When the last shah lost his nerve, many of his supporters had an escape route - they fled to the United States and Europe. Iran's current ruling class has no such option. "Where are these guys going to go?" asked Ali M. Ansari, director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St. Andrews, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
As "Hvylya" reports, citing the WSJ interview, this lack of exit options shapes the regime's behavior in fundamental ways. Defectors have been promised amnesty, but the Revolutionary Guards know Iranians will struggle to forgive them - especially after the January crackdown that killed between 10,000 and 20,000 people, including protesters shot in hospital beds.
Some IRGC factions will fight on purely as a matter of personal survival, Ansari argued. But he rejected the notion that the force is a monolithic institution. "I don't think the IRGC is some sort of homogenous, unified, ideologically coherent unit of hundreds of thousands of men," he said. That figure includes the basij paramilitary.
Ansari described a fractured organization. The core group may be driven "by a sort of Shia millenarianism, devoted to Khamenei as a cult," but "it's not an organization that doesn't fray at the edges and have a variety of views on the periphery and different groups within." If the U.S. and Israel continue grinding down the regime and its ability to repress the population comes into question, some factions will split off.
The dynamic creates a paradox: the very factors that make some IRGC leaders desperate enough to fight to the end - no safe haven, no forgiveness waiting - also make the organization brittle. An institution held together by fear of consequences rather than shared conviction is vulnerable to sudden fracture once the balance of power shifts.
Also read: Not Democracy: Foreign Affairs Analyst Reveals the Most Likely Outcome of Iran's Power Vacuum