Appeasement Has Failed: Britain Must Finally Proscribe the IRGC and Close Iran's Embassy
It is a grim indictment of European timidity that only the slaughter of thousands of innocent protesters on the streets of Iran finally forced the European Union to act. For decades, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been the backbone of repression at home and terror abroad. Its crimes were never hidden. They were merely ignored. Now, quite belatedly, Brussels has moved and only one shameful outlier remains, the United KingdomBritain’s refusal to fast-track proscribing the IRGC rests on a feeble and frankly ludicrous argument, that one cannot designate an “organ of a state” as a terrorist organisation. This is not a legal principle; it is an excuse. The IRGC is not a conventional arm of a state. It is a parallel military, intelligence and economic empire, answerable not to the Iranian people, and not even to the agencies of the state, but to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who rules through fear, torture and murder. If that does not meet the definition of terrorism, then the word has lost all meaning.
Recent briefings that the UK Government is considering the blacklisting of the IRGC might appear, at first glance, to signal progress. They do not. Officials have already confirmed that any legislation will not be fast-tracked, citing the alleged “complexity” of designating state agencies as terrorists. This is appeasement by procedural delay. Everyone knows what follows. Consultation, caution, prevarication and ultimately inertia. Legislation delayed is legislation designed to die quietly on the shelf.
This reluctance has little to do with law and everything to do with mindset. The British intelligence services and the UK Foreign Office remain wedded to the discredited belief that proscribing the IRGC would “sever diplomatic, and perhaps, business channels” with Tehran. The IRGC, mind you, controls 70 percent of the Iranian economy. The Brits are keen not to do anything that might risk losing a slice of this lucrative, yet blood-soaked, pie. That is precisely the problem. Those channels have produced nothing except impunity for Iran’s executioners. To preserve them at all costs, even as bodies pile up on Iranian streets, is not realism. It is moral surrender.
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