After fighting an eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard returned from the battlefields demanding greater power in the system it defended. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered.
Today the guards are in another existential fight, this time against the US and Israel. Supreme leader Khamenei is dead, the guards’ top ranks have been shattered, and the force’s headquarters has been obliterated.
Yet if the corps is still standing after the bombardment, the war may simply accelerate a defining feature of revolutionary Iran: the guard’s 40-year rise as the Islamic republic’s pre-eminent military institution, with broad economic and political power.
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