Can Ayatollah Khamenei, and Iran’s Theocracy, Survive This War?

Simply hours after the U.S. bombed three nuclear websites in Iran on Sunday, President Masoud Pezeshkian joined 1000’s of anti-American protesters in Tehran’s Enghelab Sq.. Enghelab means “revolution” in Farsi. The offended crowd waved placards vowing that they have been “prepared for the large battle” and calling for “revenge, revenge.” One poster depicted President Donald Trump as a snarling vampire. The Iranian regime has lengthy been in a position to mobilize its base for propaganda functions and social-media imagery. However, after ten days of barrages by the American and Israeli militaries, the extra telling banners made plaintive and prideful statements. “Iran is our homeland,” one declared. “Its soil is our honor. And its flag is our shroud.”The result of this warfare could also be formed extra by Iran’s tradition and politics than by the navy prowess of its opponents. Iran’s controversial nuclear program is simply half of a bigger conundrum. Can the U.S. and Israel coexist with the Islamic Republic in any respect after forty-six years of fraught enmity? And can the Supreme Chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Islamic theocracy survive politically after the navy onslaughts?Following the unprecedented deployment of U.S. stealth plane and bunker-busting bombs, Trump referred to as for an finish to hostilities, and renewed negotiations with Tehran. “Iran, the bully of the Center East, should now make peace,” he mentioned, in a televised tackle. In a subsequent briefing on the Pentagon, his Protection Secretary, Pete Hegseth, instructed reporters that Operation Midnight Hammer, which lasted a mere twenty-five minutes, “has not been about regime change.” However, by Sunday afternoon, Trump posted, on Reality Social, “It’s not politically right to make use of the time period, ‘Regime Change,’ but when the present Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”Israel has been much more specific. Its Protection Minister, Israel Katz, mentioned that Khamenei is a “fashionable Hitler” and “can’t live on.” On Monday, Israel struck two of the most important symbols of Iranian repression: the entryway of the notorious Evin Jail, the place 1000’s of dissidents have been held, and the headquarters of the Basij, the paramilitary wing of the Revolutionary Guard, which is used to crack down on opposition. It additionally hit different inner safety websites. In a press release, the Israeli Protection Forces mentioned that the services have been accountable “for homeland protection, suppressing threats, and sustaining regime stability.”In a while Monday, Iran launched its anticipated response to the U.S. strikes, with short- and medium-range missile barrages on Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar, the biggest American navy set up within the area. The Supreme Nationwide Safety Council, the chief decision-making physique in Tehran, which incorporates political and navy leaders, mentioned in a press release that it had fired the identical variety of missiles that the U.S. used over the weekend. The response mirrors Iran’s retaliation, in 2020, after the U.S. killed Normal Qassem Suleimani, the chief of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Pressure. It fired missiles on U.S. forces on the Ain al-Asad base in Iraq. Hostilities de-escalated after that. This time, Tehran reportedly despatched warning of its strike prematurely. A number of American warplanes and ships had already been moved final week.I think that thousands and thousands of Iranians wouldn’t miss Khamenei, an unintentional chief who stepped into high jobs solely after others died unexpectedly. He was a mid-level cleric when he turned President, in 1981; a terror assault had killed his predecessor. Six years later, I had breakfast with him, in an ornate room on the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York. It was throughout his solely journey to the West, when he spoke on the opening session of the U.N. Normal Meeting. In our assembly, he lacked charisma, worldliness, and mental depth. He mumbled his method by means of inflammatory rhetoric as a member of his Revolutionary Guard staff bent over to chop up his breakfast meat. (He misplaced the usage of his proper arm in 1981, after a bomb hidden in a tape recorder went off as he spoke at a mosque in Tehran. His hand dangles at his facet.) In 1989, he stepped in after the revolutionary chief, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died instantly, with no inheritor obvious. Khamenei had a restricted unbiased political base, so he tapped into the Iranian navy. They’ve empowered one another ever since.The destiny of the Islamic Republic will not be essentially depending on the destiny of its ruling Ayatollah. “Khamenei as a pacesetter might not survive this warfare—both as a result of he’s actually taken out of the scene by means of an assassination or as a result of the warfare ends with such a disastrous end result for the nation that he shall be compelled to step down,” Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow on the European Council on Overseas Relations, instructed me. Khamenei now faces solely dangerous choices. He’ll, nevertheless, keep away from unconditional give up in any respect prices. He would “seemingly choose being taken down as a martyr somewhat than happening in historical past because the Iranian chief who capitulated with a gun to his head,” Geranmayeh mentioned.Nearly all of Iranians are Shiite. The sect emerged within the seventh century, after the Prophet Muhammad died, throughout a political dispute over management with mainstream Sunnis. Shiism preaches that it’s higher to die preventing for justice than to reside with injustice. Imam Hussein, an early Shiite chief, fought Sunnis within the Umayyad dynasty, despite the fact that he had only some dozen fighters and knew they have been grossly outnumbered and certain to die. Martyrdom stays central to religious Shia. I’ve travelled in Iran for many years, and I feel it’s among the many most secular international locations within the Center East. But the historical past of the religion and its traditions nonetheless outline the tradition and the mind-sets of many. Iranians are additionally non secular and ethnic minorities within the wider world, and that has bred existential fears of international conquest.“Shiism is a tradition of resistance,” Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, a former member of Iran’s parliament, instructed me. Elected in 2000 on the age of thirty-two, she was the youngest feminine lawmaker within the revolution’s historical past. She was barred from operating a second time, in 2004, after accusing the regime of torturing political prisoners and manipulating elections. She left Tehran a yr later and now lives in Massachusetts. Iranians “are mainly towards authoritarianism, and so they don’t like what’s happening within the nation,” she instructed me. However Haghighatjoo doesn’t see the regime abruptly collapsing. Khamenei might simply get replaced, she mentioned. Article 111 of Iran’s structure, which is modelled on French and Belgian legislation, requires a troika—made up of the President, the judiciary chief, and a cleric from the Guardian Council—to imagine the duties of the chief if he’s incapacitated or dismissed. An eighty-eight-man Meeting of Consultants, which is democratically elected each eight years, would then choose a brand new one.After nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic has deeply entrenched establishments—and intense rivalries amongst its govt, legislative, judicial, navy, and intelligence branches. However all of them crave survival regardless of their bickering, John Limbert, considered one of fifty-two diplomats held hostage after the U.S. Embassy was seized, in 1979, instructed me. “They love energy. They’ve saved it. They’ve saved different individuals out of it,” he mentioned. “For higher or worse, they’ve constructed a system that’s resilient. There’s a cadre, a males’s membership” that features the primary era of revolutionaries or their acolytes. For a lot of the previous twenty-five hundred years, Limbert famous, Iran has been led by dictators—“some dangerous, some horrible. Some with crowns, some with turbans, some with navy uniforms.” And, if regime change does occur, he cautioned, “Why ought to we assume it’s for the higher? Folks assumed that in 1979. ‘Let’s eliminate the shah and the whole lot shall be higher.’ ”