by Pavel Podolyak

Created on: July 01, 2009   Last Updated: July 10, 2009

The students in Iran aren't up against a foreign backed puppet, an out of touch old monarch, or a decadent oligarch. They are up against a former elite special forces leader who specialized in divide and conquer tactics, intelligence, and asymmetric warfare. Ahmadinejad was one of the founders and high ranking organizers of the cream of the crop of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Quds force. The Revolutionary Guards are the private army of the Iranian ruling party with their own navy, special forces, intelligence, and militias. The IRG is a separate loyal army that competes with the regular army for resources and gets privileged access when it comes to training, talent acquisition, and funding. This competition is analogous to how Waffen SS in Nazi Germany was the vanguard of National Socialism, competed with the regular army, and often got preferential treatment when it came to talent, recruitment, cutting edge technology, and political influence.

Although IRG has a public ideology for recruitment purposes, its main task ( of keeping the ruling party in power ) forces it into very pragmatic decision making. The Quds force is IRG's CIA/special forces equivalent and like all special/intelligence services worldwide, is completely pragmatic when it comes to alliances with ideological enemies to achieve is goals. The Quds force is not above funding itself with drug money, bribes, and covert business dealings. IRG also employs thousands of ideological youngsters in a civilian militia (Basij) through using the clergy's infrastructure.

Lets make a semi-humorous analogy of what Iranian students are up against using American Republican party in 2004 as an example. Imagine if in 2004, the Republican party had a well funded army to "preserve the Reagan Revolution." This Reagan Revolution Guards had its own bases and access to tanks, factories, aircraft, and almost as many soldiers as the regular American military.

The best of the Reagan guards were in elite Freedom Corps that combined CIA, FBI, NSA, homeland security, and Green Berets. Imagine if the Reagan Guards also employed an enormous civilian militia consisting of young Baptist zealots who were called say, College Republicans.

Imagine if College Republicans were given legal power to assist the police, the Reagan Guard military, and did the bidding of the top GOP chairman. Imagine if GOP also consisted of a tight alliance of oligarchs and the clergy ( ha ha ). Imagine if like ROTC, College Republicans had local

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