Change in Iran Will Come Through Evolution, Not Revolution

Much ink has been spilled on the pages of countless journals and newspapers over the preceding weeks about whether the current protests in Iran will spell the end of clerical authority. Like an enraptured audience watching a play, most observers identify with the protagonists of this tale, the Iranian youth and ethnic Kurds, against the antagonist enforcers of the Tehran regime. It is worth keeping in mind that the history of a country, especially one as ancient and as complex as Iran, is not a morality play. Western media outlets, focused exclusively on molding every story to fit a nihilistic narrative between oppressor and the oppressed, purposely omit relevant facts.

As wonderful as it would be if protestors risking life and limb were to gain their rights, the reality is much more bitter. Even if clerical authority were to miraculously collapse overnight, Iran would quickly transition to a military dictatorship under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, an entity whose reign would almost certainly be more brutal than the status quo. Despite the valiant efforts of those seeking change, clerical authority in Iran is stable and will remain unchanged for the foreseeable future. These are some of the explanations:  

The security services are vast, powerful, and vested in the regime

Those looking to recent history need only recall that the Pahlavi Monarchy collapsed in 1979 because the bulk of the military, below the general officer level, aligned themselves with Ayatollah Khomeini against the Shah. As a matter of fact, every powerful regime that has collapsed lost the support of the security services. The Soviet Union crumbled because the military sided with Boris Yeltsin and the new Russian authorities against the hardline plotters of the August 1991 coup.  The brutal regime of Nicolae Ceausescu fell only when the military switched sides and refused to suppress their fellow Romanians. The current climate in Iran is not the same.

Ayatollah Khomeini and his inner circle, spooked by the defection of the rank and file of the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces, structured the Islamic Republic differently. Paranoid that the regular Iranian military, the Artesh, may one day turn against them, just as they did against the Shah, the clerics created the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC is tasked with guarding the Islamic revolution against all enemies foreign and domestic. The IRGC is a parallel military structure with an air force, navy, and army. Furthermore, Iran’s nuclear and missile forces fall under the command of the IRGC. The IRGC also controls the Basij paramilitary militia which number in the hundreds of thousands. These are shock troops of the regime on the streets, in universities, and in public institutions and throughout the society. They are dressed in civilian clothing, wield batons, use guns, and are willing to crack down on opponents of the regime.

The same dynamic is at play with the intelligence services. The regime created a Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS) in 1984 to deal with domestic security and foreign intelligence collection and operations. Nevertheless, in 2009 the IRGC intelligence apparatus was restructured into a new organization. The newly formed IRGC Intelligence Organization (IRGC-IO) serves as a parallel intelligence entity with many of the same duties as the MOIS. It is believed that competition between the services will prevent either one from gaining too much power at the expense of Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei and the regime writ large.

In addition to the MOIS and IRGC, the Islamic Republic utilizes a separate national police force, known as the Law Enforcement Forces (LEF), with its own intelligence apparatus to both combat internal crime and to keep tabs on regime dissidents. Although the Islamic Republic has made many mistakes in governing the Iranian nation over the past forty years, compensating the security services is not one of them. Iranian authorities go out of their way to dispense the necessary incentives for the loyalty of the security apparatus. From food and housing subsidies to non-competitive seats at Iran’s elite colleges, perks guarantee loyalty during times of crisis.

The final variable that ensures loyalty to the Islamic Republic among the security services is ideological. Similar to the Soviet Zampolit, the Islamic Republic maintains multiple “political-ideological directorates” among the security organs that guarantee obedience to the regime. Representatives of the Iranian supreme leader, clerics with specialized training, are embedded at all levels of the security services. They can be found from service headquarters all the way down to field level units. As a function of their duties, the clerics hold a variety of family-oriented events with civilian officers. These include joint prayer services as well clerical participation in military exercises. The input of these ideological commissars is necessary for promotion in rank of every officer in the IRGC and Artesh. All of these safeguards make impossible a scenario where the security forces would abandon their perks in order to “join with the people” according to Western commentators.

Foreign volunteers and martyrs

The Iranian regime has spent over four decades financing and training a variety of militias throughout the Muslim world to fight on behalf of Tehran’s interests. After the ousting of Saddam’s Baathist regime, their Iraqi proxies jumped into action to protect Iranian interests vis-à-vis Iraqi Sunnis. Groups such as the Badr Organization, the Mehdi Army, and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, among others, were the tip of the Iranian spear in post Saddam Iraq. In Syria, the Iranian regime supplemented direct support for pro-Assad militias with numerous fighters they imported from outside the country.

In addition to Lebanese Hezbollah, which fights on behalf of Tehran in conflicts around the world, groups such as the Afghan Fatemyoun and the Pakistani Zaynabyoun were trained Shia militia who fought in the bloody Syrian civil war. If these Shia volunteers were ready to die for the Iranian regime in Syria, it is safe to assume that they would fight even more valiantly to prevent the collapse of their masters in Tehran. That is to say, if and when Iran’s internal security forces were unwilling to kill their fellow citizens for patriotic reasons, then the regime has many foreign options with no such considerations. The late Shah had no such options in 1979.

The Iranian masses invisible to Western media

The bias of Western media is not just evident in the stories they choose to highlight, but also the omission of relevant facts that refute their narrative. In the case of Iran, a country with a population of over eighty-five million, the focus has always been on the minority of Westernized city dwellers who are both tech savvy and who speak fluent English, French or German.

What has always been missing from Western media coverage of Iran are the millions of devout Shia who, despite their grievances with the Islamic Republic, nevertheless prefer the status quo to any system that will be ushered in by the “Gharbzadegan” or those intoxicated by the West. Although Iran is among the most pro-Western nations in the Muslim world, it remains a traditional society where religion still informs the beliefs of the majority of the population. These are the men who fill the ranks of the Artesh and the IRGC, and the scientists and technicians who have made Iran one of the top indigenous missile producers in the Middle East. These devout Iranian are also the ones whose children died by the thousands, walking through minefields, to attack Iraqi positions because a regime cleric had bestowed them with a key to paradise during the Iran-Iraq War.

What is important to remember about these Iranians, invisible to the Western press, is that their antipathy toward the West is greater than any resentment they feel toward the regime. They are motivated to fight against the very same ideology endorsed by Western media. That is to say that they don’t want recreational drugs to become legalized in their society, they don’t want to watch overly sexualized programming and pornography on their television sets, they don’t want to become a society where criminals are fetishized by guilt ridden academics, and they certainly don’t want state sponsored homosexuality and the cult of trans-gender propagated in their schools. For all these reasons, referred to as “fesad” or corruption in Iran, countless millions will fight to prevent what they view as “Western inspired democracy” from sweeping their country in the near future.

Conclusion

For those watching events unfold around the world, it is important to remember that Iran is a unique country with a unique history. Revolutionary change is still within the memory of many older Iranians, doubtless coloring their reticence to overthrow the current regime. What is more likely in the long term is the type of evolutionary change that spanned centuries in the West. The type of change that places reason, truth, and the rights of man as the foundations of classical liberalism. Due to their hatred of truth, post-modernist western journalists and analysts, imbued with a nihilistic drive to depict all conflicts as a struggle between victims and oppressors, will never understand events in a way to accurately depict the future in Iran.

MJ Javani is the author of the Janusz Soltani series espionage novels available on Amazon.