Iran Analysts Doubt Tehran Will Make Deal To Limit IRGC Activities
Iranian analysts abroad say it is unlikely Tehran would limit activities of the Revolutionary Guard just to have its terror designation lifted by Washington.
Iranian analysts abroad say it is unlikely Tehran would limit activities of the Revolutionary Guard just to have its terror designation lifted by Washington.
Observers in Iran and abroad have been saying during the past weeks that the issue of the IRGC's designation as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) is the main hinderance to a renewed nuclear agreement between Tehran and Washington.
Mehdi Mahdavi Azad in Germany and Houshang Hassanyari, a military analyst in Canada, expressed skepticism to Iran International TV on Saturday about Iran's willingness to seriously limit the role of IRGC and its Qods Force.
When on Friday reporters asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki how far the Biden administration is ready to go in its attempt to salvage the remains of the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, she evaded the question.
Psaki said negotiations were still ongoing and had nothing more to offer. Meanwhile, she refused to address their concern about whether secret negotiations with Iran "are turning into negotiations with terrorists."
Mahdavi termed the secret negotiations between Iran and the United States over the IRGC issue, "JCPOA-2". He pointed out that in fact this was the term Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had used in a March 2016 speech. According to Mahdavi, Khamenei defined JCPOA-2 as a model the United States and other Western states had suggested for reducing tensions in the region. "Khamenei said at the time that if he accepted the idea, the Westerners would then ask for the disbanding of the IRGC Qods Force," Mahdavi said.
The analysts maintained that whatever the world knows as Iran's revolutionary foreign policy fully involves the IRGC and its Qods Force. If Tehran is negotiating with Washington over IRGC’s role, it simply wants to make sure that the terrorist designation is lifted.
Asked if this could change the Islamic Republic's foreign policy, Hassanyari said: "This would be the biggest retreat for the Islamic Republic and its leader Khamenei. The IRGC's role in the region has been one of the most important problems US officials are focused on." Hassanyari agreed with Mahdavi that it is the IRGC carries out the Tehran's regional policy.
Mahdavi said the reason the Islamic Republic has not admitted that talks are taking place about the role of the IRGC, is because people in Iran will ask why Khamenei had not done this during the past ten years and allowed a large part of the population to go into poverty. Naturally, if Khamenei has to negotiate with America, it has to be done secretly. Mahdavi added that the Iranian regime might have to undermine its credibility before its own supporters and give bigger concessions to the West if it feels that it is the only way out of problems it faces.
Hassanyari said that the fate of Iran's proxy groups in the region are also part of the negotiations. This will further humiliate the Islamic Republic both at home and in those countries where it has heavily invested to build influence.
In another part of the interview, Mahdavi said that the Obama administration ignored the demands of regional countries including Israel when it forged the 2015 agreement with Iran. However, the Biden administration is paying more attention to the growing concerns in Israel and Arab countries about a compromise with Tehran particularly as Iran has been launching attacks on some Arab countries and intervening in the affairs of other Arab states.
“The Revolutionary Guards are a terrorist organization that has murdered thousands of people, including Americans,” Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid said in a statement. “We have a hard time believing that the United States will remove it from the definition of a terrorist organization.”
During negotiations since April 2021 to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, Tehran has made clear it expects the United States to lift a raft of ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions introduced after the Trump administration in 2018 withdrew the US from the deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
There has been speculation that one of the disagreements in not concluding a nuclear deal is over delisting the IRGC. Opponents of the JCPOA in the US and Israel are aware than not delisting the IRGC would make it harder to gain acceptance in Tehran for reimplementing the agreement, which limited Iran’s atomic program.
Shared global mission
The statement from Bennett and Lapid portrayed IRGC designation as part of a “global fight against terrorism…a shared mission of the entire world.” To remove the designation, they said, would mean the US abandoning “its closest allies in exchange for empty promises from terrorists.”
Former United States president Donald Trump added the IRGC to the list in 2019, the first time part of a state’s armed forces was included. Trump’s designation referred specifically to the 1983 bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon, carried out by a Lebanese Shia group when the US intervened in the Lebanon war after the 1982 Israeli invasion, and the 1996 Khobar Tower bombing in Saudi Arabia, culpability for which has never been conclusively established.
The Israeli statement portrayed the IRGC as controlling a range of groups across the Middle East. “The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are Hezbollah in Lebanon, they are Islamic Jihad in Gaza, they are the Houthis in Yemen, they are the militias in Iraq,” it said.
Promise not to harm Americans
Bennett and Lapid argued against the US listing groups as terrorists only on the grounds of a perceived threat to Americans: “The Revolutionary Guards took part in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians, they destroyed Lebanon, they are engaged in the murderous repression of Iranian civilians. They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they do not surrender to them. We find it hard to believe that the definition of the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization will be abolished in exchange for a ‘promise not to harm the Americans.'”
Not only that, the IRGC, for the Israeli leaders, is an “integral part of the murderous repression machine in Iran” whose “hands are stained with the blood of thousands of Iranians and the trampling of the soul of Iranian society.” Hence, argued Bennett and Lapid, removing the IRGC from the list would be “an insult to the victims and the erasure of a documented reality, with unequivocal evidence.”
Collision course
Reports say the Biden Administration is considering removing the IRGC from its ‘foreign terrorist’ list a part of agreement to revive the JCPOA limiting Iran’s nuclear program. But JCPOA opponents in Israel, the US and elsewhere have highlighted the IRGC recently firing a dozen ballistic missiles at Erbil in northern Iraq after an Israeli airstrike killed two Iranian soldiers in Syria. Iran claimed that it targeted an Israeli intelligence base, but Iraq and the US dismissed the claim.
Following a House Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday, Democrat congresswoman Elaine Luria, a naval veteran, tweeted that reviving the JCPOA would “put Iran and Israel on a collision course,” echoing remarks by Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Herzog.