Iranian Overseas Terror Networks

There is no counterpart on the western world to describe what the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps actually is. Call it a military and you miss the political machine inside it. Call it an intelligence service and you miss the standing

army. Call it a terrorist organization-as the United States government formally did in 2019-and you miss the fact that it controls significant portions of the Iranian economy, fields its own navy and aerospace force, runs its own missile program, and has placed veterans in every major branch of the Iraniangovernment. The IRGC is all of these things simultaneously, and understanding that fact is the baseline requirement for understanding everything else in this book