Terrorists Haven’t Just Taken Over Iran — They’ve Run It for 47 Years

I am an ardent admirer of Elliott Abrams, but I find his column today, lamenting that Iran has been taken over by terrorists, as if that just happened, confusing.

There has been no regime change in Iran. Since its inception after, and spurred by, the Khomeini revolution in 1979, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been a component of the regime. As recounted in 2022 by Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., “mere months” after Khomeini came to power he established the IRGC to (per the McIntyre Report) “‘ensure there would be no backsliding in implementing [his] vision for an Islamic theocratic government in Iran.’”

The IRGC is not and has never been an independent actor separate from the Iranian regime. Consequently, terrorists have not suddenly taken over Iran. The Iranian regime is the same jihadist terrorist regime it has been for the past 47 years.

I don’t want to overstate my disagreement. In the main, I take Elliott to be saying that, over time, within Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih (guardianship of the Islamic jurist) framework, there has been a shift in intra-governmental influence from the sharia authority to the IRGC. I agree with that.

Nevertheless, such internal power dynamics were inevitable. As the decades went by, the IRGC has built military and economic power. Comparatively, the influence of the Islamic juridical authority has eroded as it passed from Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the state and an authentic expert in Islamic jurisprudence, to Ali Khamenei, a Khomeini courtier who was really not a qualified sharia authority, and finally to Mojtaba Khamenei (who may be even less qualified than his father, who may or may not be alive, and who may never have had the physical capacity to govern when the torch was ostensibly passed to him).

Such a shift, however, is not regime change. The Iranian regime has been withered by American and Israeli armed forces, and thus many of its leaders have been eliminated. Still, it is the same government with the same actors. In fact, it was in conformity with Khomeini’s governing framework that the IRGC hastened to install, however nominally, Khamenei the younger. The shift in relative influence between these actors doesn’t change the apocalyptic Islam and revolutionary jihadism that gives the regime its character and global ambitions.

The anomaly here is that, in 2019, the first Trump administration undertook to brand the IRGC a foreign terrorist organization (FTO). This was a triumph of rhetoric over law: politically popular because it gave the appearance of taking meaningful action, but (a) conceptually confusing because the FTO designation is meant to cover non-state actors — e.g., terrorist organizations like the ones Elliott discusses, al-Qaeda and Hamas — and (b) redundant because the Iranian regime, of which the IRGC was and is a component, was already designated, by the Reagan administration in 1984, as a state sponsor of terrorism and subject to crushing sanctions.

(An aside: It could be argued that Hamas became something of a governmental actor when it was elected in the 2006 Palestinian Authority parliamentary election and ultimately functioned as de facto ruler of Gaza; and Ahmed al-Sharaa, who claims to be a former al-Qaeda operative (and who was a designated foreign terrorist) is now “president” of Syria by dint of forcible conquest. Yet both were non-state actors when they were formally designated in the late nineties. By contrast, the IRGC was part and parcel of the Iranian regime when the regime was designated as a terrorism sponsor in 1984, and when the IRGC was designated an FTO over 30 years later. Prior to the IRGC’s designation, the U.S. government had never designated a component of a government as an FTO. In fact, as I noted in frustration many times, especially during the Obama years, our government resisted designating the Afghan Taliban as an FTO, despite its harboring of al-Qaeda as it committed the 9/11 atrocities and other attacks, because such a designation would have legally and diplomatically complicated our government’s negotiations with the Taliban, with an eye toward peacefully incorporating them into the Afghan government — in hopes of preventing them from ousting that government, as they ultimately did.)

There is nothing new about this. For example, the Khobar Towers litigation (see, e.g., Ackley v. Islamic Republic of Iran (Washington, D.C., federal district court (2022), describing the history of the related cases), involved a suit to compensate victims of the 1996 attack in Saudi Arabia, principally carried out by the Iranian regime and one of its Hezbollah-related proxies, Hezbollah al-Hejaz. (There continues to be debate over whether al Qaeda played at least a peripheral role). During that litigation, the aforementioned Judge Lamberth, noted that the IRGC and the Qods (Jerusalem) Force (the IRGC-created “external operations directorate” for controlling terrorist proxies outside Iran) “report directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran.” The judge further concluded that, in its capacity as an arm of the Iranian government, the IRGC was responsible for the 1996 attack, in which 19 U.S. airmen were killed and many others were injured.

Nevertheless, as Lamberth has repeatedly complained over the years, it is exceedingly difficult for victims of IRGC terrorism to recover damages because of sovereign immunity principles. That has been an enduring problem because the IRGC has always been part of the Iranian government — a state actor, not a stand-alone, nongovernment terrorist organization.

And in that vein, the IRGC has always been a terrorist entity. It didn’t become one when it was designated. Hence, pace Elliott, it is not surprising that there has been no international outcry over the IRGC’s purportedly elevated status in Iran — whatever that may be in fast-changing wartime conditions.

What has happened in Iran is not comparable to a situation in which a designated terrorist organization takes power upon ousting a different regime, especially a non-terrorist regime. I’m not sure I agree with the implication that the sharia authority component of Iran’s government has been completely supplanted; Khamenei the younger may be dead or incapacitated, but the Guardian Council (which vets laws and candidates for fidelity to the state’s construction of sharia) still appears to exist. But even if we agree for argument’s sake that the IRGC has supplanted the sharia authority, that authority was as much a terrorist entity as the IRGC. In point of fact, it was the same terrorist entity.

Where I emphatically agree with Elliott is that civilized states should refuse to have dealings with terrorist entities — whether they are governments, government components, or nongovernment organizations. But on that accounting, civilized states should have been shunning Iran all along. It is to be expected that other states have not much changed their position on Iran just because the IRGC jihadists may now have eclipsed the sharia-authority jihadists to whom they heretofore reported.

A last rueful point. Like Elliott, I think it’s notable that, about 20 years ago, the U.S., joined by the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations (“the Middle East Quartet”) demanded that the Palestinian Authority “abandon violence and terror, acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and support all previous agreements between the PA and Israel, including the Oslo Accords.” But it’s mostly notable because there is little chance such a demand would be issued today. In fact, under a Democratic administration, I doubt even the United States government would take that position, for fear of mutiny from the Democrats’ pro-Islamist base supporters.

To be clear, Elliott Abrams, both in and out of government, has been one of the nation’s most compelling thinkers on Iran. He’s entirely right that other countries should be shunning Iran because it is a terrorist state. I just don’t think that the IRGC’s ascendancy, if that’s what’s happened, has changed anything.