In Wednesday’s Washington Post, Miriam Berger reported on the protests “rocking” Iran. The focus of her article is on the way the Islamic government is and is not responding. So far, “the clerics who lead Iran have yet to fully unleash the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a parallel military force created to defend the state at any cost.” And I’ll get to that because it’s very important.
But first I want to highlight something she mentions but does not do enough to emphasize. As you hopefully know, the current unrest in Iran began about six weeks ago, on September 16, when a young Kurdish-Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini was killed by the Guidance Patrol (“morality police”), apparently for (“improper hijab”) not sufficiently covering her hair. Wednesday marked the fortieth day since her death, which is precisely why the protests were bigger and more emphatic than other days.
Thousands of people poured into the streets of Mahsa Amini’s hometown Wednesday and marched to her grave. Iranian security forces responded — as they have throughout the course of the nationwide protests inspired by her death — with violence and arrests.
The gathering in Saqez, in Iran’s western Kurdistan region, marked the 40th day since Amini’s death in the custody of Iran’s “morality police,” a traditional moment of remembrance in Islam. As the night wore on, demonstrators came out in other cities, as they have every day since mid-September.
To understand the potential significance of this, I want you to read the following retelling of how the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran unfolded in 40 day stages. It really got started on January 8, 1978 when the semiofficial newspaper Ettelaat published an article accusing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then in exile in Najaf, Iraq, of being a tool of colonialism and a British spy. There scurrilous lies outraged pious Shiites who were already feeling put-upon by the Shah’s aggressive secularism. On January 9, roughly 4,000 religious students in the holy city of Qom (or Qum) took to the streets in protest, and the Shah responded with gunfire, killing as many as seventy of them.
The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, By Karen Armstrong, Ballentine Books, p.304, 2000.
In an American context, this was like Kent State on steroids, and the religious and secular alike were completely outraged.
Forty days later, more people were killed while observing the remembrance of the Qom students. And forty days after that, more died while remembering those lost in second protest. This pattern continued until the Shah was finally forced into exile.
In this way, what had originated as elite resistance to the Shah took on a more clerical flavor. Yet, at the same time, those who might have disdained the clerics in the beginning, increasingly saw them as allies and leaders in the just cause of ending the Shah’s reign of terror.
We know how the revolution turned out, and it wasn’t the way “the intellectuals, writers, lawyers and businessmen” has envisaged at the outset. But that’s not the part we should focus on here.
On Wednesday, the clerics repeated the mistake the Shah made in February 1979. On the fortieth day anniversary of the original sin, they created more martyrs who will be mourned 40 days hence.
In all likelihood, they’ll respond with force and create another batch of martyrs. And, so, every 40 days the protests can grow and gather strength, with the government losing more allies and creditability each time, until they are washed away.
Except, the clerics aren’t completely unaware of how they came to power. They took precautions from the outset to make sure their regime was more secure, and that’s where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps comes into the picture.
The IRGC was founded as a counterweight to Iran’s other security forces — a way to prevent a revolution like the one that first brought the Islamic republic to power in 1979…
…After the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Shah in 1979, the Shiite revolutionaries who won out purged the existing military, called the Artesh, and the shah’s fearsome intelligence agency. In their place, they created their own security state undergirded by the IRGC.
Then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini constitutionally tasked the Revolutionary Guard with protecting the Islamic Republic and its ideals inside and outside the country…
…The IRGC’s profile rose during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, as the guard took charge of training young soldiers to send to the front. As a reward for its service — and to prevent massive unemployment among decommissioned fighters — the guard was given control of Khatam al-Anbiya, the first of Iran’s many military-run economic enterprises.
The engineering firm was tasked with rebuilding the war-battered country…But the Revolutionary Guard profited mightily, diverting large amounts of money to its own banks and institutions.
The IRGC has so far been relying on the Basij, a volunteer force of mostly young lower class and rural citizens who operate a lot like the fascist brown and blackshirts if German and Italian fame. They’re good at cracking heads and breaking up protests, but they’re nowhere as lethal as the IRGC’s full-time forces.
At a certain point, the Shah’s forces were simply not willing to gun down their own citizens, but the IRGC’s financial well-being is so enmeshed with the clerical regime that will likely have more willingness to kill. What this means is that the government may look like it’s in a 1979-type of trouble, but they’re going to be more resilient.
Still, the same principles apply. The more unjust killings occur, the more erstwhile allies of the regime will be revolted and join in the resistance.
I can’t say how it will turn out, but there’s hope that the regime will fall. We just have to observe the revolution in 40 days stages to see how it unfolds.
