US gambles on Iran's 'soldiers of
terror' By Trita Parsi
WASHINGTON - The White House's plan to
designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps
(IRGC) a terrorist organization could deal a
double blow to efforts to use diplomacy with Iran
to stabilize Iraq.
Not only would the
designation risk undermining the important yet
limited talks between the United States and Iran
in Baghdad, but it might also negatively impact
the next US president's ability to seek diplomacy
with Tehran by further entrenching US-Iran
relations in a paradigm of
enmity.
The Washington Post and New York
Times reported on Tuesday that the administration
of President George W Bush is going to include the
IRGC, Iran's 125,000-strong elite military branch,
as a "specially designated global terrorist" under
Executive Order 13224, because of the
organization's alleged destabilizing activities in
Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The
designation would authorize the US to target the
IRGC's business dealings, including blocking its
assets.
Originally set up by the ruling
clergy in Iran as a parallel army to prevent the
regular Iranian army from orchestrating a military
coup against the revolutionary government, the
IRGC is widely considered to be a powerful
political force in Iran with close ties to the
country's conservative factions.
The IRGC
has heavily penetrated Iran's economy, including
some of its key industries. It is often accused of
behaving like a state-sponsored mafia, with a
corrupting influence on Iran's economy, police,
media, industries, judiciary and government.
As such, many Iranians find the power and
political influence of this paramilitary force
highly problematic. Some Iranian political
activists have warned that any swift political
change in Iran will likely benefit the IRGC rather
than the pro-democracy movement, precisely because
the IRGC is well equipped and highly organized.
The Bush administration's decision to
label the IRGC as a global terrorist organization
has been presented as a step to ratchet up
pressure on Iran and intensify efforts to isolate
the country financially. Yet it is unclear whether
the designation is necessary to target the IRGC
economically.
The US Treasury is already
engaged in an extensive campaign to dry up Iran's
sources of finance. Whether the IRGC is labeled a
terrorist organization or not will likely have
little bearing on that campaign. Nor is the
decision likely to have a decisive impact on the
IRGC's shady business dealings.
Iran has,
after all, been under intense US sanctions since
the mid-1990s. While the sanctions have been
effective in imposing a major cost on the Iranian
economy, they have been utterly unsuccessful in
compelling Iran to alter its foreign policy. More
sanctions and financial pressure are likely only
to achieve more of the same: they will increase
the cost for the Iranian government to pursue its
policies while failing to halt or change those
policies.
The real impact of the
designation is likely to be political. On the one
hand, the move risks undermining the newly
initiated talks in Baghdad between US and Iranian
officials in regards to the security situation in
Iraq. While this step has been hailed as
unprecedented, the talks are yet to produce a real
breakthrough - except, that is, for the fact that
the two countries actually talked to each other in
the open for the first time in 28 years.
It is unclear how Washington expects
success in those talks if it at the same time
designates the very same people it seeks help from
as global terrorists.
Ironically, some of
the Iranian diplomats the US is dealing with in
Iraq are still part of the IRGC, including
Mohammad Jafari, who sat across the table from US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the Iraq
summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, this year.
The designation jeopardizes the Baghdad
channel by potentially causing its collapse or, at
a minimum, by sending a signal of hostility that
could convince Tehran - rightly or wrongly - that
the US is not serious about diplomacy.
Many analysts in Washington are already
skeptical about the Bush administration's
intentions with the talks. On Capitol Hill,
Republican lawmakers supportive of the
administration's policies have pointed to the
Baghdad channel as evidence that the White House
is implementing the Iraq Study Group
recommendations, and have urged their Democratic
colleagues to support the "surge" of troops in
Iraq in return.
Even if the Bush
administration is not banking on the Baghdad
channel to produce anything tangible, at the very
least it does provide the administration with
much-needed political cover on Capitol Hill.
The long-term effect of the decision to
designate the IRGC a terrorist organization,
however, may be even more significant. It is
easier to put an entity on the terrorist list than
to remove it. Future US presidents will likely
find their efforts to change Iranian behavior and
resolve US-Iranian disputes more difficult, not
only because the designation may put legal limits
on how the United States can deal with individuals
associated with the IRGC, but also by further
entrenching US-Iran relations in a paradigm of
enmity.
It will strengthen and prolong the
dominating narrative in the US, which reads that
stability in the Middle East can only be achieved
through Iran's containment and defeat. In this
paradigm, the US and Iran are entangled in a
zero-sum game where compromise and dialogue are
tantamount to defeat. Diplomacy, in this context,
is not a tool for seeking win-win solutions, but
rather another means for confrontation with the
aim of beating back the United States'
adversaries.
Not surprisingly, this line
of thought is equally common among radicals in
Tehran, who in the past have found no shortage of
ways to undercut any diplomatic outreach to
Washington. Left unchallenged, the strengthening
of this paradigm of enmity in Tehran and
Washington may very well lead to a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
Dr Trita Parsi is the
author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret
Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States
(Yale University Press, 2007). He is also
president of the National Iranian American Council
(www.niacouncil.org).
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