As Israel prepares to take the next step up a ladder of retaliatory escalation with Iran, there are good reasons not to strike the nation’s nuclear program or critical energy infrastructure, and instead focus on military assets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Such an attack would deserve support. However, as so often, much hinges on how and where the attacks are conducted.
The IRGC is not the Iranian military. It is a favored parallel set of armed forces and intelligence agencies that acts as a roughly 180,000-strong Praetorian guard for Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Sanctions have helped grow its share of the economy to between one and two-thirds. It produces and smuggles oil, backstops domestic repression and projects the 1979 Islamic Revolution across the Levant.
This sprawling institution has multiple interests, so it is no monolith. Still, taken as a whole, its members are heavily indoctrinated by Islamist training. Most Iranians just roll their eyes at the regime’s choreographed chants of “Death to America! Death to Israel!” The IRGC means it. The Guard’s elite Quds Force nurtured Hezbollah into the missile-toting militia it has become. It armed and funded Hamas, and provided the Houthis of Yemen with the missiles and technology to harass commercial shipping in the Red Sea, and to lob the occasional attack at Israel. It helped stop rebels from Syria’s majority Sunni population from overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is part of the country’s Shiite-derived Alawite minority. The IRGC also provided Shiite militias in Iraq with roadside bombs to kill US servicemembers, as well as the arms and expertise to fight the Islamic State, their Sunni rivals in radical fundamentalism.
Illustration: Yusha
Many Iranians, even those who opposed the regime, used to accept the IRGC’s external role. The charismatic former Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani routinely polled as the most popular political figure in the country, until his assassination in January 2020. The unspoken deal was that the IRGC would ensure Iran never again had to fight the kind of devastating state-on-state war it experienced with Iraq in the 1980s, which left hundreds of thousands of Iranians dead. Soleimani, in effect, updated that social contract by taking on enemies such as the Islamic State outside Iran so they did not have to be fought at home.
Yet the arrangement was starting to fall apart by the time former US president Donald Trump approved Soleimani’s killing in a drone strike. Iranians, while happy to see Quds Force work with Shiite militias to fight the Islamic State, were less keen on the IRGC’s obsession with attacking (and provoking) Israel and the US or building some kind of Islamist Shiite empire. Iran’s population remains among the least anti-Israel and anti-US in the Middle East.
“When you talk to other Muslims, they say: What is wrong with Iranians? I don’t see them protesting against Israel. Why don’t they go to mosque?” Saeid Golkar, a specialist on the region and associate professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, told me. “If I am an Israeli politician, striking now is an opportunity, it’s the right thing to do. But as an Iranian, I am concerned about people in Iran. I really hope any collateral damage is very, very small.”
Popular frustration with IRGC activities has grown over the last few years, especially as the regime swung back to a period of severe domestic repression, spawning the 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests. The Guard and its volunteer Basij units played a central role in the state’s brutal response, killing hundreds.
At the same time, sanctions and inflation continue to weaken the economy. Per capita GDP almost halved in a decade, in raw dollar terms, to US$4,503 at the end of last year from a peak of US$8,329 in 2012, according to the World Bank. The threat that the IRGC’s adventures could now spark a large-scale war that strikes at home, within Iran, is making things worse. Gold purchases have soared, more investors fled an already weak stock market, and the street exchange rate for the rial, the country’s currency, has fallen sharply.
From a geopolitical standpoint, the regime’s position has rarely been as good. It has a staunch ally in Russia, with China also in its camp. Its stockpile of uranium, enriched to within a sprint of weapons grade, has grown fast since Trump ended the nuclear deal. The Quds Force has been building militias and weapons capacity in Syria and organizing destabilization operations in Jordan. Hamas’ Oct. 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation last year, or rather Israel’s heavy-handed reaction to it, was a gift.
However, none of this “winning” resonates outside the regime’s hardline support base. Khamenei knows this, just as he knows he can fight but not win an all-out conflict with Israel and the US. That is why he hesitated so long before hitting Israel a second time, on Oct. 1, even as the Israeli air force devastated Hezbollah’s leadership and killed several top Quds Force generals in the process. So this is a pivotal moment.
Striking nuclear or energy sites would amount to a massive escalation, would have a significant impact on ordinary Iranians and would guarantee Iran’s retaliation on regional energy assets that are critical to the global economy. On Wednesday, General Ebrahim Jabbari, advisor to the commander of the IRGC, claimed the Oct. 1 strike had destroyed a large number of Israel’s F-35 jets and that 90 percent of Iran’s missile barrage had hit their targets. He also pledged massive retaliation to any Israeli response.
All of these claims seem unlikely, aimed at showing a domestic audience that the IRGC is no paper tiger. Available footage suggests far more than 10 percent of Iran’s missiles were intercepted, even if many got through, and so far, there is no evidence that multiple F-35s were destroyed, even if Israel is hiding some level of damage. Above all, Jabbari would not be making the decision on a response — Khamenei would. A proportionate Israeli attack would again put Iran’s supreme leader in a tough corner. The IRGC controls the ballistic missiles and launchers that pose Iran’s greatest threat to the Jewish state, especially should it ever develop a nuclear weapon. A surgically targeted Israeli strike on multiple IRGC military assets, inside or outside Iran, would be both useful in degrading potential to damage Israel, and proportionate to what Iran tried (and failed) to do on Oct. 1.
To avoid doing the regime a favor, Israel’s counterstrike should avoid population centers — as Iran did at the start of this month — unless it makes symbolic attacks on the Basij and IRGC headquarters used for domestic repression. That balance would improve Israeli security, demonstrate to Iranians the risks that the IRGC’s Islamist zeal is bringing to its own country, and make clear that the Jewish state’s only target is the armed wing of a hated Islamist regime.
This is something Israel has dismally failed to achieve in Gaza, and now risks again in Lebanon, should it get stuck in another long occupation of the country’s south. It cannot afford to make the same mistake with Iran by attacking in ways that rally a nation of 84 million behind Khamenei.
Limiting the coming strike to military IRGC assets could thread that needle.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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