Prepare for insurgency in Iran when the Ayatollahs fall
Michael Rubin
On May 8, 1945, President Harry S. Truman confirmed Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender. “We join in offering our thanks to the Providence which has guided and sustained us through the dark days of adversity,” he declared. “Our rejoicing is sobered and subdued by a supreme consciousness of the terrible price we have paid to rid the world of Hitler and his evil band.”
But while Americans celebrated across the country, some hardcore Nazi ideologues refused to give up the fight. A Nazi insurgency continued to stage sporadic attacks through 1947. Historians debate the number of insurgent attacks and casualties but agree that they were minor, both because Allied forces succeeded in disrupting the network and because Germans were simply too exhausted after years of war.
The end of the Islamic Republic of Iran will be different. While the current protests have ended any pretense of regime legitimacy, the Islamic Republic is not bankrupt. The supreme leader’s holdings may approach $100 billion, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) continue to run a business empire that brings in revenue almost an order of magnitude above the money they receive through the ordinary budgetary process.
The IRGC is not homogeneous. Many Iranians know someone who joined the group for the privileges and pay. It would be a mistake, however, to downplay its ideology. It is possible for young Iranians to enter the IRGC bubble through various programs while still in primary school, the Iranian equivalent of the Hitler Youth. Once in the system, they can continue within it through graduate school and then a career. Many Iranians want nothing more than to live a normal life in a normal, parliamentary democracy, but the IRGC’s true believers will do anything to prevent that. Decades of incitement matter.
Here, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) also provides a crystal ball. The group was an early ally of Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. When he purged them, they undertook a terror campaign that targeted not only regime officials but ordinary Iranians as well. Nor was the MKO alone. They merely followed a long history of Iranian religious radicals utilizing terror to attack liberals if unable to win power themselves. IRGC true believers will be no different. This is what makes President Joe Biden and Special Envoy Rob Malley’s continued willingness to resource Iran’s security forces under the guise of nuclear diplomacy so bizarre.
The Islamic Republic should crumble, and most Iranians will celebrate when it does. That, however, will be the end of only one chapter with several more to come before there is a happily ever after for Iranians. IRGC ideologues will never accept democracy without a fight; they will need to be captured, killed, or forced into a Qatari, Lebanese, or Russian exile. Nor will IRGC businesses give up their billion-dollar fortunes.
When the Iranian regime falls, the first order of business for the provisional government will be to stabilize its economy. The ayatollahs’ regime is not only Islamist but also protectionist. Decades of command economy and incompetent management have ruined Iranian industry and left it unable to compete. The Iranian currency is in the sewer. Despite Iranian distrust of foreigners, recovery will mean some form of foreign direct investment.
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IRGC insurgents will target not only Iranian civil society activists, liberated women, and the new class of post-Islamic Republic politicians and administrators, but also visiting American businessmen and Western diplomats.
What most blunted the SS insurgency in post-war Germany was intelligence work in the last weeks of the war. U.S. and British forces kneecapped the insurgency with arrests, discovery of weapons caches, and confiscation of cash. Rather than replenish IRGC resources, perhaps a better strategy today would be for the Biden administration to identify and neutralize them. Anything else would be policy malpractice and will cost scores of American resources and thousands of Iranian lives.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.