Iran’s Revolutionary Guard are ruthless, but they are not irrational, reports Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh.
The Iranian military and civilian leadership structure has so far befuddled the increasingly erratic US president who has lost the ability to speak straight to the American people. President Donald Trump, with the backing and bombs and assassinations from Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, went to war with Iran on February 28. To the surprise of American war planners, Iran responded by attacking US bases in the region as well as the oil- and gas-producing facilities of our allies and by shutting passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian leadership seems unwilling to give up its now essentially useless supply of enriched uranium. The Iranians, experts in chess as they are, seem secure in the belief that a rattled Trump, facing political ruin as gasoline and other prices soar, will decide at this politically contentious point to leave his ally Netanyahu at the altar – if he can somehow pull off a deal to get the oil flowing. More US and Israeli bombing of Iran – which is continuing this week, according to press reports – will not change the stalemate, nor will America’s and the world’s growing unhappiness with the bumbling leadership of the US president.
His Iranian venture was a failure of intelligence and military planning that has rattled the world’s economy and added to the political woes of Trump’s administration. It has also provided a windfall to the Democrats in Congress who may ride the president’s missteps to a victory in the fall midterm elections. It raises a question of what the extremists who control domestic policy in Trump’s White House – Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget – will do to prevent a massive Democratic victory in the fall congressional elections, which are administered by individual states.
I have been told again and again that some senior aides in the White House intend to disrupt the midterms with allegations of widespread election fraud and mismanagement by Democratic election officials, common claims made over the past decade by the president and other Republicans. They are debating whether to go further in a few key states – perhaps by mobilising the National Guard—to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House.
Such a disruption, especially if it involved the National Guard, would amount to another betrayal of the American people and the US Constitution by President Trump. We’d thought we’d seen the worst last winter in Minneapolis, with the ICE killings of two protesters, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti. These abuses aroused indignation even among the feckless Democrats in Congress, who have otherwise done little to impede Trump’s agenda.
So far Trump’s leadership team gives little sign that it understands how the Iranian military and political systems work. Some light is shed on this by a recent study from the Israeli scholar Amatzia Baram. He did his compulsory military service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) tank corps, earned a doctorate, and became chair of the department of Middle East history at the University of Haifa. Like many Israeli scholars, he has advised the Israeli military and government.
Baram’s paper, “Inside Iran’s fragmented decision-making structure,” was published last week by Geopolitical Intelligence Services. It focuses on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he identifies as the centre of power in Iran today. It is generally seen in the West as a bastion of Shia fanatics who believe that dying in combat will bring them to martyrdom in the afterlife. Baram says that this is not so and argues that without a public opinion poll “there is no way to know.” He writes that “the available historic evidence points in a somewhat different direction.”
“During the Iraq-Iran War,” he says, that ran from 1980 to 1988, the Republican Guard fought bravely while also sacrificing thousands of Iranian children who went into battle in mass infantry charges, often without weapons, against fortified Iraqi forces. Yet, despite such fanaticism, Baram writes, the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard not only accepted a ceasefire sought by the leadership but urged such a settlement. “They were not suicidal,” Baram writes, and in 2013 they agreed with the leadership’s decision to negotiate the future of Iran’s nuclear policy with the Obama administration, and they went along with the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump would disavow in his first term.
Baram writes that the IRGC “may or may not be a highly ideological corps, but either way they know how to recognise the needs of the regime and act accordingly. They certainly are not willing to die for purely ideological reasons” – a belief that is not widely shared in Washington policy-making circles. “Their decisions,” he explains, “are interest-based. The question is: What are the IRGC’s interests?”
Baram says that the Revolutionary Guard’s leadership’s “first interests” are regime survival – even to the point that its troops massacred as many as thirty thousand protesters after widespread anti-administration demonstrations last winter. Baram argues that the Revolutionary Guard was humiliated by the recent Israeli and US bombing attacks, as well as by the assassination by Israel agents of many of the government’s leadership. At that point, he wrote, they were moved “by the understanding that they cannot afford another humiliation. To preserve their status, they need to be able to declare some victory.
“They therefore have four core goals, One: no immediate concession on the nuclear issue. Two: resources for the resuscitation of the economy, namely a complete end to the Western embargo. Three: iron-clad guarantees for the eternal end to the American-Israeli attacks. Four: de facto international recognition of their sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.” Baram argues that the last goal has already been achieved, “as scores of vessels are coordinating their passage directly with Tehran.”
Baram admits that, as US and Israeli intelligence concluded early in last winter’s air war, that the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was slain in one of the early US and Israeli air raids, along with his wife and other family members. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, though severely wounded – he is said to have been in a coma for months, and still may be – is nonetheless the new leader of Iran.
“Dead or alive, in coma or in his full senses,” Baram writes, “it makes no difference: At this point, [Mojtaba’s] decisions are being dictated” by the leadership of the Republican Guard. “Yet,” Baram says, “pledging allegiance to Mr. Khamanei is imperative for all regime luminaries, including President [Masoud] Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker and [Republican Guard] General Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, both of whom are relatively pragmatic and trying to reach an agreement with the US. They must know that the new supreme leader is not independent but it makes no difference. Iran is an ‘Islamic Republic,’” he writes. “Constitutionally and in the eyes of many Iranians, the Rule of the [Islamic] Jurist, the legacy of former Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is still binding. …All legitimacy flows from him.”
At the end of his essay, Baram’s tone shifts and he adds some personal words – he did spend years on active and reserve duty with the IDF – that include a bleak assessment of the present and an optimistic guess about the future:
“A true change of regime in Tehran that empowers moderates to abandon Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its territorial claim to the strait and its support for the Islamist proxies, is less likely anytime soon. The opposite is more likely: To keep down a deeply disgruntled population, the regime will be more oppressive. However, if President Trump insists on zero enrichment and an open strait, and the present regime rejects those demands, it will be hurling Iran into a brick wall.
“If it continues with its embargo, then given its present degree of institutional corruption and economic inefficiency, support for distant proxies, huge security-related expenses, and the added burden of the 40-day war of 2026, this regime cannot survive for more than a few years. Even within months, when the Basij [the Republican Guard’s street enforcers] disobey shooting orders, the masses will rise.”
Republished from Seymour Hersh Substack
Seymour Hersh
Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.