If We Want to Help the Iranians, We Should Disrupt the IRGC

President Trump is considering military intervention to protect Iran’s legitimate protesters from the regime. I am not necessarily recommending intervention, but if we do, I have some thoughts on how it should be done. Unlike Venezuela, where targeting President Maduro was seen as a critical first step to modifying the government, the center of gravity of the Iranian regime is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It is the glue that holds the rotting edifice together. The frightened old men who constitute the Grand Ayatollah and his Guardian Council are nothing without them, nor are the various ministries that comprise the executive branch of the government; they are technocrats and bureaucrats who have no real power outside their narrow responsibilities.

The IRGC is more powerful than the regular armed forces or the police. If it is nullified, the regime collapses under pressure from the mob. Unlike the Taliban and ISIS, the IRGC is very vulnerable to both air and cyber attack. In contrast to the Iranian nuclear program, the IRGC’s internal security forces have to operate in the open from fixed bases to intimidate the general public. We know where their key facilities are. They are not well hardened underground. Their Quds Force special operators are primarily geared toward supporting overseas terrorist groups; they may be relatively covert, but that limits their usefulness against civilian demonstrators.

Since its inception during the Iran-Iraq War, the IRGC has been the premier security force in the nation. The survivors of the hordes of young people who suicidally threw themselves against Iraqi fortifications in the 1970s have grown old, managing what has become not just a security force, but a for-profit business organization that owns much of the nation’s war production as well as the nuclear program. Its increasingly elderly leadership will do anything to maintain their elite status. If that organization is neutralized or forced underground by U.S. air strikes on their fixed installations and cyberattacks on their command and control systems, their ability to disrupt legitimate protests becomes nil. They might make effective insurgents in a civil war, but they would no longer be running the country.