Listing the IRGC – “Quote Unquote”
Jane’s Weekly – Listing the IRGC “A Fatal Risk to Khameni”
“Deliberations in Washington about listing the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation is perceived by Khamenei as another step to pave the way to attack IRGC assets without a need for US Congress’ authorisation. This represents a fatal risk to Khamenei, as the IRGC remains the primary armed entity entrusted to guard the theocratic regime that Khamenei oversees from the Office of the Supreme Leader.” [1]
Liberal Foreign Affairs Critic Bob Rae: List the IRGC (Dec.9 2009)
“The Liberal Party of Canada, through the Hon. Bob Rae, Official Opposition Critic for Foreign Affairs, and Mark Holland, Official Opposition Critic for Public Safety, has called on the…government to…designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization immediately.” [2]
Liberal Public Safety Critic Mark Holland:
Canada Should Push the Rest of the World on the IRGC (Dec. 4, 2009)
“It’s time for Canada to speak out against the IRGC and push the rest of the world to follow. We strongly urge the Harper government to make this official designation immediately.” [3]
Minister Stockwell Day
[then Minister of Public Safety]
(Sept. 2007)“Canada is ‘very concerned’ about Tehran’s intervention outsie its borders and has not ruled out banning the Iranian Revolutionary Guard under the Anti-Terrorism Act.” [4]President Barack Obama
[then Senator and Co-Sponsor of the Iran Counter-Proliferation Act]
Iran Counter-Proliferation Act 2007: “The Secretary of State should designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a Foreign Terrorist Organization…and the Secretary of the Treasury should place the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists under executive Order 13224.” [5]
Sen. Obama: “We do need to tighten sanctions on the Iranian regime, particularly on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which sponsors terrorism far beyond Iran’s borders.” [6]
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
“[The NIE] accurately noted that the tool most likely to alter Iran’s nuclear calculus – if any – is targeted political and economic pressure, not military action.” [7]
Former Senior UN Diplomat Victor Comras [8]
“… designation [of the IRGC in the US] open[s] the door to possible civil litigation against foreign companies doing business with terrorists under the Anti Terrorism Act of 1996. These Rulings could well prove to be among the most important factors in dissuading certain foreign companies that do business in the United States from also conducting business with the IRGC.” [9]
Iran Specialist Patrick Clawson [10]
“Applying the sanctions lessons of the last twenty years to Iran, the clear implication is that Western interests are best served by measures that target the regime’s leaders. But how vulnerable to economic pressure are Iran’s leaders? …Iran’s leaders in fact devote much of their efforts to lining their own pockets – fighting more often and viciously to protect their incomes than their ideas.”[11]
U.S. Under Secretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson
Speaking in Dubai in March 2007, US Under Secretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey warned, “When corporations do business with IRGC companies, they are doing business with organizations that are providing direct support to terrorism.” In a July 2007 speech, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson stated that “The IRGC is so deeply entrenched in Iran’s economy and commercial enterprises; it is increasingly likely that if you are doing business with Iran, you are somehow doing business with the IRGC.”[12]
Washington Post Journalist David Ignatius
“These new, targeted financial measures [listing the IRGC] are to traditional sanctions what Super Glue is to Elmer’s Glue-All.” [13]
Middle East Expert Rasool Nafisi:
Listing is Major Blow to IRGC Prestige and Economic Activities
“I think it [the listing of the IRGC by the US] is very important because from now on, if the policy is carried out, the movement of the IRGC members abroad would become very very hard – especially in neighboring countries. They could easily be detained as terrorists. So I think that it’s a major blow to the status and movement of the IRGC. Secondly because it is a large conglomerate with a tremendous amount of assets and is involved in business, it would not be able to do business in Afghanistan, with Iraq, with neighbouring countries; and that’s going to be another major issue. Thirdly if you look at the fact that a large organization like that is put on the list of terror organizations and if Interpol accepts that, then it’s going to be a major issue for the IRGC, as a legitimate Iranian institution. I think that it’s basically a very major blow to the status, prestige and economic activities and movement of the organization.”[14]
Holland Parliamentarians Recommend Putting IRGC on EU-Terror list
(Nov. 27, 2009)
“A majority of the Netherlands parliament voted this past week to place Iran’s elite military unit, the Revolutionary Guards, on the European Union (EU) terror list. The Dutch resolution appears to be the first European motion to target the IRGC as a terrorist entity. The resolution cited the IRGC’s support for Hamas and Hizbullah as reasons to label the Guards as an unlawful organization fomenting terror.”  [15]
* This was in fact a resolution to recommend that the Dutch government and the E.U. consider listing the IRGC.
British Politicians Urge EU to Impose Sanctions Targeting Iran’s IRGC
(Nov. 2007)
“The U.S. decision to impose sanctions against the IRGC and the Iranian Ministry of Defence will ‘contribute greatly’ to slashing funding for the ‘world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism’. Our committee believes that for sanctions to have a meaningful effect, they must be multilateral. It therefore feels that it is in the interest of world peace and stability and an asset to the fight against terrorism for the European Union and in particular the United Kingdom to follow suit’, the Parliamentarians said.”[16]
The IRGC – A Unique Entity Quote Unquote
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khameini
“Today the IRGC has a determining effect on all international political balances and calculations… If one day this corps ceases to exist in our society, the authority of our Islamic Revolution shall collapse and the calculations of global politics will be upset.”[17]
Mohsen Sazegara, [18] IRGC Co-Founder and Iranian Dissident
“And now, the Revolutionary Guard is something really strange. It’s an organization which is like a political party because they have 80 seats in the parliament; they have more than half of the members of the cabinet. They are like the KGB because they have secret services, and they act like that. And they are like a cartel or trust.” … “Now, the Revolutionary Guard has been converted into a kind of organization, a kind of government inside the government of Iran.” [19]
RAND Corporation, National Defense Research Institute
“[The IRGC] has evolved well beyond its… foundations as an ideological guard for the… revolutionary regime. Today, the IRGC functions as an expansive socio-political-economic conglomerate whose influence extends into virtually every corner of Iranian political life and society…. [It can be seen] less as a traditional military entity wielding a navy, ground forces, air force, and a clandestine paramilitary wing…and more as a domestic actor… [t]he IRGC may be more profitably viewed as a deeply entrenched domestic institution. Arguably, this internal role overshadows its significance as a purely military force.”[20]
Maj.-Gen. Ali Ja’fari, IRGC Commander in Chief
“[It] is not solely a military organization” but “also a political and ideological organization.”[21]Dr. Bruce Tefft,[22]
Founding Member of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center
“The [IRGC is]… an organization that probably does not have a counterpart in the Western world, per se. The closest metaphor I could give you probably would be the Brown Shirts, the SA of the Nazi Party during World War II.”
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Blais v. Islamic Republic of Iran in 2006t
…the IRGC is a non-traditional instrumentality of Iran. It is the military arm of a kind of shadow government…It is similar to the Nazi party’s SA organization prior to World War II. The IRGC actively supports terrorism as a means of protecting the Islamic revolution that brought the Ayatollah to power in Iran in 1979. It has its own separate funding sources…[23]
The IRGC – An Autonomous Entity?
Quote Unquote
Dr. Magnus Ranstorp, world renowned expert on Hizbullah
Despite attempts by Iran’s clerical establishment to impose a degree of clerical control over the Pasdaran [IRGC]… [its] semi-institutional autonomy from the civilian leadership in Iran has meant that Hizb’allah has been able to resist attempts at cooption by Iran through support of the IRGC. Attempts by Iranian political leaders to exert pressure on the IRGC contingent in Lebanon were unsuccessful…The lack of control by Iran’s political leadership over IRGC support for Hizb’allah was clearly revealed…. [i]t enabled Hizb’allah to exercise a certain amount of independence, at times in violation of specific orders….[424]
Mohsen Sazegara, IRGC Co-Founder and Iranian Dissident
“The Revolutionary Guard has been converted into a kind of… government inside the government of Iran.”[25] “They don’t answer to anybody.”[26]
Francis Fukuyama, Dean of the School of Afdvanced Internationl Studies,
Johns Hopkins University
“…Rafsanjani and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have allowed the IRGC to grow into a semi-autonomous state-within-a-state.”[27]
RAND Corporation
An Iranian expert who addressed a RAND Corporation conference described the IRGC as “the only institution in Iran capable of both enforcing and breaching any red lines.”[28]
Ali Alfoneh[29] (the American Enterprise Institute)
“IRGC educational Centers host the [IRGC‘s] indoctrination courses and sessions…[which] amounts to asking the IRGC to supervise itself. There are no checks and balances.”[30]
Robin Hughes (deputy editor of Jane’s Defense Weekly)
“All the money that’s coming in serves to make them the most powerful force in Iran… And what’s important about that is that there is no oversight body.”[31]
Mehdi Khalaji, Shiite theologian and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy)[32]
Following the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, the Majlis [Iranian parliament] enacted legislation permitting the IRGC to use “its engineering capability in rebuilding the country‘s economy.” However, no oversight body exists with the capability of supervising the Revolutionary Guards‘ economic activities.[33]
Wilfried Buchta, Iran Expert[34]
”Clearly the IRGC is among the most autonomous power centers in Iran and it has resisted any subordination to any civilian authority from the presidential executive to the clerical control apparatus embodied in the Supreme Leaders representatives.”[35]
Douglas Farrah
“The al Quds force is not always operating with the full knowledge or consent of the central government…”[36]
Hooshang Amirahmadi (director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University)
“The actions of the [IRGC’s] Quds Force are not necessarily ordered by Ayatollah Khameinei, and the Supreme Leader may not even get reports of all its actions… The Iranian government is a very loose grouping of power centers,” “blurring lines of control and authority.”[37]
The IRGC and IRAN – Violence and Ideology
Quote Unquote
“Killing is a great Divine gift.”
Ayatollah Khomeini: “Those who say Islam should not kill don’t understand [it]. Killing is a great [divine] gift that appears [to man]. A religion that does not include [provisions for] killing and massacre is incomplete. Those who claim that Jesus was averse to killing and war, harm his prophetic mission… Killing is the same as mercy.”[38]
“Violence is the heart of Islam.”
Ayatollah Yazdi – Senior Advisor to Ahmadinejad and IRGC Leaders: “We must wipe away the shameful stain whereby some people imagine that violence has no place in Islam… we have decided and are determined to argue that violence is the heart of Islam.”[39]“We will confront the world with our ideology.”
Khomeini perceived Iran as a nation with a mission –“to export our revolution to the whole world”;[40] “to establish an Islamic state worldwide”; [41] and “to confront the world with our ideology”.[42]
Shiite Leaders: Khomeinism is Sui Generis
More than 300 Mullahs and students of theology have been executed, thousands are in prison, others are in exile, and all of Iran‘s Grand Ayatollahs have been under house arrest on different occasions. More than 100 religious seminaries have been closed and religious instruction in schools has been cut from six hours a week to four. The remaining two hours are devoted to the study of the political thought of Khomeini.
Ayatatollah Hassan Sane’i: The Islamic Republic is “as removed from Islam as the moon from the earth.”[43]
Ayatollah Mahmououd Tabatabai-Qomi: The Islamic Republic is “a total and systematic betrayal of Islam. No one should could call this regime Islamic.”[44]
Ayatollah Kazemeini Borujerdi: The regime “is a conspiracy against God and believers.”[45]
Ayatollah Mahdo Rouhani: Khomeinism is “neither Islamic nor Shiite, but despotic.” [46]
Hojat al-Islam Kamaleddin Ganjeh’i: Khomeinism is a creation of Taghut (“The Rebel” – an Islamic designation for Satan). [47]
Hussein Mussavi Khomeini (Ayatollah Khomeini‟s grandson and a mid ranking cleric): The IRI “has no right to be described as Islamic.” [48]
The IRGC, IRAN and Terror
Quote Unquote
The Budget
U.S. officials have described the Iranian regime as the world’s “central banker of terrorism”, based in part on the declassified fact that Tehran has a nine-digit line item in its budget to support terrorism.[49]“The national budget that came into effect on March 21, 2008 allocated over $2 billion to the promotion of revolutionary causes [terrorism]”. [50]
“Ten Days of Dawn”
Since 1989 Tehran has hosted an international gathering of terrorist organizations every February. Known as the Ten Days of Dawn, the event attracts scores of terror groups from more than 70 countries across the globe.[51] For the last 25 years Iran has been the host to the offices of more than three dozen terrorist organizations, from FARC to Hamas to Leninist and Trotskyite groups.[52]
Death Squads – Abroad
Iranian death squads have killed 127 dissidents, most of them intellectuals, in sixteen countries including the United States and several European nations.[53] No other regime in recent history has seen so many of its highest officials [including IRGC leaders] implicated in political murders at trials taking place in countries where the rule of law is respected.[54]