And, of course, none of this is taking place in a unified country. The regime rules by terror, because it has to.
One will recall that long before the war, Iran entered this year already facing demonstrations driven initially by the economy, but rapidly encompassing the familiar grievances against corruption, repression and the clerical regime itself. The protests were suppressed with the usual comic-book brutality, to the horror of many onlookers on the one hand and the dutifully selective blindness of many Western leftists on the other.
On Paper, Revolution Awaits
All of this raises an obvious question: how long can this go on? How long can the mullahs actually survive these conditions, which would go a long way toward toppling most regimes on earth? Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, for example, did not preside over this level of inflation or economic ruin.
That question – how long can it last, essentially – is now being asked inside Israel’s security establishment. The Jerusalem Post reported this weekend that Israeli officials increasingly see Iran as a state undergoing a process of internal deterioration which may ultimately end with the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself. The strategy, according to the paper, is not necessarily to overthrow the regime directly, but to “create the conditions” in which overthrow becomes possible.
The conditions are certainly becoming more favorable, for whatever that is worth.
The regime has less room for maneuver than it once did. Economically, concessions to the population cost money which Tehran increasingly does not have. Politically, concessions are almost as dangerous: a dictatorship built around ideological certainty cannot exactly admit that 47 years of ideological certainty have produced an unhappy population, a battered economy and boundless misery. Reform would necessitate admissions of failure.
Might Mullahs Miss Their Own Battered Reformists?
And anyway, according to nearly all reports, the supposed “reformist” alternative – traditionally taken to mean “we will still kill the infidel, but we will wait for more favorable conditions” – has largely ceased to exist.
Indeed, according to US intelligence and most independent assessments, one of the consequences of the war has been the further consolidation of power around the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the security state.
The old farce in which Iranian elections were technically held in order to offer voters a choice between hardliners and slightly less hard hardliners has narrowed further still.
But from one point of view, this apparent success actually creates a weird little trap for Iran’s rulers – because to relieve popular pressure, they need the illusion of reform. But with the reformists ruined and marginalized, that means there is very little room within the system to give the Iranian public the impression that some change is taking place.
All of that should be encouraging to those in Washington and Jerusalem, and indeed elsewhere, who would like to see the Islamic Republic disappear.
The Biggest Problem Remains
But there is still a fairly large problem – an unanswered question: who, precisely, is going to overthrow it?
There is a tendency in Western analysis of dictatorships to assume that sufficiently unhappy people will eventually produce a revolution. History offers rather less reassurance. Unhappy people produce revolutions when the state loses the ability – or the willingness – to control them.
So far, Iran has not.
The demonstrations of recent years have been enormous. They have been brave. They have demonstrated beyond much doubt that millions of Iranians despise the system. But what they have not produced is any serious threat to the survival of the regime.
During the protests which began at the end of last year, the security forces remained loyal. There were no significant defections.
A Missing Historical Precedent
History – including the lessons of 1979, when the Shah fell – shows that regimes like the Iranian one usually fall when some section of the regime itself defects in order to preserve or usurp power and unites around a coherent alternative. That moment has not yet arrived in Iran and does not appear to be in prospect.
Nor, by the way, is there any obvious reason to believe that an alternative, should it arise, might be more reasonable or more coherent. Westerners attached to the idea of overthrowing the mullahs have long imagined the return of the Shah and liberalization. But given that sections of the regime would need to defect for that to happen, it seems a remote prospect.
It is every bit as possible that the mullahs might be replaced by something worse, hard as that is to imagine.
For now, then, Israeli and US analysts continue to look at Iran expecting something to happen. The laws of history say something must happen. But what it is, or whether it will be good or bad, is entirely uncertain.
Uncertainty: just what the world economy, and markets, adore. Such is the price of war.
