[osint] The Revolutionary Guards: custodians of Iran's rulers

[Beowulf]

 
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSBLA03484120071030
 

FACTBOX-The Revolutionary Guards: custodians of Iran's rulers

Tue Oct 30, 2007 7:40am EDT

(Reuters) - An Iranian military commander has said the Basij militia,
commanded by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), could disrupt
vital Gulf oil shipping routes with its "martyrdom-seeking" volunteers, if
the need arose.

The United States has branded the IRGC a proliferator of weapons of mass
destruction, said one unit backed terrorists and slapped sanctions on firms
and individuals linked to the force. Iran dismissed the accusations and
brushed off sanctions.

Following are some questions and answers about the IRGC:

WHAT IS THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS CORPS?

The IRGC was set up after the 1979 Islamic revolution to protect the
clerical ruling system and revolutionary values. It answers to Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's top authority.

The IRGC has an estimated 125,000-strong military with army, navy and air
units. It commands the Basij religious militia, a volunteer paramilitary
force loyal to the revolution. Basijis mounted "human wave" attacks against
Iraqi troops. In peacetime, they enforce Iran's Islamic social codes.
Analysts say Basiji volunteers may number in millions, with 1 million active
members.

The Qods (Jerusalem) force is also under IRGC command. It handles the IRGC's
foreign activities. The United States says it backs militants in Iraq and
Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas.

WHAT HAS THE IRGC SAID ABOUT THE NUCLEAR ROW WITH THE WEST?

The Guards have warned they could disrupt oil traffic in the Gulf waterway
if pushed but commanders doubt the United States will strike because it is
bogged down in Iraq and Afghanisan, and the proximity of U.S. forces to Iran
make them too vulnerable to an Iranian response.

WHAT ARE THE IRGC'S MILITARY CAPABILITIES?

Although Guardsmen fought in conventional battles against Iraq, military
experts say they developed "asymmetric" tactics, such as hit-and-run raids
using small craft targeting shipping in the 1980s when Iran and Iraq sought
to knock out each others oil exports.

Such tactics could be used again to disrupt oil shipping lines in the Gulf
waterway.

The IRGC has been involved with handling Iran's most advanced missile
systems like the Shahab-3 with a range of 2,000 km (1,250 miles), analysts
say.

WHAT IS THE IRGC'S POSITION IN THE POLITICAL SYSTEM?

The IRGC's mandate to protect revolutionary values has prompted it to speak
out when it felt the system was threatened.

Former IRGC officers have reached top political posts, notably President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But views of ex-officers are not homogenous and
analysts say inside the IRGC there are different camps, some with a more
pragmatic approach.

The IRGC's influence appears to have grown since Ahmadinejad came to power
in 2005.

WHAT ABOUT BUSINESS INTERESTS?

After the 1980s Iraq war, the IRGC became heavily involved in reconstruction
and has expanded its work to cover areas such as import and exports, oil and
gas projects and construction.

Sources: Reuters, Globalsecurity.org

 



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[osint] The Revolutionary

[R.A. Hettinga]

   

Esquire

The Revolutionary
Dick Cheney is the calmest man in the room. Too calm.

by Walter Russell Mead | Nov 01 '04

 He has many faces, all gray. He is a symphony in gray. He ranges the
spectrum from vanilla to colorless to dull. Even the pink of his lip and
the blue of his eyes are gray. As the Trojan horse for a contemporary
American revolution, he is magnificent, as radical behavior would be the
last thing suspected of someone who comports himself as he does. He is an
accident of history. He is a world-historic figure. He is the greatest
enigma in American public life. His name is Dick Cheney.


 1. The West Wing

 Portraits of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson-the country's first two
vice-presidents-gaze benignly past the cream-colored walls toward the
blue-carpeted floor. A copy of a Remington sculpture and a
nineteenth-century painting of the Grand Tetons add a hint of the West.

 Vice-President Cheney meets me at the door, shakes my hand, and shows me
to a seat in the half of his office furnished for guests.

 I think and write about U. S. foreign policy for a living at the Council
on Foreign Relations in New York. Before getting this far-my first contact
with the vice-president-I'd gone through months of screening. My latest
book had circulated among the vice-president's staff to determine whether
my political attitudes passed muster. Call me unaligned; there are days
when I can't decide whether to worry more about the Bush administration or
its critics.

 But I had come to the White House on a mission. This man, and this
administration, were wrecking my life. I wanted to know why.

 I hate the decision I'm being forced to make this November. I hate the
choices that the war on terrorism is imposing on us. The gravest threats of
an unimaginably difficult and challenging future are coming together with
some of the unhappiest unresolved conflicts in our national life, creating
a perfect political shit storm. I don't like the storm and I don't like the
choice. But the war is real, our divisions are real, and the choice isn't
going away.

 You can talk about Bush all you want, but for me the choice is not so much
either hating Bush or voting for him (or hating him  and  voting for him,
which quite a few people I know seem to be doing) but about the man in
whose office I was now sitting, the most powerful vice-president in history.

 In a very real sense, the Bush administration is a Cheney administration.
There are a lot of people-and a fair few are among my friends and
relations-who think of Dick Cheney much the way Captain Ahab thought of
Moby Dick. In poll after poll last summer, he scored the lowest approval
ratings of any of the four top national candidates. One poll showed that
four times as many people think he needs his teeth whitened as think John
Edwards does.

 That's not quite my beef with Dick Cheney. Rather, for virtually his
entire adult life, he's been engaged in the systematic destruction of what
I was raised to believe was progressive, decent, and forward-looking in the
United States of America. Now, with Cheney's determined backing, the Bush
administration had invaded Iraq in the teeth of world opinion, had stumbled
into an occupation for which it was clearly unprepared, and, whether you
looked at the Atlantic alliance or the United Nations, seemed to be
mounting an assault on what two generations of American statesmen had grown
accustomed to regarding as the fundamental principles of sound American
foreign policy. And they won't even tell us why they really did it. Their
stated reason-Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction-was patently
wrong. They had bigger and even better reasons for what they did, reasons
that would calm their critics if not win them over, but we are in the last
laps of an endless presidential campaign, and on this momentous subject
they remain mute. Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator. George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney are as silent as the Sphinx.

 And so, how to make coherent what is incoherent-U. S. foreign policy in
the Bush years? The great question in America today is this: Are Cheney and
Bush the bearers of bad news who are adjusting American foreign policy to a
new and ugly reality, or are they themselves the bad news, making the world
more squalid and more dangerous as they mislead the country on a ruinous
course?

 You have to give Cheney credit: Although he sits in the eye of the
tremendous shit storm encircling the world, you will never find a calmer,
more rational guy.

 "Looking back on the last three years," I ask, "what would you say are the
administration's lessons learned from fighting the war on terrorism?"

 Looking a bit like Jeeves bringing his hangover remedy to Bertie Wooster,
Cheney deflects the question with reassuring blandness about the difficult
task.

 Cheney projects calm no matter what it is he is saying, which makes it
possible to miss the portent of things tha