Brian M Downing
The health of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, has been in question for years. Wounded in an MEK bombing, treated for cancer, the 81-year-old cleric was recently said to be gravely ill and choosing a successor. But death isn’t at hand, though piety and power do not ensure eternal life, at least not in this world.
Iran has had only two Supreme Leaders since the Shah was driven out in 1979. Khamenei’s succession, then, will be closely watched by generals around the world, including those in the IRGC. The next Supreme Leader will not have the prestige Khamenei has built up over the last thirty years, let alone that of his predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini. He was a spiritual leader while in exile, came home to jubilant if unquestioning throngs, and created the Islamic Republic. He lies in a Mao-like mausoleum.
Khamenei touched the cloak of Khomeini, made decisions alongside him in war and peace, and nurtured the IRGC from a band of fervent shock troops to a sprawling military-bureaucratic behemoth. The next leader will undoubtedly have impeccable theological credentials but will lack experience in war and security matters. He might not realize his deficiencies, but the generals do.
Generals and the state
The Islamic Republic has been under siege since its founding. It endured eight years of war with Iraq and continues to face threats. Today, a powerful Sunni alliance, with the help of Israel and intermittently the US, wants to destroy it with uprisings and fragmentation. They have imposed harsh sanctions, encouraged insurgencies, supported a slew of assassinations and bombings (two major ones this year), and came close to toppling the Alawi-Shia government in Syria – Iran’s sole regional ally.
The IRGC sees itself as the defender of the nation and since its inception has been fiercely, even fanatically devoted to the Supreme Leader. But the accession of a new generation of clerics, who lack the prestige and experience of forbears, may cause the generals to question deference to religious figures and to strengthen their power in the state, if only subtly at first.
The military coup, a sudden often violent seizure of state power, is well known, especially in the Middle East. That’s how regimes in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and the Sudan came to power. Elsewhere, militaries have gained power slowly. At the outset of the Great War, the German generals were deferent to Kaiser and Reichstag. Three years later, they’d become the state – more so than any Bourbon king.
A sudden power grab by the IRGC would trigger an immediate response from the clergy. The mullahs above all compose a powerful guild-like entity that has defended its privileges from the encroachments of kings, shahs, and civilians alike.
The mullahs would find important allies in parts of the state, urban middle classes, the regular army, and even the IRGC, especially its informal militias (Basij) which comprise a half million dedicated toughs who know how to crack heads. Many Greens will oppose a military coup, not out of admiration for the mullahs but in the hopes of toppling mullahs and generals alike and ushering in broad political change.
The nation would be in turmoil, army and state paralyzed, and the Republic open to foreign intervention and secessionism by Kurds, Arabs, Azeris, and Baloch – the IRGC’s greatest fear. Better to set a slower course and gradually change Iran from a theocracy defended by an elite military to a national security state legitimized by an obliging clergy. Putin’s Russia speaks to them.
Next: the IRGC perspective.
© 2020 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.