Cliff Notes for the Revolutionary Guard

Prompted by Sec. of State, Hillary Clinton's statement of fact that Iran is becoming a military dictatorship.

IRAN'S REVOLUTIONARY GUARD

• Founded 1979
• Numbers about 125,000 troops
• Operates independently of the regular army
• Controls the Basij militia, Iran's "moral police"
• Commercial arm involved in construction, oil exports, petrol imports, defence and transport contracts
• The Qods Force special unit is thought to back armed groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon Source: Reuters (via BBC, 15 Feb. 2010)
  

• Some analysts believe IRGC influence in the political arena amounts to the irreversible militarization of Iran's government. Others, like Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, suggest the guard's power has grown to exceed that of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who legally has final say on all state matters. But Frederic Wehrey, an adjunct senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation and the co-author of a recent study on the IRGC, notes that the Revolutionary Guard is far from a cohesive unit of likeminded conservatives. Instead, he says, it's a heavily factionalized institution with a mix of political aspirants unlikely to turn on their masters. ("Who are Iran’s Revolutionary Guards?," by Greg Bruno, Council on Foreign Relations, MSNBC, 23 June 2009)