HeavenlyPossumMar 17

The Iranian state fields two separate militaries.

The first is its regular army, the Islamic Republic of Iran Army, or Artesh. It does regular military stuff: territorial protection, power projection, etc.

The second is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC. Its mandate is the protection of the “Islamic Revolution” of 1979 and the resulting Islamic republic. It is, in short, the ideologically-oriented component of the Iranian armed forces.

This arrangement is pretty typical in autocratic regimes as a mechanism of ensuring the regular armed forces are kept in check as a potential coup threat. Hitler built the ideological SS in parallel to the regular Wehrmacht; Saddam Hussein built the Republican Guard in parallel to the Iraqi army. Trump has taken initial steps to do something similar with ICE.

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Show threadHeavenlyPossumMar 17

The IRGC is, like the SS, a multi-service force. It has its own ground force, air force, and navy. It also has a special operations and direct action arm, the Quds (or “Jerusalem”) Force. Remember when Trump ordered Qasem Soleimani assassinated in 2020? He was the head of the IRGC-QF.

The IRGC has a fifth branch: the Basij. The Basij is a paramilitary force, more of an auxiliary force for maintaining domestic control than a military force. Members of the Basij are basically volunteer thugs who maintain order, suppress protests, assault women who don’t wear their headscarves properly—that sort of thing. They’re the front-line element of the Iranian state’s apparatus of oppression.

If the IRGC is somewhat akin to what Trump would like ICE to be, then the Basij is sort of like a mash-up of the KKK, Proud Boys, and Patriot Front, mobilized and given license by the state to beat up protesters and maybe murder a few.

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Show threadHeavenlyPossumMar 17

I am not, to put it mildly, a fan of the IRGC or the Basij. These are not good actors and they do not become good by virtue of being attacked by the US and Israel. When you hear news stories about Iranians being afraid to protest the regime right now because there are plain-clothes agents on the street surveilling or intimidating people, most of those agents are probably Basij.

So I won’t lose any sleep when I hear that US and Israeli strikes are targeting Basij facilities and checkpoints. At the same time, holy shit, what an obscene disregard for the safety of the Iranian civilians near these checkpoints is on display in these videos:

https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/shipwreck75.bsky.social/post/3mhbbizd3622u

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Shipwreck (@shipwreck75.bsky.social)

Israeli Air Force has been striking Basij soldiers and its checkpoints across Tehran.

Bluesky Social
Show threadHeavenlyPossumMar 17

These strikes also suggest that the US and Israel have run out of military targets they can easily strike and are now just hitting random Basij checkpoints.

Imagine a foreign power trying to take over the US or render it powerless by blowing up a handful of cops at a random sobriety checkpoint here and there, and you can get a sense of the problem of scale at work here. Iran is a big country. Its state apparatus is extensive. Killing a few Basij goons at a time is not going to materially affect the Iranian state’s ability to suppress domestic unrest, much less bring down the regime.

So if Iran can still fire ballistic missiles and attack drones at a steady rate, day after day, and the US and Israel are striking Basij checkpoints rather than ballistic missiles or launchers, it’s probably because *the US and Israel can’t find the missiles or their launchers*.

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Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Mar 17

@HeavenlyPossum

They are also reportedly blowing up hospitals, so I assume they've gone on to all kinds of infrastructure.

One thing the "Iranian missiles vs US/Israeli interceptors" way of looking at the war elides is that Iran doesn't have any particular defense for civilian targets.

Show threadellie (slut arc) 🖤 

@richpuchalsky @HeavenlyPossum I should articulate this more clearly sometime but it seems to me that in speaking of the "Iranian Terror Regime", what Israel is doing rhetorically is equating the Iranian gvmt with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and with that they're essentially trying to legitimise the same tactics they use in gaza or beirut (I have no doubt the israelis not only talk about but think of iran in this way). rhetorically, a terror group cannot be reasoned with. they cannot be negotiated with in good faith. a "terrorist" is a categorically evil person who just wants to hurt & kill others with little reasoning behind it. a terror group can only be eradicated.

and so, the iranian government cannot be reasoned with, it can only be eradicated. you've gone through all the bigwigs you can blow up, you've gone through the military bases & the launch sites you know of & whatever else, so the next step is, obviously, to destabilize society in its entirety in hopes of collapsing the state. so israel is showing the same regard for civilian lives in iran that it has shown in lebanon or gaza.

we could spend a while arguing about whether mass civilian casualties are a feature or a bug in this approach within the context of iran specifically. like in gaza it's obviously genocidal but I don't really see the same political (i.e. colonial) or emotional reasons (the genocidal hatred) for doing this to Iran. not that that actually makes a difference for all the people blown to smithereens.

Mar 17 at 9:33pmWeb
Show threadRich Puchalsky ⩜⃝Mar 17

@roadblock161_

It doesn't matter what they say or think to any great degree. All recent US wars have been about destabilization, whether that was the ostensible goal or not. All Israeli military actions are about either destabilization or genocide.

@HeavenlyPossum