Iran's Challenging Victory Narrative

Abstract

41 ran celebrated the 30th anniver- sary of its Islamic Revolution in early February this year, and its leaders gave full throat to declara- tions of the historical magnitude of their first victory against the West- ern-dominated international status quo. Iran's aging radical theocrats re- minded the masses that Iran had overcome the U.S.-backed Shah and Washington's ongoing attempts to isolate the Islamic Republic and force it to give up its uranium en- richment efforts. Iranian officials also took credit for Hezbollah's 2006 victory over Israel in Lebanon and the Palestinians' just-ended and less successful resistance in Gaza. In these cases, and especially in their claims of having defeated Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, Iran's leaders touted by Saddam's Sunni-dominated Iraq was a godsend for the Islamic Republic's founding father, Ayatol- lah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his new revolutionary order, which at that point was facing waning pop- ular enthusiasm. The Iraqi aggression ensured the clerical regime's survival by reviving the public's na- tionalism and diverting attention from the country's slide into tyranny. A merger of religion and politics shaped Iran's military strategy and tactics, resulting in tension between the regular armed forces' West- ern-style professionalism and reliance on technol- ogy and a new Islamic way of war based on faith and spirituality. The result was the creation of two separate and competing armed forces, the regular military and the Revolutionary Guard, the service that had assembled the various armed revolution- ary groups into a single fighting force. Iran has generally had dual and sometimes du- eling militaries since the rise of the Safavid Empire in the 16th century. It also has had the attendant control, coordination, and reliability problems of having two armies. In the 19th and 20th centuries Iran's clerics were wary of European-based military reforms, fearing Western influences on the rank- and-file's observance of the mosque's guidance. To protect their interests, the Muslim mullahs repeat- edly undermined reform efforts to foster profes- sionalism, a tendency that came to a head in the Islamic Revolution with the subsequent purges of the regular military and the creation of the Revolu- tionary Guard as a counterbalance.