Debate Over IRGC Designation Is Pointless — Like the Rest of the Iran Deal

The Revolutionary Corps Guard is a terrorist organization, plain and simple.

T he Biden administration has yet to finalize its highly capitulatory iteration of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). On Monday, Ned Price, spokesperson for the State Department, said that the U.S. was ready to “return to full JCPOA implementation,” depending on Iran’s compliance. Yet the deal, which is far weaker and more dangerous than Obama’s original pact with the Islamic Republic, has stalled on one key question: the FTO (foreign terrorist organization) designation of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC).

Despite Biden’s jaw-dropping list of concessions thus far in negotiations, the debate over the FTO designation carries on. This is because Iran has witnessed the Biden administration entertain its demands for over a year. Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told National Review that “the reason we don’t have a deal today is not because of U.S. domestic politics” or issues related to “legal lifting” of the FTO designation. It’s because Iran is “still playing hardball” and the Islamic Republic’s ultra-hardliners are “still pressing their advantage.”

Their hubris is backed by a reasonable risk calculation.

The Biden administration is still negotiating a (weak and dangerous) deal with Tehran, despite regional destabilization, Iran’s countless violations of enrichment limits, and its evasions of inspections by the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Assocation). In the latest of its atrocities, Iran has rejected an “offer from its enemies” to lift sanctions in exchange for refraining from an attack:

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(Reuters) – Iran has rejected "regular offers from its enemies" to lift sanctions in return for Tehran abandoning plans to avenge the U.S. assassination of Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, semi-official ISNA news agency quotes Navy Commander as saying

— Phil Stewart (@phildstewart) April 21, 2022

Though the Biden administration has shown it’s willing to bend to Iran, a bipartisan resistance has sprung up, shocked into action by the capitulatory deal and especially by the question of the IRGC’s FTO status.

Many, like Senator Joe Manchin, have written to the president, urging him to maintain a terrorist designation on, well, a terrorist group. Manchin wrote:

I am particularly worried about reports that you might be considering removing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list in the hopes that trade relations can be reestablished with Iran to assist with our energy crisis. Let me be clear. The IRGC is a terrorist organization.

And yet there are still some pushing for a deal, even if it means conceding on the IRGC’s terrorism designation and, more broadly, on the Biden administration’s lax terms of the deal.

One tactic is to blame Donald Trump. Proponents of the deal say that Trump listed the IRGC as an FTO to create a “poison pill” for future Iran deal negotiations in subsequent administrations. As it was put in an NBC News article:

Critics accused the Trump administration of intentionally introducing “poison pill” sanctions that would make it difficult for the next president to restore the accord. But officials at the time said the sanctions were designed to hammer Iran as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign to force more concessions from Tehran and to weaken the regime.

Murtaza Hussain at the Intercept wrote that Trump’s 2019 FTO listing of the IRGC “made [Obama’s] deal virtually impossible to revive.”

In December, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in regard to Biden’s embarrassing concessions to Iran that “the Biden Administration’s problem is that it came into office believing that the main threat to world stability was Donald Trump.”

The whole “poison pill” notion is moot. The sky is blue and the IRGC is a terrorist organization, plain and simple.

Even the State Department, which is negotiating the Iran deal, has designated Iran the world’s leading sponsor of terror. Taleblu told me that “the Islamic Republic has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism since the early 1980s” because of “the activities of the entire Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

Iran — and its Revolutionary Guard — have spread terror throughout the region and the world. Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi rebels, and other Iranian-backed entities continue to violently destabilize their home countries. The IRGC itself is behind many deadly terrorist attacks, including the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

There is bipartisan political consensus that the IRGC is an FTO group and should be held accountable as such. In his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that lifting terrorism sanctions for Iran would be inconsistent with U.S. national-security interests and that the U.S. must do “everything possible . . . to deal with Iranian support for terrorism.” Under Obama, even, this was true; terrorism sanctions on Iran were not inconsistent with the original JCPOA.

In congress, both Democrats and Republicans have been holding press conferences slamming Biden’s deal. In a Democratic conference hosted by Representatives Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) and Elaine Luria (Va.), Luria said that the deal was raising “a variety of concerns” and “outright opposition” among a group of 18 House Democrats. Regarding the IRGC concession, she said that it’s “completely unacceptable” to even consider “to lift Iran’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designation on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

There is even judicial consensus on the IRGC’s terrorist roots among judges of all political bents. Judge Beryl A. Howell, appointed to the D.C. District Court by President Obama, ruled that Iran and the IRGC were responsible for the Khobar Towers attack. Though Iran and the IRGC did not defend themselves against the claims, Howell sought damages under the “terrorism exception” in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which stipulates that “a foreign state shall not be immune from the jurisdiction of courts of the United States” should it be responsible for “personal injury or death” caused by an act of terrorism. In 2008, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, appointed by President Reagan, ruled that “the Khobar Towers bombing was planned, funded and sponsored by senior leadership in the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The case was entered against not only the Iranian government but the Revolutionary Guard as well.

It’s clear enough that the IRGC should remain an FTO despite any deal. But, more broadly, that deal — as it stands, weak and dangerous to our national-security interests — shouldn’t be on the table in the first place. Thus, an FTO designation is not a political threat to the deal, as the Washington Post put it earlier today, but an unconscionable concession that’s part of a generally unconscionable deal:

Virtually all Republican lawmakers and many Democrats have voiced opposition to any deal with Iran, disapproval that has escalated with reports that the administration has considered lifting the IRGC terrorist designation. Inside the administration, there is widespread agreement on the dangers of not renewing the agreement, but significant differences over whether the nuclear risk outweighs the political minefield.

Hussain believes that conceding on the IRGC designation is worth “restarting a conflict that the Obama administration had expended significant diplomatic and political capital to avert.”

The fatal flaw is to assume that Biden’s deal would mitigate an immediate “nuclear risk” and that it merits massive concessions to Iran. In reality, the deal would make Iran more dangerous; it would pump billions into Iran’s economy, empower its sponsorship of terrorism, and put only a very temporary stall on Iran’s nuclear-enrichment and ballistic-missile program. But most damning would be the tarnished U.S. deterrent in the face of an emboldened Iran.