic revolution and Khomeini; and, unique among revolutionary armed forces formed in other major social revolutions, it has become a relatively complex and cohesive organization without losing its ideological zeal.

To analyze the Guard's strength as a revolutionary institution, a distinct framework of analysis is needed, one that will permit rigorous presentation of what is known and can be demonstrated to be true about the Revolutionary Guard.¹ Such a framework will facilitate the analysis of the Guard as a revolutionary institution and as a unique revolutionary armed force. It will be necessary to supplement the framework, where applicable, with work on the role of the military in politics and political development by other scholars.² Relevant as well, particularly for comparing the Revolutionary Guard to other revolutionary armed forces is the work on revolutionary militaries. For example, John Ellis measures the strength and success of such forces by the degree to which they were able to identify the personal interests of their fighters with the goals of the revolutions that produced them.³ Jonathan Adelman argues that a revolutionary armed force, because of its zeal, is more militarily effective than its prerevolutionary predecessor.⁴ For purposes of this analysis, however, the most important observer of revolutionary armed forces is Katharine Chorley, who delineates stages through which revolutionary armies must pass in order to defend the revolution's gains and prosecute revolutionary war.⁵ Chorley argues that a revolutionary armed force inevitably becomes professionalized and loses its revolutionary zeal and ideological character. This is essentially an adaptation of Weber's concept of the routinization of charisma, in which the ideological zeal of an institution is dampened as the institution develops and becomes increasingly regularized and bureaucratized.⁶ Others argue that the interests of the organization, although instrumental in perpetuating ideology, ultimately take prece dence over ideology when ideological purity and organizational interests conflict.⁷ It will be shown that the Revolutionary Guard, to some extent, refutes these latter assertions.

Whether or not one accepts Huntington's argument that the outstriping of institutionalization by mobilization leads to political breakdown, it can certainly be argued that the durability of the Iranian revolution has lain, in part, in its ability to create revolutionary institutions to absorb the many social forces that contributed to the overthrow of the Shah. Despite Ay atollah Khomeini's unquestioned personal authority, the regime undoubtedly would have been unable to handle the many challenges it has faced had it not established an institutional base. These challenges included rebellion by several ethnic groups, insurrection by a major urban guerrilla opposition group, bombings in Tehran that resulted in the death of several major leaders in 1981, and a major invasion by Iraq. To demon strate this, the several other institutions produced by the revolution and their roles in strengthening the Islamic revolution must also be discussed.

By being able to organize, incorporate, and provide a channel for participation for the revolution's newly mobilized social forces, the Revolutionary Guard played a crucial role in defeating the above mentioned, as well as many other, severe threats to the revolution's very survival. Primarily, the Revolutionary Guard provided the hardline, pro-Khomeini nonclerics, many of whom had battled the Shah's regime as urban guerrillas in major cities, with an avenue for participation in the regime.⁸ It can be argued that without the Revolutionary Guard to absorb these non-clerical elements, the Islamic revolution might otherwise have been seen, to a greater degree than it was, as a seizure of power by Iran's clerics. Had such a perception taken hold, the clerics might well have been left de fenseless in the face of significant armed challenges and the revolution might have been very short-lived. It can be demonstrated, therefore, that the Guard was able to absorb Iran's newly mobilized social forces, especially those elements that were motivated by the revolution's ideology.

Political Resiliency

The first criteria of an institution's strength is that it is adaptable, or resilient, rather than rigid.⁹ The resiliency of an organization refers to its ability to survive challenges or adverse changes in its environment. The Guard's resiliency is demonstrated in its ability to incorporate not only revolutionary social forces but also social groups which do not necessarily share the Guard's revolutionary ethos. Its role in rallying the armed nonclerical militants to the defense of the clerical leaders was touched on briefly above. However, like other revolutionary armies that were forced to engage anti-revolutionary foreign powers, the Guard had to assimilate groups, such as conscripts, that did not identify with the Guard's zealous ideology or its battlefield strategy and tactics. The Guard needed these non-ideological groups, however, to provide manpower and skills for successful prosecution of the war.¹⁰

The Guard also provided an opportunity for advancement for ambitious youths who were less hardline than the typical rank and file Guard volunteer but viewed the Guard as a vehicle for upward mobility The Guard's ability to resist dilution of its ideological commitment while incorporating these elements is a key indicator of its strength as an institution, As Chorley argues after examining several revolutionary armies, the development of a unified, disciplined structure that enables revolutionary armed forces to prosecute a revolutionary war also militates against revolutionary zeal and ideological commitment.¹¹ This is analagous to Weber's argument that, as modernization proceeds, charisma becomes routinized and dampened by bureaucratic patterns of organization.¹² The case of the Revolutionary Guard refutes these arguments to some extent.

Related to the Guard's ability to absorb less ideologically motivated elements was the ease with which it accommodated commanders and troops from different social backgrounds and recruitment networks into the core of the organization. The original organizers of the Revolutionary Guard, such as Abbas Zamani (better known by his nom de guerre Abu Sharif) were urban anti-Shah guerrillas, many of whom had trained in Lebanon with the PLO.¹³ The core of the Guard then took on new elements from the private militias put together by the many revolutionary clerics from their mosque congregations.¹⁴ About a year after its official inauguration the Guard took control of and responsibility for the Basij Mustazafin, or Mobilization of the Oppressed.¹⁵ In general, the Basij was composed of very young and relatively old volunteers from the countryside and small towns, and were less well-educated than the somewhat more cosmopolitan core of the Revolutionary Guard.¹⁶ The varied social composition of the Guard, aside from demonstrating the Guard's institutional flexibility, was nevertheless a key constraint in the running of the war.

A comparison of the history of the regular military and its role under the Shah and his father, Reza Shah (creator of the Iranian army), with the formation and role of the Revolutionary Guard, shows why the Revolutionary Guard emerged as a far stronger and important institution than the regular military. Although the regular military, to its credit, was flexible enough to survive the revolution and emerge as a separate institution despite many calls for it to be dismantled completely,¹⁷ other prerevolutionary armies have carved out greater roles for themselves in their respective revolutionary armed forces' structures. For example, in contrast to the Iranian regular military, the officer corps and many units of the prerevolutionary French and Czarist armies were indispensable to the for mation of unified and effective revolutionary armies in France and the former Soviet Union, respectively.¹⁸ The Iranian regular armed forces also lost much of their prerevolutionary clout as an interest group in the regime and suffered repeated purges.¹⁹

The Guard's ability to make the transition to new missions is another indicator of its strength. Initially only an internal security militia, the Guard was able to later organize itself into military force to fight the war against Iraq. Moreover, once it had become a military force, the Revolutionary Guard was able to make some temporary pragmatic adjustments in its tactics in order to further its overall ideological goals. The Guard was able to modify its strategy and tactics for prosecuting the war according to such factors as tactical and strategic adjustments by the adversary, Iraq; infighting over war strategy among senior Iranian political leaders; and the US buildup in the Gulf in 1987. However, it will be argued that during the Iran-Iraq war and following the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the Guard tried to accomplish its overriding revolutionary objective—to an swer Khomeini's call for the defeat of Iraq and the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Husayn.

The Guard also proved itself adept at parrying the several political challenges it faced during its existence thus far, especially during its early years. The Guard's resiliency is shown in its political struggles with the Islamic Republic's first Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, its first President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, and with senior political leaders immediately following the battlefield catastrophes that led to the end of the war with Iraq will be analyzed.²⁰ There are numerous examples in which the Guard teamed up with its political allies—or even acted alone—to undermine those political leaders whom the Guard leaders viewed as compromising the goals of the Islamic revolution. Perhaps the most critical test of the Guard's institutional flexibility was how it adjusted to the ending of the Iran-Iraq war and retained its importance even though its main mission, the defeat of Iraq, had ended.

Bureaucratization of Revolution

Another criteria for demonstrating institutionalization is complexity.²¹ The multiplication and differentiation of organizational subunits and the diversity of the organization's functions indicate greater institutionalization. To a great degree, its acquisition of a progressively more complex organizational structure is a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Guard as Revolutionary Institution
• 2 The Political Environment
• 3 The Resiliency of the Revolutionary Guard
• 4 The Guard's Organizational Complexity
• 5 The Guard's Political Autonomy
• 6 Guard Factionalism
• 7 Conclusions and Prospects
• Bibliography
• Index