On Sunday at approximately 2 a.m. Tehran time, seven B-2 stealth aircraft attacked the Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan, strikes enabled as much by the belief that Iran had this coming as the particular technology of the American bombers. A drawling President Trump put it in stark terms shortly after the operation ended. “For 40 years, Iran has been saying death to America, death to Israel. They have been killing our people, blowing off their arms, blowing off their legs, with roadside bombs. That was their specialty.”
Convention drives coverage of Iran in the United States, from stock images of anti-American murals to the enduring menace of “Iranian-backed militias.” Now there is an emerging consensus that overthrowing the government in Tehran will accomplish what Israeli and U.S. missiles and air assaults have not: an end to Iran’s nuclear program and that country’s destabilizing aspirations for regional hegemony, not to mention an end of the oppressive Islamic Republic itself. A series of headlines, analysts and politicians have in recent days presented regime change as a natural certainty, nothing less than a magic bullet. This too is seen as Iran’s due.
Very few of these expert voices have taken the next step by asking, “Then what?” Where does the magic bullet land? Sovereign imperatives await the next group to come into power. Democratic or otherwise, the government that replaces the current regime will be laser-focused on Iran’s survival. And there is very little reason for Israel or the U.S. to think that a reconstituted Iran will become more conciliatory toward either country once the war ends.
The reality is that nationalism, not theocracy, remains what what the historian Ali Ansari calls the “determining ideology” of Iran. There is a robust consensus among scholars that politics in Iran begins with the idea of Iran as a people with a continuous and unbroken history, a nation that “looms out of an immemorial past.” Nationalism provides the broad political arena in which different groups and ideologies in Iran compete for power and authority, whether monarchist, Islamist or leftist.
And that means that the patriotic defense of Iran isn’t a passing phase, produced under the duress of bombs, but the default position, the big idea that holds Iran together, hardened over the last two centuries of Iranian history and the trauma of the loss of territory and dignity to outside powers, including the Russians, the British and the Americans.
Getting rid of Islamic rule won’t change this dynamic; it is almost sure to guarantee that something worse will come along, sending Iranian politics in unexpected and more corrosive directions. Americans, after all, need only look to their current administration (or past interventions in the Middle East) for examples of how populist responses to foreign invasions, real or imagined, can lead to unthinkable outcomes.
“Trump just guaranteed that Iran will be a nuclear weapons state in the next 5 to 10 years, particularly if the regime changes,” Trita Parsi of the U.S.-based Quincy Institute wrote Saturday night. This is especially true if a new regime is democratic. The promised “liberation” of the Iranian people through devastating bombing campaigns presents the worst-case scenario for Israel and the U.S., as no future elected government would survive unless it sustained, and perhaps surpassed, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s current belligerence.
There is tragedy here. Ordinary Iranians, like most people, want peace and security, preferably through diplomacy and dialogue. The unprovoked attacks of the last week and their subsequent justification by not only the U.S. but also nearly all of the European Union, a disastrous sequence that began with Trump’s wanton violation of President Obama’s Iran deal in 2018, have convinced an increasing number of Iranians that the restraint of arms, nuclear or otherwise, is national suicide.
Insofar as the Islamic Republic can claim that it is the only Iranian government in more than 200 years to have lost “not an inch of soil,” it continues to cling to power. Of course, such legitimacy comes with a dual edge. This regime may survive in the short term, but if and when it does fall it will be because its leaders failed to keep Israeli and American arms out, munitions that have already killed more than 800 of their fellow citizens in less than a week, according to the Washington-based group Human Rights Activists.
One of the most common conventions when it comes to Iran, typically presented as a gesture of grace, is to draw a distinction between its government and the people, to lay blame on “the mullahs” and not the country’s long-suffering citizens for their country’s status as a rogue actor. As a way to appeal to Iranians of the righteousness of his cause, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his surrogates have deployed tropes of civilizational greatness that would make even the most ardent Persian chauvinist blush. On Thursday, the Israeli prime minister announced that the time had come for the Jews to repay an ancient debt: “I want to tell you that 2,500 years ago, Cyrus the Great, the king of Persia, liberated the Jews. And today, a Jewish state is creating the means to liberate the Persian people.” Regime change, by this logic, is a project of recovery and revivalism, a surefire way to make Iran great again.
Iranians are proving to be less nuanced, and unconvinced. The distance between the Iranian state and society has in the last week been reduced to almost nothing. Across the range of experience and suffering, from imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureates and formerly imprisoned Palm D’Or winners to working-class laborers left behind by the revolution, the overriding sentiment today in Iran is clear: These clerics may be scoundrels, but they’re our scoundrels, our problem to solve.
Nearly 50 years into an unwanted dictatorship, Iranians have developed a refined capacity for identifying bad faith. They know who has Iran’s interests at heart and who is trying to save his own skin.
Iranian American Shervin Malekzadeh is a visiting assistant professor of political science at Pitzer College and author of the forthcoming book, “Fire Beneath the Ash: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Democracy in Iran, 2009-2019.”
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