Previous Reviews
Number 76 ● May 24, 2016
The Revolutionary Guards, the Persian Gulf and the Nuclear Deal
By Chelsi Mueller*
As “Implementation Day” (16 January 2016)—marking Iran’s compliance with the terms of the agreement struck on 14 July 2015 with the US and five other world powers to restrict its nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of sanctions—drew near, commanders in the Iranian armed forces sought to frame the story in terms of their own stance and rationale. Reports that the Arak reactor had been dismantled and more than 12,000 uranium-producing centrifuges decommissioned were particularly injurious to the military sensibilities of senior figures in the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who fought hard against compliance with the agreement (The New York Times, 16 January 2016). Just days before Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was due to attend the Implementation Day ceremony in Vienna, officers of the IRGC Navy were presented with a fortuitous occasion to assume a confrontational posture: the fall of 10 American sailors into the hands of the IRGC Navy.
Due to engine problems, the American sailors unwittingly strayed into Iran’s territorial waters while en route from Kuwait to Bahrain. The two American riverine vessels were encircled by IRGC naval vessels, boarded at gunpoint, and the sailors were made to kneel with their hands behind their heads (Foreign Policy, 1 March 2016). Iran released the sailors and four other American prisoners the next morning, in return for the release of seven Iranians held on charges of violating US sanctions.
However the sailors’ 16 hours in captivity provided their handlers with ample opportunity to use the incident for propaganda purposes. Powerful images and video clips were released to the media in the hours and days following the incident, including a recorded apology from one of the sailors, images of another crying and images of the female sailor wearing a Muslim headscarf (Tasnim News Agency, 13 January 2016). This was done in order to prove Iran’s military supremacy in the region, said Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the IRGC. The capture of the American sailors represented a major historic moment because, he claimed, no other country’s military had managed to capture an American soldier since the end of WWII (Holy Defense News Agency, 15 January 2016).
For those who follow the military’s media pronouncements, the pairing of Persian Gulf issues and the nuclear agreement should come as no surprise. The military’s response to the conclusion of the nuclear agreement was conceptually very similar. It linked the Persian Gulf to the nuclear issue, in a music video, “Energy Hasteei” (“Nuclear Energy”) posted on YouTube on 12 July 2015, two days before the text of the nuclear agreement was released to the public. The song and video was produced by the Iranian rapper Amir Hussein Maghsoudloo (better known as Tataloo) in cooperation with the Iranian armed forces. The video, which features both English and Farsi subtitles, opens with a title page asserting, “No force can deny peaceful nuclear energy from Iran.”It features Tataloo, dressed in rugged, camouflage street clothes with a large “Allah” pendant hanging on a chain around his neck. First, he is standing in the countryside against a backdrop of electric utility poles and then on an army base in front of a formation of uniformed, armed marine cadets, singing, “I’m an honest Iranian/ Against all violence/ But if it’s gonna be by force/ Then I stay in this path with all my being…” Then the camera pans out to an aerial shot of Tataloo standing on the helipad of the guided missile frigate Damavand, where he sings the chorus, “This is our absolute right, to have an armed Persian Gulf.” As the sequence switches between the frigate and the military base (where Khamenei’s portrait is seen on the structure in the background), civilians are holding signs affirming in English “Iranian people are peaceful,” and “Peaceful nuclear energy for everyone.” Helicopter filming provided stunning aerial angles of the Damavand with its modern radar dome and high-tech warfare devices. The refrain comes back again and again, “This is our absolute right, to have an armed Persian Gulf.”
The military’s decision to use Tataloo for disseminating its response to the nuclear agreement is significant. From the perspective of Islamic and revolutionary values, the rapper is hardly a model of virtue. He is an underground musician who was briefly detained in 2013 by the morality police for alleged cooperation with illegal satellite channels (The Guardian, 3 December 2013). As a rapper, Tataloo has identified with the Western hip-hop culture, a culture of rebellion and challenge to the status quo. This attitude is prominently expressed on his album covers and fan websites where he appears with his chest exposed, banded forearms covered in tattoos and wearing a mammoth Christian cross pendant.
The decision to deploy Tataloo reflected an awareness on the part of the generals that an appeal to national pride was more likely to attract the younger generation than an appeal to religious values such as personal sacrifice. While the political attitudes of many senior military officers were formed in the trenches of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, known as “the Sacred Defense,” young people under the age of 30 (60% of Iran’s total population) do not share that memory. The generals fear that the regime’s efforts to reach the youth through the veneration of martyrs who died for “Imam Khomeini and Islam” have failed. Young people are more connected than ever to the internet, social media and celebrity culture. They are more comfortable with foreigners than the generation before them. Although full of national pride, they by and large supported the nuclear agreement that, for them, represents the normalization of Iran’s relationship with the international community and hope for a better future. While senior military figures followed Khamenei’s lead and endorsed the deal, framing it as an agreement that preserved Iran’s legitimate rights to a peaceful nuclear program, they remain suspicious of a political opening to the West: they fear that it will open the floodgates to American cultural influence and undermine the Islamic mores that underpin the Revolution.
The music video’s message is about Iran’s inalienable sovereign rights—rights to the Persian Gulf, rights to nuclear power and rights of self-defense—rights that senior figures in the military and especially the IRGC view as interconnected and interdependent. The question remains, why do the activities and pronouncements of the military emphasize the Persian Gulf? Because the Persian Gulf, like the nuclear issue, is an arena where Iran has continuously confronted external forces, specifically the United States and its Western allies who, Iran claims, seek to deprive it of its sovereign rights. Moreover, for the IRGC, the Persian Gulf and the nuclear issue represent arenas in which Iran is defiantly working toward but has not completely fulfilled its national aspirations.Iranians have long viewed the Persian Gulf as—exactly what the name implies—Persian. Many in Iran believe that the country’s size, geographical location and history afford it the sovereign right to be the main security provider in the Persian Gulf waterway, a role that is now filled by the United States with the support of the Arab Gulf monarchies and emirates. The Persian Gulf remains a contested frontier region where Iranian naval forces are, in fact, on the frontline of resistance against the foreign naval forces that they view as menacing to Iran’s national interests.
The IRGC “guardians of the revolution” exploit every available opportunity and cultural medium to keep the Persian Gulf issue and the nuclear issue alive, thereby underscoring their own indispensability to the state. While the topics of religious control and the wisdom of engaging with the West are likely to remain subjects of contention between the Revolutionary Guards and youth, the Guards have rightly identified nationalist aspirations as one of few subjects that can potentially bridge the generational divide.
*Chelsi Mueller is a research fellow at the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies, Tel Aviv University.
T h e A l l i a n c e C e n t e r f o r I r a n i a n S t u d i e s ( A C I S )
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Iran Pulse No. 76 ● May 24, 2016
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