“The IRGC, which was founded by the Ayatollah Khomeini in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution, has a singular and unique mission for its roughly 125,000 soldiers and staff: to protect, support, and defend the ideological legacy of the Islamic Revolution—by any means necessary. These are the fanatics that are sent into the streets to shoot anyone who dares to oppose the orders of the mullahs and happily arrests anyone suspected of the least deviation from the extremist orthodoxy that shrouds women in chadors, insists on blind hatred of America, and yearns for nuclear weapons that can be used to force all nations to bend to their will. Whatever negotiated settlements America and Iran might agree to, the vast majority of the IRGC is guaranteed to see it as an affront and work to undermine it in every possible way.”
(I wrote this a month ago. I hate, in this case, to be proven correct.)
We have a deal—of a sort. Unfortunately, any agreement we sign with Iran is likely to be tenuous at best. The heavily armed and exceedingly
