By Janis Siegel , JTNews Correspondent
As tensions remain high over the progress of Iran’s nuclear program, an Iranian civil-military relations expert, Ali Alfoneh, told a Seattle crowd at Temple De Hirsch Sinai that in Iran today, a corrupt and increasingly powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps does not fear the United States or President Obama. As its political and economic power surges, Iran’s “radical clergy” continue to manipulate a population steeped in “superstitious” religious teachings.
Alfoneh, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research exposed an Iranian regime whose main objectives include continued nuclear enrichment, despite threats of attack from the U.S. or Israel, and the suppression of the reform movement within the country, which took to the streets in 2009 to protest what it believed was Ahmadinejad’s corrupt landslide re-election to his second term in office.
Under the rule of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian law, which discourages the military from intervening in politics, is playing out differently on the ground.
“Iran is generally deteriorating into a military dictatorship,” said Alfoneh at the June 8 event that was co-hosted by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Ever since the revolution in my country, power has rested upon two pillars…the Revolutionary Shia Clergy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC is an ideological military organization. The RSC is being marginalized.”
Alfoneh, who writes extensively about internal Iranian politics, has stated that after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, moderates such as former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, both from the literary cleric class, confined the Revolutionary Guard to a “bureaucratic” role. However, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war, popular support began to favor military power, which Alfoneh compared to the disposition of German society after its bitter defeat in World War I. This shift in Iran, he said, led to the ascendancy of Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005.
“The clerical class in Iran is recruited from the rich,” said Alfoneh. “Rafsanjani’s father was a pistachio farmer who could afford to send his son to Japan, to the United States, to Canada, and to Malaysia. He traveled all over.”
On the other hand, he said, the Revolutionary Guard recruits from lower- and middle-class rural families.
Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith, earned his doctorate from the University of Science and Technology in Tehran, where he was a lecturer. He claims to have joined the guard after the revolution, where he reportedly worked in covert military operations throughout the war.
“Ahmadinejad is the first president in the history of my country during the past 33 years who is not a cleric,” said Alfoneh. “He’s a soldier, an eight-year Iraq War veteran and war hero. Ahmadinejad has 18 cabinet ministers and all of them are war veterans.”
It was the Revolutionary Guard who arrested hundreds, and beat and shot protestors in the streets during the 2009 election protest, killing more than 20, according to official reports.
“The biggest mistake was to allow the Revolutionary Guard to suppress domestic enemies, but the leadership of the movement blew the uprising,” said Alfoneh, arguing that protesters refused to stay in the streets at all costs.
Today, the Revolutionary Guard influences all areas of Iranian life he said, including the economy, where it monopolizes all state-run building contracts, sub-contracting the construction to local private local companies.
The Guard also runs a healthy smuggling business, according to Alfoneh, supplying the Muslim country with plenty of liquor and Viagra-type male enhancement medicine.
Internationally, the Guard remains defiant against any and all sanctions, continued Alfoneh, and has ample funds to wait out the effects of those sanctions, however severe.
At a minimum, he said, the regime may have $30 billion of financial reserves that could sustain the country through a year of the most austere sanctions. Others estimate Iran’s financial reserves to be closer to $90 billion, which, Alfoneh believes, could sustain the country for as long as two years.
When asked by JTNews as to whether Iran’s defiance amid tightening international sanctions could be taken as a signal that the regime intends to use its resources to achieve its nuclear goals — whatever they may be — within two years, Alfoneh answered affirmatively.
“The Revolutionary Guard believes that the U.S. today is a declining empire, so why should they give any concessions to them?” added Alfoneh. “I believe that the Revolutionary Guard and the regime are afraid of Israel, but they don’t think it’s going to be a massive blow. But it would be a disaster if the U.S. engaged in such an operation. It would mean four to five weeks of bombardment of their air defenses. But if they are attacked, they are ready to pay that price.”