When, last month, the Trump administration announced that it was considering adding the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—the Iranian political paramilitary force—to the State Department’s official list of foreign terrorist organizations, it was warned that doing so would unnecessarily provoke the Islamic Republic. Mark Dubowitz and Ray Takeyh disagree. (Free registration required.)
From the IRGC’s inception in 1979, terrorism has been its defining feature. The 125,000-strong force has always been commanded by reactionary religious ideologues. During the 1980s, the IRGC conducted vicious campaigns against all forms of [internal] dissent as well as against ethnic minorities, especially the Kurds and the Baluchis. . . . In 1999, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei unleashed the IRGC to crush student protests, a move that President Hassan Rouhani, then the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, had passionately supported. . . .
Yet it has been the IRGC’s terrorism abroad that has garnered the most attention. In the early 1980s, it combined various Lebanese Shiite groups to form Hizballah, which has become Iran’s most dependable and lethal proxy. At Iran’s behest, Hizballah bombed a U.S. Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, killing 238 U.S. service members. Since then, the IRGC has continuously trained and armed non-Iranian Shiite radicals, often dispatching them against Americans. The 1996 Khobar Tower bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen American service members, was an Iranian-directed proxy attack. Since 2003, Iranian-supplied munitions and Iranian-trained paramilitary forces have lacerated U.S. troops in Iraq.
In 2011, the Revolutionary Guard conducted its first attack on U.S. soil by attempting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, at a popular restaurant in Washington, D.C. . . . In Syria, the IRGC has been instrumental in preserving the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. . . .
The Trump administration must understand that it cannot stabilize the Middle East without first weakening the IRGC. And to do that, it should go after the group’s financial empire. If the president continues to face opposition in having the organization designated as a foreign terrorist organization, he can use Executive Order 13224, signed by President Bush [in 2001], which gives the administration the authority to freeze the assets of individuals or groups that either carry out terrorist acts or are at risk of doing so.
Read more on Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iran/2017-03-06/labeling-irans-revolutionary-guard