By: Reza Shafa
Khomeini and the chalice of poison
On July 16, 1988, only two days before the cease fire, in a letter, Khomeini stated the reasons why he accepted the UN Resolution 598 ending the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war which only on Iranian side left more than one million causalities and according to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then deputy commander-in-chief, one trillion dollars in economic losses.
Khomeini determined that the nation could not afford, politically or economically, to continue the war, and in a famous public statement compared the decision to “drinking a chalice of poison.”
“The commander has said we can have no victory for another five years, and even by then we need to have 350 infantry bridges, 2,500 tanks, 300 fighter planes,” he wrote, adding that the officer also said he would need “a considerable number of laser and nuclear weapons to confront the attacks.” The officer he referred to was none other than Brig. Gen. Mohsen Rezaii who was the most senior IRGC commander in the war.
Since Khomeini’s death, the IRGC has been trying very hard to obtain nuclear weapons, however it has not fulfilled the dreams of its founder yet.
Strategy of preventive defense
In 1989 the clerical regime adopted a new strategy called "preventive defense." Such defense mechanism was in use to deter "enemies of the Islamic Republic. At some point in time they [enemies] may impose their will on us by military might."
The strategy is resting on the following pillars:
– The capacity for accepting huge risks such as growing casualty figures;
– Having a large arsenal of short and medium range missiles to compensate for deficiencies in air power;
– An arsenal of nuclear weapons to deter major powers from threatening Iran and on top of the list is the U.S.
As it is clear the main deterrent in this case will of course be the nuclear weapons. One of the IRGC commanders said that Khamenei and other military leaders believe that "Iran’s defenses without a real deterrent such as nuclear weapons would not have much credibility."
Learning from U.S. invasion of Iraq, the mullahs’ regime concluded that Iraq would not have been occupied if it really had nuclear weapons as it was the case with North Korea.
To be continued
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Reza Shafa is an expert on the Iranian regime’s intelligence networks, both in Iran and abroad. He has done extensive research on VAVAK (MOIS), IRGC’s Intelligence Office, and Quds Force among others. Currently he is a contributor to NCRI website.