Is US preparing to crack down on IRGC?
Julian Pecquet/Al-Monitor/December 04/15
A key panel of Congress is getting closer to slapping new sanctions on Iran’s revolutionary guards despite warnings that doing so could undermine the nuclear deal with Tehran.Individual lawmakers over the past few months have introduced several bills encouraging the Obama administration to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization, with little traction so far. But now the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over the issue, has begun to coalesce behind the scenes around a similar effort.
“The issue is what’s the best way to get at those individuals, those entities that are essentially IRGC-controlled but look for ways to suggest that they’re not,” said Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., the top Democrat on the committee’s Middle East panel. “There are a lot of us who would like to move in that direction … especially before there is sanctions relief granted under the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action].”
A committee aide confirmed that staff-level discussions are ongoing but there’s not yet draft legislation.
Deutch spoke to Al-Monitor following a Dec. 2 full committee hearing looking at how the IRGC is “fueling conflict in the Middle East.” During the hearing, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., received the blessing of Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., to distribute his own “discussion draft of a statute aimed at the IRGC” to all members of the committee. “We now have a menu of sanctions that can be imposed against a bank or a company that does business with the IRGC,” Sherman told the committee. “It shouldn’t be a menu … but rather an absolute ban on doing business with the United States that then could be lifted with specific licenses, so that a company that does any significant business with the IRGC would lose all access to the US market.” Royce himself has urged the administration to keep the pressure on the revolutionary guards, as has the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y. US sanctions on the IRGC for human rights abuses — and the terrorist designation of its military arm, the Quds Force — will remain in place, but many lawmakers want to further crack down on the group’s many tentacles in Iranian business. “We’ll take our cues from Chairman Royce and ranking member Engel, but everybody’s fired up that we need to do more and that certainly looks like the direction we’re headed,” Middle East panel Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., told Al-Monitor. “It seems to me like everybody’s on the same page, sympatico, we understand the threat, let’s do it. We’re not going to get any leadership from the White House to do it, so we’re going to have to act.”
President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the Treasury Department’s counterterrorism and financial intelligence efforts, Adam Szubin, has testified, however, that the human rights sanctions on the IRGC and its subsidiaries are “just as sweeping” as the terrorism designation Congress is contemplating.
Royce declined to comment about his plans and Engel’s office did not respond to a request for comment. “We have yet to see any effective strategy from the administration to push back against the IRGC’s regional advances, which have emboldened Iran and undermined our allies,” Royce said in his opening statement. “This morning we’ll hear from our witnesses on what such a strategy might look like, and how Congress can help.”
Engel, for his part, said lawmakers “need to send a clear message that working with Iranian firms linked to the IRGC is risky business.”
The issue is heating up as the US prepares to lift so-called secondary sanctions early next year that impact foreign firms and governments — notably in Europe — that are seeking to do business with Iran. While US sanctions on Iran will remain largely in place, critics of the nuclear deal worry that Europe’s sanctions against the IRGC are set to expire while its existing sanctions apparatus isn’t comprehensive enough to capture all aspects of the IRGC’s numerous operations. Republican presidential contender and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has introduced legislation urging the State Department to designate the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), as has House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas. And Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, has offered a separate bill requesting the Treasury Department to report on whether the IRGC fits the bill for a terrorism designation. “Designating the IRGC as an FTO will provide another warning for foreign companies considering doing business in Iran,” Emanuele Ottolenghi of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies testified before Ros-Lehtinen’s panel in September. He went on to urge Congress to leverage trade talks with Europe to demand a tougher stance on the IRGC.
“Congress should require the trans-Atlantic trade and investment partnership between the US and the EU to stipulate that any European company contracting with Iran must certify that none of the indigenous partners are associated in part or in whole with the IRGC, requiring also that the EU report annually on European investing in Iran, placing it under public scrutiny,” Ottolenghi said. “At a minimum, Congress should encourage international corporations to demand an exclusion clause to halt commercial activities with all suspected or designated IRGC.” Two of the witnesses at the Dec. 2 hearing agreed that further sanctions on the IRGC are warranted. Scott Modell, a former CIA officer who now heads the Rapidan Group, said Iran’s “main goal has always been to get rid of European sanction.”
“If you did do that,” Modell said, “you would have an extra deterrent for Europeans to do business with [the Iranians] and that might be an extra way of prying them to change their behavior.” And Ali Alfoneh, also of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, recommended targeting IRGC ground forces fighting in Syria. “I would like to punish those entities of the Revolutionary Guard which take part in the war in Syria and we can document their presence in Syria,” Alfoneh testified. “Hopefully [this will help the IRGC] understand the price that they are paying for supporting Bashar [al-]Assad’s regime.”
The State Department’s former counterterrorism chief, Daniel Benjamin, broke with the other two. “Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism, and as such it is covered by a wide swath of different sanctions that are extremely comprehensive,” Benjamin said. “We have all the instruments we need and I think to do something additional like this would both be unnecessary from a functional standpoint, and from a signaling standpoint I’m not sure that it is precisely what we need at precisely the moment that we want to see an effective implementation of the JCPOA.”
Will Iran play peacemaker between Russia, Turkey?
Arash Karami/Al-Monitor/December 04/15
The downing of a Russian Su-24 fighter jet by Turkey near the Syrian border has put Iran in an uncomfortable position given its close ties with both countries. As Russia and Turkey continue to escalate tensions with new accusations against one another of cooperating with the Islamic State terrorist group, the announcement of unilateral sanctions and the ending of military and economic ties, Iran may try to bring both countries back from the brink.In an article titled “How can Iran mediate between Russia and Turkey?” Shabestan News Agency interviewed an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general and foreign policy analysts to discuss the issue. The article offers various perspectives on how Iran sees its role between the two countries.
Gen. Yadollah Javani, adviser to the supreme leader’s representative to the IRGC, said, “Iran wants to be a mediator between the Russians and the Turks.” Javani was critical of Turkey’s policies in the region, however, saying it “has been a piece of the puzzle of the enemy and played an important role in helping bring about terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.”
Javani envisioned Iran’s mediation as part of a larger role in the region that coincides with America’s declining role, saying, “To create tensions between countries in the region, the United States has attempted to incite Turkey against Russia, and Turkey must realize that the influence of the West in the region has come to an end and Iran’s mediation can be a type of convergence of regional powers.”
Foreign policy analyst Hassan Hanizadeh told Shabestan News Agency that he believes Iran will first attempt to limit the Russia-Turkey crisis to Syria, so that the two countries do not begin to have differences in other parts of the region. He said that Iran’s ultimate goal will be to return the Moscow-Ankara relations back to normal and that if officials from both countries are unwilling, Iran will “take action as a mediator.”
Hanizadeh also said that Iran will try to convince Turkey to decrease “its destructive role in Syria.” Given Turkey’s support of opposition fighters to the Syrian government and reports they seek to create a type of buffer zone on the border, this policy shift by Turkey seems unlikely at the moment.
Conservative analyst and Tehran University professor Mohammad-Sadegh Koushaki was less optimistic and more hard line on Turkey, saying, “It’s unlikely that Turkey has reached the level of rationality to accept Iran’s mediation.” He said that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan knew that targeting the Russian plane would cause a harsh reaction. He added that accepting Iran’s mediation would be a rational decision and that Erdogan “has always shown that his actions are rational.”
For Iran, despite being on opposing sides of Syria’s bloody civil war, Turkey has been an important trading partner, with $13.7 billion volume of trade in 2014. Turkey has also helped Iran evade international sanctions the country has been under for their nuclear program. With the international sanctions coming off as a result of the nuclear deal, trade is expected to increase in numerous industries between the countries.
Ties with Russia, however, are much deeper for Iran. In addition to playing a large role in the development of the country’s nuclear program, the two countries are aligned on many geopolitical issues in the Middle East. According to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s foreign policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran and Russia have recently “entered a strategic relationship” and their economic and security relations will grow.
Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani is the latest official to comment on the Russia-Turkey crisis. On Dec. 1, he called it unfortunate that there is tension between the two countries and said it is harmful to the fight against terrorism. Larijani also praised Russia’s actions in Syria, saying, “If the West had done what Russia is doing against IS, Jabhat al-Nusra and other terrorist groups, we would not have had these regional problems.”
