[Rocky_Shorz]

Although set up by Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution to defend the rule of the clerics, the Revolutionary Guards is now a far cry from its days of subservience toward Iran's clerics. Former and current members of the Guards are now littered among Tehran's leadership. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, current speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani and current Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar are just three of a large number of individuals who have spent many days among the Guards' ranks as they rose to become leaders of the group's militant core.

However, the Guards is no longer simply the militant beast that has entered Iran's political spectrum. Rather, it now controls much of Iran's economy, including 30 percent of Iran's nonoil exports and more than half the country's imports, in addition to vast contracts to develop Iran's oil and gas fields.

In the current climate, with Iran's leadership weakened by mass internal unrest that has exploded in recent months into unprecedented nationwide protests, the Obama administration sees the Guards as potentially replacing many centers of power in Tehran. In truth, the group answers only to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Targeting the Guards is a politically sound method of not only slowing Iran's nuclear progress but hurting this regime where it hurts most, its pocket.

In November, the group famed for exposing Tehran's nuclear program in 2002 announced that the Guards had taken on a new, advanced role among Iran's leadership. The president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Maryam Rajavi, announced that authorities had set up the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which became the regime's main security force. Headed by the IRGC's top commander, the organization marked another step toward the Guards being in direct control of the regime.

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so, according to the Media it shows this is a very frightening development... But frightening for who is the question...