Grief and Destruction
Iranians Rally Round the Flag: “Now I Wonder, Even if the Islamic Republic Falls, What Will we Inherit: a Land in Ruins?”
If, like me, you were unfamiliar with the name Najmeh Bozorgmehr, let me inform you that, for the last 26 years, she has been the Financial Times’ Tehran correspondent. And that, ladies and germs, is nothing to be sneezed at.
Today, she writes, Iranians rethink the price of regime change: Destructive US and Israeli war and Islamic republic’s relilience have alarmed even those who supported foreign intervention:
After thousands were killed in a brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests in Iran in January, Mandana gave up hope for reform from within. She came to the conclusion that the Islamic republic’s leaders had to go even if it meant US and Israeli-led regime change.
So when the two countries attacked the compound of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28, killing him and several of his family members, Mandana — who like others interviewed used a pseudonym — believed the change she coveted had finally come.
Her experience in the terrifying days since has shattered that belief. Air strikes have targeted not just military sites and senior regime figures but have repeatedly hit civilian infrastructure.
Over the weekend, Tehran was enveloped in toxic black smog after Israel bombed fuel depots around the city; on Tuesday, massive explosions caused widespread blackouts.
“We weren’t supposed to be bombed,” Mandana said, her voice trembling after a massive explosion near her apartment by Vanak Square in central Tehran. “Our city, our country, this wasn’t supposed to happen. How is it that Venezuela . . . saw clean, bloodless regime change, but not here?”
The scale of destruction and the apparent resilience of the Islamic regime, which appointed Khamenei’s son Mojtaba as the new supreme leader in an act of defiance, has prompted many Iranians to rethink hopes that foreign intervention might bring about its end.
Approaching two weeks into the war, no signs exist of the sort of anti-regime unrest that broke out across the country in January before being crushed in a brutal crackdown that killed thousands.
Instead many, even those who loathe the Islamic republic, appear to have recoiled at the destruction and comments including Donald Trump’s threat to target electricity production facilities if the regime escalated. The US president also said Iran’s map will “probably not” be the same after the war, sparking fears the conflict could break apart the country.
One sociologist in Tehran, who is critical of the regime and the war, said there was anecdotal evidence of a growing “sense of nationalism emerging from the war” as happened during Israel’s 12-day conflict against Iran last year, when people rallied around the flag.
“The fear of Iran’s destruction is increasingly uniting people as they fear the consequences of such a large-scale conflict,” the sociologist said, asking not to be named.
Non-military sites have become collateral damage, as air strikes target police stations, military facilities and officials living in residential neighbourhoods. More than 1,000 civilians have been killed and over 8,000 homes damaged or destroyed, according to official figures.
The scenes of devastation — to schools, a desalination plant, passenger aircraft and historic landmarks such as Tehran’s Grand Bazaar and Golestan Palace — have shocked many Iranians.
“If they wanted to assassinate the supreme leader, why are they waging full-scale war?” asked one woman. Before the war, she — like many anti-regime Iranians inside and outside the country — had welcomed military intervention.
Expatriate communities staged large rallies in western capitals, calling for an end to the Islamic republic. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late ousted Shah, also supported military action, promising to return to lead Iran once the regime had collapsed.
“Maybe he should come now with his three daughters and see how it feels to be bombarded,” said one woman, who opposes the current regime but also rejects a return to monarchy. “Those who supported the war should take responsibility now. But I doubt they will.”
When many Iranians put aside their disillusionment with their leaders to embrace patriotic gestures during the June war, the regime presented this as proof of public support and ignored calls for reform after the conflict was over.
This time, Iranians — traumatised by the crackdown in January — have been more hesitant, fearing that expressions of patriotism or anti-war sentiment will again be co-opted by the authorities.
In northern Iran, a woman whose son was killed in the protests stopped wearing black the day Khamenei died, feeling that some revenge had been exacted. In Tehran, another woman baked a cake for her neighbours to celebrate the supreme leader’s demise. But she was so shocked by the scale of the subsequent attacks that she later left the city.
The Islamic republic, for its part, is taking no chances. Authorities have filled squares with loyalists each evening, drawing on the vocal minority of regime supporters to project strength and support. They also patrol the streets on motorcycles carrying loudspeakers that blare out religious songs.
“These are our real supporters,” said one regime insider. “This is genuine loyalty, rooted in Shia Islam — something the Americans can never understand. Even if the leader of the Islamic system is killed, the system will survive because Shiism is alive.”
The regime’s apparent resilience in the face of the greatest conflict since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s has led some to question whether even a prolonged war would bring about its demise.
After Mojtaba Khamenei was selected as the new supreme leader on Monday, supporters across the country also took to the streets.
But Khamenei has not been seen since the war started and he is yet to speak to Iranians about his plans. The US and Israel have threatened to assassinate whoever takes over and rumours are rife that he was injured during the war.
His selection has stunned many anti-regime Iranians, who fear a supreme leader who will continue his father’s hardline agenda, resistance to reform and hostility to the west.
“If things stay like this, we’re in a worse place now than before the war,” said Mahboubeh, a translator. “A country destroyed; Khamenei replaced by another Khamenei, 30 years younger.”
Meanwhile, monarchists support Pahlavi and back the US and Israeli intervention despite its toll. But analysts believe the exiled royal may have lost support from more recent converts to his cause as the brutal reality of war sets in.
The majority of Iranians who see the January killings as unforgivable are lost over how to push for change. This includes Sara, a teacher in her forties who once hoped for the regime’s overthrow but now admits she has changed her mind.
“I’ve come to terms with the bitter reality: the Islamic republic is resilient,” she said. “I never thought I’d say this, but if someone from within the regime becomes a real reformer, why not? In the end, we just want peace and welfare.”
Marjan, a housewife, could not hide her emotions when news of Khamenei’s death broke. She had believed it would usher in the regime’s collapse. “Now I wonder, even if the Islamic republic falls, what will we inherit: a land in ruins?”
In My Experience, It’s Hard to Explain That Which You Do Not Actually Understand
The Mind Boggles
Even for those of us who despise Trump, the mind boggles at the thought of his walking into a major war without clear objectives, devoid of any understanding about how the war is going to end.
However, boggle as it may, the mind must accept that this is exactly what is happening. See, among many other examples, Reuters, Trump seeks to justify Iran war, but stated objectives shift.
Trump cannot explain his war aims and how they will be achieved because he is delusional—and misapprehends many vital facts about the situation—because he has no rudimentary understanding of the relation between cause and effect, and because he thinks that whatever horrific misjudgments he makes can be wiped out by his magical bullshit.
The New York Times this morning elucidates the consequences for public opinion:
A Suggestion for Discussion with Your Red Hatted Friends
If you chance to speak to one of the 41 percent who say they support the Iran war, you might consider trying this: Have a discussion about what they think Trump’s war aims are. Try to get them to be specific. Having done so, try to find agreement on an objective criterion to determine whether or not their imagined war aims have actually been achieved. Finally, agree on a date to schedule a follow-up conversation to discuss the actual state of the war, in light of what they imagine its objectives to be and whether their objective test of success has been met.
Too Late to TACO
Meanwhile, Ed Luce of the Financial Times tells us that Taco on Iran will come too late for Trump:
Sometime soon Donald Trump will ring the closing bell on his Iran war. That moment will have less to do with whether his mission is accomplished (whatever that is) than how much pain he can endure. We can safely assume that Iran’s pain threshold is higher than his. Trump will nevertheless present his exit as a victory. Iran will have every incentive to ensure nobody believes him. That is the crux of his self-inflicted dilemma.
Anticipating this would have served Trump well. One step would have been to build up America’s strategic petroleum reserves, which dropped sharply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and were never replenished. Oil and natural gas prices may have soared but an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure. A second would have been to win the Gulf monarchies round to his war plan in advance. That he had no fixed goal made that difficult. Now he is faced with an increasingly irascible Gulf. A third would have been to prepare the US public for a longer conflict. Ditto.
The question is whether Trump has become aware of the drawbacks of not thinking ahead. Were he on a learning curve, he would know that even a severely degraded Iran can continue to frighten oil tankers from the Gulf and shutter much of the region’s energy production. Short of occupying Iran, Trump cannot guarantee safe passage in the Strait of Hormuz. Drone production is decentralised and hard to eradicate from the air.
Nor can Trump handpick a new Iranian leadership. Others have observed it took America two decades to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It took Trump just over a week to replace one Khamenei with another. Since Mojtaba, the new supreme leader, is considered more hardline than his father, Trump will likely draw a blank on securing an Iranian ceasefire, let alone an “unconditional surrender”. Which leaves him with a couple of very risky gambles.
The first would be to send US or Israeli commandos to Isfahan to seize what remains of Iran’s 400kg stockpile of enriched uranium. Success would offer Trump a spectacular off-ramp. Indeed, the temptation of a lightning operation that upends the Taco narrative could be overpowering. Hovering over that is the ghost of Jimmy Carter. His failed 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission helped to sink his presidency. Having so often announced the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear programme, Trump would not survive an equivalent setback.
His other gambit would be to occupy Iran’s Kharg island to shut off its oil exports. Such a move could be even riskier because it would involve many more US boots on the ground than a commando raid — and for much longer. It would strangle Iran’s main revenue source and worsen the oil shock. But its risk-reward ratio looks reckless. After barely a week, public support for Trump’s Iran war is at the same level it was for the Vietnam war in late 1967 following more than 11,000 American deaths. There is no US tolerance today for even a few dozen casualties. Taco — “Trump always chickens out” — is thus a question of when.
Trump would still pay a high price for a unilateral declaration of victory. The biggest risk is that nothing will happen. By walking away, the US president would have given Iran knowledge of his price point, which is soaring energy prices. Iran also has a vote in deciding when this conflict ends. It would have every reason to sustain its disruption to global energy markets as a deterrent to Trump changing his mind. Iran has now been attacked by Israel four times in the past two years — twice with Trump’s America in the lead. Iran will want to raise the costs of another resumption a few months from now.
The Iranian regime’s surest route to safety would be to go nuclear. Good intelligence can keep making a rubble of Iran’s nuclear capacity but that is no sure bet. Iran’s logic of dashing to North Korea’s status will be compelling. Others, notably Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, may be tempted to help. Regimes everywhere are making the same calculations with fresh immediacy.
One piece of damage that Trump cannot repair is to trust in America. Long after oil prices have stabilised, the world will recall his administration’s glory in the imagery of “lethality”, as his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, calls it. Trump chose to go to war and has taken explicit satisfaction in his power of life and death. War is a grave step after all other options have been exhausted. That Trump had other courses of action is well understood. That he preferred this one is hard to unsee.
Facing MAGA 