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Tracing Paradoxes in the Evolution of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Henry Johnson Claremont Mckenna College

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Tracing Paradoxes in the Evolution of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Henry Johnson Claremont Mckenna College Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2014 Islamic Nationalism: Tracing Paradoxes in the Evolution of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Henry Johnson Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Johnson, Henry, "Islamic Nationalism: Tracing Paradoxes in the Evolution of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps" (2014). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 911. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/911 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CLAREMONT MCKENNA COLLEGE Islamic Nationalism: Tracing Paradoxes in the Evolution of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps SUBMITTED TO Professor Heather Ferguson AND DEAN NICHOLAS WARNER BY Henry Johnson for SENIOR THESIS 2014 4/28/14 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….1 CHAPTER ONE FRICTION WITH BAZARGAN AND BANISADR…………………………………….6 CHAPTER TWO WAR OF REVOLUTIONARY SELF-DEFENSE………………………………………23 CHAPTER THREE EXPORTING THE REVOLUTION…………………………………………………….53 CHAPTER FOUR THE RISE OF PRAGMATISM…………………………………………………………83 CHAPTER FIVE REVOLUTION AND STRATEGY……………………………………………………115 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………..147 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………..150 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I owe thanks to my thesis reader, Professor Heather Ferguson. Her deep expertise in Islam and its role in politics and statecraft has been a boon to the quality of this paper. She helped give my analysis a degree of nuance that I could not have attained without her. Her willingness to edit many drafts and provide constructive comments was likewise a blessing. I am also grateful for her kindness and patience, which made an otherwise stressful process enjoyable and more relaxed. I would also like to thank the history department at Claremont McKenna College, where I have felt at home intellectually and socially since day one and learned career- defining skills. Lastly, I thank my parents and family for their loving support and for encouraging my interests in history from a young age. ABSTRACT This paper presents a narrative history of Iranian revolutionary ideology and its evolving impact on foreign policy. It looks at this history primary through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, an institution established after the revolution and designed to defend the Islamic political order in Iran as well as oppressed Muslims abroad. The Revolutionary Guard, or Guard for short, became a focal point in the efforts of Iranian revolutionaries to export their ideology and has evolved overtime into a politicized and unconventional military force, often associated in the media with supporting foreign terrorists and militants. This paper argues that the Guard has implemented revolutionary ideology in an arc from radical to pragmatic. Unlike past literature on the Guard, this paper situates the organization’s institutional history in Iran’s broader political context and concentrates on its relationships to and differences with other factions. A persistent aim is also to analyze terminology such as radical and pragmatic and provide theoretical foundations for the use of such terms. 1 Introduction Discussions of the Iranian nuclear program dominate the current discourse on US- Iran relations. While this nuclear program remains an important security concern for the US, overladen attention to it has obscured the intricate historical reasons behind both the program itself and the US obsession with its evolution. Studying Iran’s development of enrichment capabilities without reference to the country’s complicated post-1979 history puts analysts at the risk of drawing conclusions about its purpose and possible effects based on specious premises. Defective analysis could have disastrous consequences, in terms of leading the US and Israel into a potentially avoidable military confrontation with Iran. This thesis does not provide a direct answer for why Iran has developed nuclear power nor even address its nuclear program. Instead, it seeks to explain how the history and influence of revolutionary ideology shapes Iranian foreign policy. It distills the premises of Iranian politics and foreign policy and explicates a set of terms descriptive of a range of political actors and operatives. Its final analysis will hopefully help those interested to better grasp Iran’s geopolitical insecurities and the significance of ideology to its policies. Following the revolution in 1979, in which the Iranian people deposed the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and set in motion events with global consequences, Iran entered a period of vast political opportunity. The prominent clerical faction of the revolutionary coalition advocated a drastic departure from the Shah’s monarchical political order. Their leader, the charismatic and popular Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had crafted a theory of Islamic government which he aspired to implement in Iran. He 2 promoted Islamic government as a panacea to the problems of not only Iran, but also of all oppressed Muslims. The clerical faction fastened the rise of its own political star to a new militarized vision, establishing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which consolidated various anti-Shah militias supportive of Khomeini’s ideology. The clerics intended for the nascent organization to defeat internal political challengers and to furnish Islamic Revolutions abroad. The Khomeinist faction, in tandem with the Guard, succeeded in asserting control over the chaotic post-revolution political process after undermining more moderate contenders. They deemed the first two post-revolution governments, those of Mehdi Bazargan and Seyyad Abolhassan Banisadr, as insufficiently radical and exploited the 1979 hostage crisis, as well as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980, to maneuver their demise. The Khomeinist faction enshrined their leader’s ideology in the new constitution, although not to the exclusion of all other ideas, enough to provide a legal mandate for executing revolutionary policy. With an ideological foothold in the constitution and moderate factions sidelined, the Guard conducted revolutionary policies in the Arab peninsula and Iraq. Once Banisadr retreated from an overwhelming political scene, the Guard took control of the war effort against Hussein and escalated it with a revolutionary design. Iran’s revolutionary policies abroad did not, for the most part, elicit the grand reaction among the oppressed masses anticipated by revolutionaries in Khomeini’s party and the Guard. At a certain point in the early to mid-1980s, the revolutionary state stopped exerting itself to export Islamic Revolution. This trend accelerated after the lackluster end to the Iran-Iraq war in 1988. After expending thousands of lives in Iraqi battlefields and cloistering the country in economic and diplomatic isolation, Khomeini 3 decided to stop pressing for victory over Hussein and finally sued for peace. These less- than auspicious outcomes of revolutionary policy precipitated a shift in favor of national self-interest. The Guard predicated foreign policies upon national, as opposed to revolutionary, interests, but still focused on aligning Iran’s foreign policy with revolutionary principles. An ideological prism colored their pursuit of national interests. The Guard viewed Iran’s regional adversaries as imperialist collaborators, lacking independence or self-identity, and denying Iran a role in regional security despite its undeniable geopolitical importance. It connected these states’ collective disdain for Iran to their dependency upon the US. Iranians perceived the US as building an exclusionary regional system of security to contain the appeal of an ideology that stressed true independence from outside powers. The suspicion that the US sought to kill authentic political ideologies and dominate regional security affairs has locked the two countries into a strategic and ideological struggle. The transition from fomenting revolutions to pursuing national interests did not necessarily mean Iran extricated ideology from its policies. A state that attaches national interests to an ideologically-constructed notion of the nation cannot truly separate the two. If the object of national interests is to preserve the state, and the state embodies an ideological concept, then the object of national interests is to preserve an idea, or at least a particular embodiment of that idea. This sort of tautology means the national- ideological tension concerns the nation-state and the ideology itself. A state founded on an idea expresses ideological qualities, but is not and cannot be that idea in and of itself. As a brief example, the US was founded in a revolutionary insistence on the idea of the equality and freedom of the individual, but, initially excluded everyone but white, 4 propertied men from this definition. As the ancient Greek philosopher Plato argued, the completeness of ideas is limited to their theoretical and intelligible dimension and not transferrable to sensory reality. In Iran’s case, the Islamic Republic was formed as a revolutionary state based on ideological principles expounded by Ayatollah Khomeini. The ideology, in and of itself, is a universalist call for Muslims to untether themselves from secular political theories and cultural customs and to erect Islamic sovereignties. It conceptualizes the nation-state as a vessel for realizing a future utopia
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