The IRGC Takes Charge
As long-time readers know, I have spent the last five months trying to figure out what Operation Epic Fury stimulated inside Iran. Some of that necessarily involved speculation. Still, the trajectory has turned out to be fairly clear.
I wrote in April that Epic Fury had shattered the governing structure and that "the IRGC arose out of the smoldering remains, probably with more weight than it had before." Later I wrote that "the hardliners assaulted the vacuum." By May my conclusion was simpler. "The IRGC has been bombed into greater importance."
Epic Fury stimulated that.
Today I don't have to speculate as much. Things are clearer now and not in a good way. Iran has announced a sweeping reorganization of its senior military and security leadership. Six major military appointments were issued together. They followed immediately after the appointment of Mohsen Rezaei, one of the most important figures in the history of the Revolutionary Guards, to run Iran's Supreme National Security Council.
Major General Ali Abdollahi is the new Chief of Staff of Iran's Armed Forces. Abdollahi was already running the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, Iran's joint wartime command, and has been one of the central military decision-makers throughout this war. Earlier this year President Masoud Pezeshkian reportedly criticized Abdollahi and IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi for military operations undertaken without sufficient civilian control. Now the wartime commander has been promoted to the top of Iran's entire armed-forces structure.
Brigadier General Kioumars Heydari becomes deputy Chief of Staff. Heydari comes from the regular Iranian Army rather than the IRGC and previously commanded Iran's ground forces. His appointment says something too. The new command does not abolish the regular military. It integrates it into a wartime hierarchy increasingly dominated by Revolutionary Guard commanders and their strategic priorities.
Ahmad Vahidi has been promoted to Major General and formally installed as Commander-in-Chief of the IRGC. Vahidi is an original creature of the Revolutionary Guards. He rose through its intelligence apparatus, commanded the Quds Force from roughly 1988 until 1997, later served as defense minister and interior minister, and moved between the military and civilian government for decades. Argentina has long sought Iranian suspects connected with the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, an attack Argentina's highest criminal court ruled was carried out by Hezbollah under Iranian direction. Vahidi has been among the Iranian officials accused in the case.
Major General Mostafa Izadi becomes Vahidi's deputy. Izadi is another old Revolutionary Guard commander. He commanded IRGC ground forces decades ago and later served in senior Armed Forces staff positions. This is hardly generational change. Iran is reaching backward toward men formed during the revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.
Rear Admiral Ali Azmaei now formally commands the IRGC Navy. He had already emerged in the position after the death of his predecessor. Azmaei previously commanded the IRGC Navy's Fifth Naval Region, covering the southern Persian Gulf and approaches to the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has placed a longtime Hormuz commander over the force that has turned the Strait into Iran's most useful strategic weapon during this war.
Then there is Hossein Taeb, who has been placed in command of the Basij Resistance Force. Taeb previously commanded the Basij and later ran the IRGC Intelligence Organization for more than a decade. European sanctions records identify him as responsible for Basij forces involved in mass beatings, killings, detention and torture during the suppression of the 2009 Green Movement. He has also been closely associated for years with Mojtaba Khamenei.
The Basij is the regime's mass paramilitary organization. It operates inside neighborhoods, universities, workplaces and local communities. When Tehran worries about riots, demonstrations, political organization or regime collapse, the Basij is one of the organizations sent into the streets. Putting Taeb back in charge tells us the purpose of this restructuring. Vahidi prepares the Guards for external war. Abdollahi integrates the larger military. Azmaei controls the maritime weapon. Taeb watches Iran itself.
Above all these men now sits Mohsen Rezaei in the Supreme National Security Council. Rezaei commanded the IRGC from 1981 until 1997. He took command at age 27 and led it through most of the Iran-Iraq War while overseeing the development of its ground, naval and air capabilities. He later spent more than two decades in the Expediency Council and served as vice president for economic affairs. Mojtaba Khamenei made him a military adviser in March. This week Rezaei became secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and Khamenei's personal representative there. Reuters notes that the SNSC coordinates Iranian national-security and foreign policy and brings together senior government, military and intelligence officials.
Rezaei has hardly hidden his position. In April he opposed extending the ceasefire. He has repeatedly expressed deep suspicion toward negotiations and argued for continued resistance. His appointment also helps resolve a problem that has followed Iran through virtually every negotiating effort since the war began.
For months Iran had negotiators who could not reliably commit Iran. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi could negotiate something. The military could reject it. The civilian government could suggest the Strait was opening. The Guards could say it wasn't. Pezeshkian, Araghchi and parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf represented a more pragmatic faction that understood the enormous economic cost of continued war and disruption. Vahidi and the IRGC repeatedly limited what they were permitted to offer.
Critical Threats Project documented this struggle in April. Pezeshkian reportedly accused Vahidi and Abdollahi of unilateral escalation. Araghchi argued for greater flexibility. Iranian negotiators were reprimanded after appearing to exceed their mandate. Security officials were inserted more deeply into the negotiating process. By late April the assessment was that Vahidi had largely prevailed and the pragmatists were aligning themselves with the harder position in the interest of maintaining political unity.
The August appointments tell us who won that argument. Vahidi and Abdollahi were not restrained. They were promoted. Rezaei now occupies the institution where military policy and diplomacy are supposed to be reconciled.
My guess is that somebody inside Iran finally recognized the obvious. Negotiations were pointless if the IRGC was not effectively at the table. It controls the Strait. It controls much of Iran's remaining military response. It possesses enormous influence over the regional network of militias and allied forces. Most importantly, it possesses the physical ability to ignore whatever a diplomat signs.
Rezaei solves much of that problem without ever having to become foreign minister. The IRGC does not need a uniformed commander sitting across from Oman or the United States. Its position can now be built into the negotiating mandate before Araghchi ever leaves Tehran. Rezaei sits where the diplomatic position, military position and Supreme Leader's authority are supposed to converge.
The negotiations did not bring the IRGC to the table. They demonstrated that the table had already moved to the IRGC.
These were supposed to be nuclear negotiations. That was the issue before the war. Iran's enrichment program, inspections, uranium stockpile and the possibility of a nuclear weapon were the strategic reasons everyone ended up here. That is no longer the immediate center of the negotiations.
June, negotiations and ceasefire proposals were increasingly focused on Hormuz, reopening commercial shipping, the American blockade, sanctions relief, frozen Iranian assets, Lebanon and regional security arrangements. The difficult nuclear questions were pushed into later phases. By July Reuters was describing Hormuz as Iran's "golden weapon" and reporting that control of the Strait had become a greater immediate strategic priority for Tehran than the nuclear program that had brought decades of sanctions.
Iran has been badly beaten militarily. But it has managed to change the subject. In this limited diplomatic sense it has won something so far.
That shift has also strengthened the Revolutionary Guards inside Iran. The nuclear program involved several centers of Iranian power. Scientists, civilian nuclear authorities, diplomats, politicians, the Supreme Leader and the Guards all had roles. Hormuz is different. Ships either pass safely or they don't. Mines either appear or they don't. Missiles, drones and small boats either threaten commercial traffic or they don't. The people who control those decisions are overwhelmingly military.
The longer Hormuz became the center of the crisis, the more every path toward settlement led back to the same organization. Want commercial shipping restored? Talk to the IRGC. Want attacks on tankers stopped? IRGC. Want the ceasefire enforced? IRGC. Want regional militias restrained? Again, heavily dependent upon the IRGC. Want whatever Araghchi negotiates actually implemented? Better make sure the Guards agree before he signs it.
The pragmatists (those who aren’t locked up anyway) did not suddenly decide Vahidi was right about everything. They discovered they could not govern around him. Political arguments can be won and lost. Power has to be confronted with other power, and Iran's civilian government increasingly seems to possess very little of its own.
The IRGC was hardly a pleasant organization before February. It was created after the 1979 revolution because the new regime did not trust the regular Iranian military. Through the decades it became an armed force, intelligence organization, political institution, economic empire and foreign-policy apparatus. It built the Quds Force. It built relationships with Hezbollah, Iraqi militias and the Houthis. It helped suppress the Green Movement in 2009 and later protest movements. Its intelligence organization arrested dissidents. The Basij beat demonstrators in the streets.
Epic Fury did not make the Revolutionary Guards brutal. The war gave their brutality a larger jurisdiction.
Iran has been carrying out an extraordinary internal crackdown while fighting abroad. On August 5, United Nations human-rights chief Volker Türk reported that Iran had executed at least 56 people on national-security charges since March 19. Twenty-seven were connected with the huge anti-government protests earlier this year. More than 100 additional people reportedly face similar charges carrying the possibility of execution. Türk said the accelerating executions were being used to instill fear and suppress dissent.
Amnesty International documented the pattern earlier. By late May Iranian authorities had arrested more than 6,000 people since the beginning of the war, including protesters, journalists, lawyers, dissidents, human-rights activists and members of ethnic and religious minorities. Iran's own national police chief announced more than 6,500 arrests of what he called "traitors and spies."
Some undoubtedly were spies. Iran suffered one of the most devastating intelligence penetrations imaginable. Senior political and military leaders were located and killed with extraordinary precision. Sensitive facilities were mapped and attacked. Any Iranian security service would begin looking furiously for collaborators after something like that.
The definition of collaborator became extraordinarily broad. Authorities have threatened people for using Starlink, using VPNs, photographing bomb damage, sharing photographs with foreign news organizations, communicating with opposition media or expressing support for the attacks. Amnesty reviewed official messages warning that some of this behavior could constitute collaboration with hostile states and become subject to espionage laws carrying the death penalty.
Iran also shut most of the country off from the global internet for 88 days. Amnesty reported the prolonged shutdown as part of the repression campaign. There have been forced confessions, disappearances and reports of torture. Amnesty documented simulated hangings, beatings, prolonged solitary confinement and coerced confessions later broadcast by state television. It reported at least one death in IRGC intelligence custody involving a man accused of filming bombed areas and sending the footage outside Iran.
Hossein Taeb has been appointed to manage that environment through the Basij. The regime was already repressive. The war has allowed national defense, counterintelligence and ordinary political dissent to bleed into the same category. Enemy of the State.
These men apparently believe their strategy worked. Iran was devastated militarily. Its senior command was shredded. Naval assets were destroyed. Nuclear facilities were badly damaged. Air-defense systems were hit repeatedly. The United States and Israel demonstrated overwhelming conventional military superiority.
The Islamic Republic survived. The IRGC survived. Hormuz remained largely under Iranian control. Diplomacy resumed through intermediaries. From inside the Revolutionary Guards that sequence can produce a very different lesson from the one produced by American bomb-damage assessments.
We bombed them. They survived us. As I have said before, they are winning the war as long as Hormuz remains choked and effectively closed. Oh victory, where is thy sting?
Ahmad Vahidi increasingly talks about active deterrence and offensive capability. Rezaei has resisted ceasefire concessions. Abdollahi has asserted Iranian military authority over the Strait. Azmaei was promoted out of the very naval structure that has made Hormuz so difficult to reopen.
An Al Jazeera interview broadcast yesterday from Tehran described the appointments as the construction of a more offensively minded leadership team. The analyst interviewed there expects restructuring of the security apparatus around stronger deterrence, greater readiness for preemptive action and more powerful retaliation against another major attack.
That remains his interpretation rather than an announced Iranian doctrine, but the appointments themselves are facts. The repression is a fact. The diminished influence of civilian diplomacy is visible. So is the transformation of the Supreme National Security Council.
Then there is the nuclear program. Remember that? The reason all of this started.
Did Epic Fury hurt it? Absolutely. Iranian enrichment facilities were destroyed or badly damaged. Natanz was attacked repeatedly. Other nuclear infrastructure was struck. Whatever anyone thinks about the larger war, that is a legitimate military accomplishment.
Did Epic Fury end Iran's nuclear initiative? No. In June the International Atomic Energy Agency reported surprisingly little change in its overall assessment of the program because inspectors still could not account for Iran's enriched uranium stockpiles or gain access to several important bombed sites. Before the war Iran possessed about 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent. Reuters reported that more than 200 kilograms may have survived in a tunnel complex near Isfahan, with additional material potentially remaining at Natanz.
So we whacked the nuclear program pretty good. Different from solving it. Would anybody be better off if this increasingly militarized Iranian state already possessed a nuclear weapon? Obviously not. Perhaps some version of this confrontation was unavoidable. Iran's enrichment program was a serious problem long before a single bomb fell.
But there is no reason for a parade.
Battlefield victories are judged partly by the possibilities they stimulate afterward. Epic Fury did extraordinary damage to Iran. It also decapitated competing centers of political authority, strengthened the institution most capable of surviving decapitation, gave that institution control of Iran's strongest remaining strategic weapon, marginalized civilian diplomacy, encouraged a siege mentality inside the country and provided the state with wartime justification for an enormous internal crackdown.
Now the men who emerged from that process are receiving the offices. The emergency government is becoming the government. Iran might eventually negotiate. Hormuz might reopen. Sanctions can change. Ceasefires come and go. Institutional power is considerably harder to surrender.
The Revolutionary Guards have learned that they can survive overwhelming military attack, dominate the Iranian response, control the Strait, overrule civilian officials and emerge with more authority than they possessed when the war began. They are riding high right now, in spite of all the spectacular damage.
The implications are bad for untangling the United States from this war that it started at Netanyahu’s ardent urging. They are bad for the Gulf region, for Saudi Arabia and its $3 trillion Vision 2030 investment.
But they are much worse for the Iranian people. The “deranged” regime is in charge.
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