TEHRAN, July 22 (UPI) -- More than 90 members of Iran's reform-majority parliament plan to question the defense minister to find out why the hard-line Revolutionary Guard Corps has intervened in politics in violation of the country's constitution, media reports said Monday.
In a strongly worded statement issued Saturday, the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had warned people against "conspiracies by certain internal political camps" and accused the reformists -- without naming them directly -- of "sowing seeds of discord among the nation" and paving the way for a foreign military attack on the country.
"We have noticed a strong tendency toward secularism, which tries to separate Islam from government and weaken the Velayat-e Faqih (religious jurisprudence, the constitutional dominance of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei)," said the statement, as quoted by the press.
The IRGC warned that opponents of the Islamic state had infiltrated the regime and have openly supporting subversion on the streets in recent weeks. These opponents are plotting to win the forthcoming elections by taking advantage of social discontent with slogans such as "free relations between boys and girls" and "freedom to watch satellite television," they said.
The guards, however, insisted that they were committed to defending the Islamic regime if it were threatened.
This harsh criticism of the reformists is expected to initiate a new round of debate between the two rival political factions of the country. Some reformists even accuse conservatives of welcoming "some external pressure and foreign threats to create a military atmosphere inside Iran" that would let them thwart the reform program.
Elsewhere, the statement, which some observers view as a "political communiqué," said the deployment of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, preparations for a military invasion of Iraq and dispatching forces to the countries around Iran are all in line with the U.S. strategy to finally launch an attack on Iran.
Iranian leaders from both factions have also warned that internal political disputes might prompt the Islamic republic's arch foe, the United States, to attack Iran.
"If national unity is damaged, it's possible that the U.S. will attack Iran after Iraq," Ali Younesi, Iran's intelligence minister, told the London-based Financial Times on the sidelines of an anti-U.S. rally in Tehran Friday.
U.S. President George W. Bush recently said that in parliamentary and local elections and the last two Iranian presidential elections a vast majority of the Iranian people voted for political and economic reforms, yet their voices are not being listened to by "the unelected people who are the real rulers of Iran."
The Revolutionary Guard's statement is the second of its kind in three years. In 1999, a group of commanders accused the reform-minded President Mohammad Khatami of creating chaos in the country by maintaining his reform program.
