K N Pandita
knp627@gmail.com
After the removal of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Religious Leader of Iran and second in line after Ruhullah Khomeini, the virtual power in Iran remains concentrated in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)
What is the IRGC? Once the Leftists and the clergy combined to succeed in ousting the monarchy in 1979, and in the struggle between the two for power, the Leftists were pushed aside. The clergy enjoyed a strong influence in rural Iran. Iranian history tells us that the clergy have always been on the side of the masses of people in any confrontation with the regime. But once that confrontation ended, the clergy returned to the mosque and the seminaries without aspiring for political power. But with the appearance of the anti-monarchy uprising in 1979, and the dominance of the political scenario by Ruhullah Khomeini, the Iranian clergy changed its age-old practice of returning to its ecclesiastical realm.
Khomeini conceived of two pillars of the Iranian State. One was of Vela at-e-faqih, meaning the Domain of the Islamic Jurisconsults. The second ideological pillar was of the export of Islamic revolution throughout the world — an ideal essentially rooted in the teachings of the Quran. The flaw in the concept of velayat-e-faqih was that a person was well-read in Islamic theology but ignorant of the unavoidable imperatives of modern- era international diplomacy. What the Shah had left behind was an Iran fully familiar with modernity. Reza Shah Pahlavi could be considered the father of modernism in Iran. As far as the second pillar was concerned, the plight of present – day Iran emanates from an erroneous concept of exporting the Iranian Islamic Revolution to the world. This concept is flawed because Iran did not visualise the significance of its huge hydrocarbon reserves in the interplay of regional and global strategies.
From the flawed concept of export of Islamic Revolution came the most dangerous decision of the theocratic state of not trusting the traditional army of Iran, and creating an entirely new force fully indoctrinated in Islamic conservatism of early years of Islam with training in ultra-guerrilla tactics and wielding full authority of action, unmindful of established norms of human rights protectionism. The IRGC became not only powerful but also an entity above the law.
One important dimension of the export of the Islamic revolution of Iran was specifically targeting Israel for destruction. The Iranian theocratic regime based its hatred and animosity against Israel on Quranic injunctions. Trying to pursue the axiom of being more loyal than the king, Iran despised the Arab states in the Gulf and West Asian region as well, for their complacent attitude towards Israel. Iran belittled the Abrahamic Accord, which shows that Tehran has little interest in peaceful coexistence, a harsh and unavoidable reality no nation can deny. Iran has to come out of the mindset of hatred and animosity against Israel.
It is here that the US steps in. Jews have a strong lobby in the American Congress. Iran knows it and decided to take on the world’s most powerful country, a democracy to the hilt. This shows how Iran has been jumping from one blunder to another.
There is a strong reason for the US to jump into the fray. What theocratic Iran did was to raise very well-trained, equipped, and indoctrinated proxies and locate them at critical points in West Asian countries from where these proxies would embark on inflicting losses on Israel. The Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis are all deadly proxies playing the game of Tehran. It is unavoidable for the Americans and the Israelis to wipe out these proxies, particularly the IRGC, lock, stock and barrel. We understand that many IRGC functionaries are deserting their ranks and going into hiding.
On the American side, the US has committed the blunder of not supporting the intensification of the anti-theocratic regime uprising among the masses of Iranians. This blunder emanates from the US’s lack of understanding of the Iranian mindset. Iran is an ancient country with one of the world’s greatest civilisations. Though it became Islamic when the Sassanian Empire fell to the sword of the Arabs, Iran never became truly Islamic. It is the only country among the Aryan ethnic nations that did not lose sight of its pre-Islamic past.
In the mass uprising of 2022, and then in the student uprising of 2026, the US should have played a definitive pro-people role and even interfered on humanistic reasons. When hundreds of women were butchered by the IRGC during the 2022 uprising and nearly thirty thousand killed by the oppressive regime of the velayat-e-faqih, the superpower of the world, also a bastion of human rights protection, should have brought great pressure for regime change. Unfortunately, President Trump, the vacillating president, made controversial statements about regime change or no change. Thereby, he gave a clean chit to the IRGC to go on with its atrocities unhindered.
We know that Prince Reza, the son of the deposed Shah, made several appeals to the US to intervene on behalf of the people of Iran to save the country from bloodshed and disaster. Washington gave him a cold shoulder because it had no understanding of the Iranian mind.
Then happened what happened. Trump issued threats like destroying the entire civilisation of Iran. This was the greatest insult not to the theocratic regime but to immensely nationalistic Iranian youth. The theocratic regime was quick to exploit it and did exploit it to the hilt. Millions of Iranians who only a month back had raised the ancient flag of Iran now abandoned those and retook the flag of the theocratic regime. The US faltered, not because of any great machination of the theocratic regime but b because of its unwise handling of the Iranian situation.
The absurdity of the American handling of the Iranian issue will be noticed in Washington agreeing to the mediation of a third country (Pakistan), and to what purpose? To the purpose of telling Iran not to make a nuclear bomb when that country has a nuclear arsenal very much intact at secret bases like Nur Khan and Sargodha, etc. Its defence minister went to the extent of saying publicly that if the US attacks Pakistan, we will nuke India. And secondly, asking a mediating country to tell Iran to wind up its proxies in Yemen and West Asian countries, when the mediating country hosts the world’s deadliest terrorist organisations, many of whose leadership have been designated by the UN, is hypocrisy.
Today, the US is cross with the EU essentially because the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the brainchild of the European powers and not of the US. She is supporting Ukraine to boost NATO’s anti-Russia policy; she has taken up cudgels with India, the world’s largest democracy, and above all, Trump has fast lost his popularity with the American people. How the future will shape, nobody predict.
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