Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Gen.Yahya Rahim Safavi of the IRGC and Ahmadinejad. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1737 froze all of Safavi’s personal assets because of his illegal dealings in Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
~Bashman

TEHRAN, Iran - They own car factories and construction firms, operate newspaper groups and oil fields and increasingly, serve in parliament or become provincial governors. To supporters, the Revolutionary Guards are the cream of Iran’s talent.

To the United States, they are simply terrorists.

Either way, the group formed to safeguard Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution has pushed well beyond its military roots: Current and former members now hold a growing role across the country’s government and economy, sometimes openly and other times in shadow.

The election of a hard-line president two years ago sharply accelerated that influence, recent interviews here suggest. Supporters of supreme leader Ali Khamenei and his protege, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have sought to consolidate power by putting allies in key positions, potentially shaping Iran for years to come.

“We don’t support it,” Mohsen Mirdamadi, who leads Iran’s largest pro-reform party, said of the guards’ spreading influence. “It can be reversed with a change of government — but slowly.”

Publicly, the guards now own or control numerous companies that receive lucrative, often no-bid government contracts in the oil and gas industry, farming, and road and dam construction. Their winning of deals is often announced outright in Tehran newspapers.

Other times, the group’s business deals are shrouded in mystery and merely whispered about.

In one example, the guards are thought to run a network of unauthorized docks and trading firms importing consumer goods, tariff-free, into Iran, said Mehdi Khalaji, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

That would be a lucrative business in Iran, where Western goods are harder to obtain.

In addition, an Iranian company that manufactures Japanese cars inside Iran is also thought to be owned by the guards, said Khalaji.

The guards have gained a particularly big role in the country’s oil and gas industry in recent years, as the national oil company has signed several contracts with a guards-operated construction company. Some have been announced publicly, including a $2 billion deal in 2006 to develop part of the important Pars gas field.

Often, firms owned by Revolutionary Guards will get noncompetitive bids for major oil or construction projects and then outsource the project to others, operating essentially as a “private mafia,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-American who works at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the guards also have gained lucrative telecommunications contracts, and have known links with university labs, weapons makers and firms linked to Iran’s nuclear program. All are industries with clear dual-use — civilian and military — potential, giving the guards firm links to many vital military-related industries.

The business deals also make the guards less reliant on Iran’s more democratic and transparent institutions, such as parliament, for their funding. The no-bid government contracts often lack any independent oversight such as from parliament’s budget process, meaning money from them can be diverted into overseas operations with little notice, other analysts said.

At least 80 former guards also are in parliament out of a total of 290 seats. Others serve as mayors and provincial governors. Former commanders also make up about two-thirds of the current Cabinet, according to some estimates, and Ahmadinejad himself is a former guards commander who went on to Tehran’s mayor before being elected president.

Full Article at Asharq Alawsat