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It’s a tale of two Iran armies.
One, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, is stacked with fierce loyalists and designed to guard the theocratic regime, with a force estimated to be 150,000 strong. They have been targeted in US and Israel attacks.
The other is the conventional Islamic Republic of Iran Army, called the Artesh, which numbers 350,000 and is designed to protect the nation’s borders and secure the Iranian homeland. And when the bombing stops, they might serve US interests as a force for change.
Now all they have to do is survive.
President Trump has alluded to the difference between them in his public comments — and the distinction is becoming evident in the targeting decisions of his War Department.
“The risk in attacking the Iranian army is that some people hope it will launch a coup of some sort against the Revolutionary Guards and put a new government in place,” warned Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel at the Center for Strategic International Studies.
He noted that if the regular army didn’t end up on the target list, it could signal that Trump would leave the force in place to counterbalance the IRGC.
“There is a whole set of civilian targets that have not been hit. For example, the lights are still on in Tehran,” he noted.
Increasing hardship on the population is a “risky strategy,” Cancian told The Post.
Some lawmakers who are now getting briefed by the administration on the Iran war are also issuing cautions.
“If you hit them so hard they can’t actually function as a nation, at the end of it, it doesn’t help,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma).
Lankford used Libya — a country left in shambles in 2011 after the killing of its strongman leader Muammar Gaddafi — as an example of what to avoid in Iran.
“Then it’s chaos there. Then it’s Libya,” he said, noting the goal in Iran is to stop the IRGC but not cause a “breakdown.”
Lankford, an Armed Services Committee member, said Iran is “going to have a functioning government.”
Warnings issued by the Department of War give a clue into the changing target lists across Iran as the US military pounds the country’s missile capability and rocket launchers.
US Central Command warned on March 8 that the regime “blatantly disregards the safety of innocent people” by conducting operations from populated areas.
It issued a similar warning about Iranian ports, after pounding Iran’s navy, some of which is operated by the IRGC. At the same time, Trump is monitoring possible “sleeper cells” at home.
Splits in Iran’s power structure can be seen in public, as when Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian apologized for its attack on Gulf neighbors March 7, only to have missile and drone attacks resume within hours.
Whether an opposition force can emerge from what remains is one of the keys to ending the war, retired Gen. David Petraeus told New Hampshire public radio.
“And is there the emergence of serious opposition forces that might lead us to continue a bit longer to give them a chance? We don’t see it yet, but watch that space.”
Trump has repeatedly said the US is holding back from hitting certain targets in Iran even while deploying massive force. That is what he did Wednesday, when he ran through some of the devastation US attacks have brought on Iran — and notably did not mention its army.
“Right now, they’ve lost their navy. They’ve lost their air force. They have no anti-aircraft apparatus at all. They have no radar. Their leaders are gone. And we can do a lot worse. We’re leaving certain things that if we take them out, or we could take them out by this afternoon – in fact within an hour – they literally would never be able to build that country back.”
The most recent “types of targets” that Central Command put out on a fact sheet lists IRGC headquarters buildings, IRGC intelligence sites, air defenses, and navy ships — but failed to mention the army.
Trump mused last weekend about hitting the military more directly.
“We could hit their military itself very hard. But maybe we will maybe we won’t. We haven’t made that determination,” he said.
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