I rarely write about ongoing political issues – and certainly not the 2008 election, given that it’s still 14 months away – or express my political views in this blog, so this is an aytpical foray into this domain.
Like many others, I read with interest the trial balloon floated in the press in recent days about the possibility that the U.S. government might designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization. Even with my barebones Poli Sci 101 background, this stood out as quite an odd proposal, because it would be the first time that a branch of the armed forces of a sovereign country had been designated as such.
What are the consequences? Much of the press, including the New York Times, has focused on the fact that the designation allows the US government to impose increasingly stringent economic restrictions and penalties on the Guard’s leaders and divisions. The Guard is known to have significant business interests, but it’s hard to imagine that given the array of penalties and restrictions that already exist, these are really going to have much of an effect. That’s why the Times editorial of 8/16/07 calls the move a heavy-handed sideshow that only serves to distract us from the hard diplomatic work ahead. But the Times and other pundits may be missing the larger point, as they often do, which is the fact that the ‘terrorist’ designation may be used to authorize an attack on Iran on the basis of the existing 2002 war authorization act. Read here for more (I found this while persuing BitchPhD). Too far-fetched? Perhaps the attack will never come to pass, but the past six years have seen an erosion of Congressional and Constitutional oversight over executive power that I never thought imaginable, thanks to our own ‘revolutionary guard.’
