He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

If the nation is to have any chance of escaping their grip, and it needs to start with this guy, the Ayatollah Khamenei.

In 1989 I was driving home when news came across the radio that Ayatollah Khomeini had died and I recall punching the air in celebration and thinking that Iran might return to being a normal society after more than a decade of theocracy, war, terrorism and failure.

Fat chance, as this prick took over at the tender age of 50 and has thus been able to rule as his predecessor did, but for much longer, with few limits on the cruelty and terror required. It’s entirely possible that the same thing could happen again, which is why I was disappointed in the ceasefire, turning what should have been an 18-day war into a 12-day war:

With another five days Israel could have taken out scores of regime-maintenance targets — thug forces protecting ayatollahs and assets that can threaten Persian Gulf oil tankers. Sample targets: Iranian Republican Guard Corps leaders; speedboats, stored naval mines and anti-ship missiles the regime could use to close the Strait of Hormuz. This target list isn’t speculative. Though I don’t know their precise location, they exist, and if the 12 Day War were 18, Israel would have smacked them.

I was never concerned about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz for the simple reason that the world had changed since the late 1980’s, with the USA now producing most of its own oil, with supplemental imports from Mexico and Canada, as I wrote in 2020, after Trump vapourised Iran’s General Soleimani, fracking had geo-political implications, not just economic ones:

The US no longer has to be the “guardian of the Arabian Gulf” to insure the energy supply of the USA & Europe. For example, in the 1980’s the USA felt compelled to intervene in the so-called Gulf Tanker War between Iran and Iraq to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. But now it only has to think about keeping them closed – while the Iranians need it open to smuggle out what oil they can.

There was also the fact that Iran’s mate, China, is now the one reliant on oil shipping through that Strait. They were never going to allow Iran to do that and Iran is almost no-mates in the world.

Israel had already taken out the IRGC leadership that could have coordinated strikes against them, but what could have come next was taking out the lower orders to give the people of Iran a fighting chance to destroy this regime. People like Iranian human rights activist, Masih Alinejad had already made it clear what the current deaths meant to people like her:

I’ve spent the past four years of my life being hunted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. They sent agents to kidnap me from my home in New York. They hired assassins to kill me on American soil. They even followed me to Davos, Switzerland, where I had to be helicoptered out from my hotel. If not for the FBI’s protection—and the more than 21 safe houses I have shuttled between over the past few years—I might not be alive to write these words.

So yes, this moment is personal. But it is also far bigger than me.
…
For many people around the world, these will just be foreign names. For me and for the people of Iran, they are the monsters who have impoverished and tyrannized our families. They are the ones who have made millions of people’s lives miserable, not just in Iran, but across the entire Middle East.

A large part of the reason these assholes are dead is that they were always far better at terrorising their own people than actually fighting in a war:

These commanders didn’t defend Iran, they defended the regime from its own people. The only people who sacrificed for the sake of the country were the poor, the women who dared to show their hair, the students shot in the streets.

This is why many Iranians are not mourning today. Despite the profound uncertainty that lies ahead, they’re celebrating. I’ve received thousands of messages from inside Iran showing young women dancing in the streets, or families cheering in their kitchens. They remember these commanders as the ones who gave the orders to shoot protesters in the eyes, jail teenage girls, and lie to the world while building bombs in secret.

One mother in Tehran who was imprisoned for protesting the 2019 murder of her child wrote to me that “waking up to the news of Salami’s death, I started to scream out of joy that I’m seeing justice.” She told me that “soon you’ll be back to Iran and we’ll dance on the graves of these killers.”

Another woman, whose mother was shot dead by the IRGC in 2022 for protesting the brutal death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody, wrote, “We’re all happy for the elimination of the killers of our loved ones. War comes with a price. Innocent people might get killed. But we know who we should blame: the Islamic Republic.” This particular woman shaved her head over her mother’s grave—an image that soon became a symbol of resistance in Iran.

As always, read the whole thing.

Aside from such protests, 46 years of Islamic theocratic rule have also resulted in a decline in Iranian Muslims practicing their faith. As long ago as 2006 research polling revealed that less than 30% of respondents visit mosques at least once a week, and the numbers have likely dropped further since then, as shown in early 2023 when a senior cleric, Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi, said that approximately 50,000 out of 75,000 mosques had closed due to declining attendance. That led to none other than the Minister of Culture, Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili, commenting later that year that this was “highly alarming”. Regular attendance at Friday Mosque services ranges from a high of 12% to perhaps as low as 1.5% – the lowest in the Middle East.

Now I would have put this down to people simply refusing to turn up in mosques as a quiet protest against the regime rather than Muslims losing their faith, until I recently saw this:

I’ve met and worked with perhaps twenty Iranians, here in New Zealand, London and the USA, and every one referred to themselves as Persian. At first this surprised me but the Persians have three thousand years of civilisation behind them (including a once vast empire that’s very much part of our Western history) and the attitude seemed to be that 1400 years of Islam doesn’t compare, especially since it was imposed upon Persia by 7th century Arabs. Yes, there’s a racial factor there too, the Arabs regarding Persians as arrogant and the Persions regarding the Arabs as uncultured barbarians.

Iran has also never been weaker geo-politically, and not just because of the decline of its oil as a lever. Foreign Policy magazine is uncharacteristically blunt, How Iran Lost:

Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, leaders in Tehran have cultivated a web of proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq—and developed ties with the Assad regime in Syria. These regional alliances, paired with Tehran’s robust ballistic missile program, allowed Iran to threaten adversaries directly and from afar, giving hard-liners core sources of power.

In October 2023, the Islamic Republic was peaking. It exerted heavy influence over a wide swath of land, from Iraq to the Mediterranean. It had bullied neighboring Arab rivals, namely Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, into submission. And Iranian proxies, armed with rockets, missiles, and drones, were keeping constant pressure on Israel.

In short, everything seemed to be going their way. In this they were aided by soft-headedness in Israel and the West generally, as described in this article:

Oh sure a few protests, a missile or two, maybe a bomb somewhere, but those stockpiles of missiles would never get used and the Iranian’s nuclear bomb program would never get to the point where they could actually build one. There was enough denial in Jerusalem that you’d think it was on the banks of a river in Egypt. Mind you it wasn’t just Jerusalem, conventional wisdom everywhere was that this could be managed. That a combination of high tech tools, spying and negotiations would keep the peace because, at base, Hamass and co. didn’t really mean it when they screamed “death to Israel”. Oh sure maybe a few hotheads did, but not enough to matter and the tech tools and spying would identify almost all potential attacks before anything too bad could happen.

October 7th changed all that.

Hence the article’s snarky title referring to the military leader of Hamas – Thanking Yahya Sinwar.

Here’s what has happened to Iran’s grand strategy since October 7, 2023:

  1. Hamas effectively destroyed as a threat to Israel, incapable of even repeating the attack of October 7, let alone anything bigger to help Iran. (What water pipes are for)
  2. Hezbollah rendered useless, starting with Israel’s “Grim Beeper” attack that destroyed their leadership, followed up by the destruction of huge amounts of those 150,000 missiles they kept boasting about. It should be noted that they haven’t lifted a finger against Israel or the US since Israel attacked Iran. It should also be remembered that the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon suffered severe injuries to his eyes when his pager exploded.
  3. The Assad regime of Syria collapsed and gone, along with its military weapons, the nation now in the hands of Islamists, but ones who hate Iran more than they hate Israel. The nation now merely a corridor for Israel’s Air Force to get to Iran, which they have, and of course the loss of a pathway for Iran to ship weapons to Hezbollah, Hamas and the West Bank Palestinians.
  4. The destruction of Iran’s air defences, starting in October 2024 and effectively completed in the recent Israeli attacks, leaving it naked to attack. The destruction of thousands of its ballistic missiles and more importantly their launchers, leaving it feeble in striking back against Israel and the USA.

The Foreign Policy article lists a fifth loss:

Added to this is the loss of the defense establishment’s brain trust. The assassinations of numerous veteran commanders and military officials, including General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force and the architect of its missile strategy, will leave a gaping hole in the regime and erase knowledge built on decades of experience. The regime has already replaced these commanders, but what cannot be duplicated so quickly is the trust that their predecessors had earned from Khamenei, the commander in chief, and the influence that they held over the regime’s grand strategy.

Which is all good, but if the Mullah’s remain in place, as weak as they are, they’ll simply rebuild all this at whatever the cost, uncaring of the suffering of their people as more tens of billions of dollars are poured into new air defence systems and a new nuke program. In fact they’ve already started now they’ve got their ceasefire:

There are reports out of Iran of mass arrests and executions, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not been heard from in days – But it’s not enough:

Iranian authorities are pivoting from a ceasefire with Israel to intensify an internal security crackdown across the country with mass arrests, executions and military deployments, particularly in the restive Kurdish region, according to officials and activists.
…
Israeli hackers briefly took over Iranian state TV and broadcast a call for uprising. “Iranian media said Wednesday that Israel briefly hacked the state television broadcast, airing footage of women’s protests and urging people to take to the streets.” Perhaps the high point came when Israel destroyed “the Basij headquarters, the Evin Prison for political prisoners and regime opponents, the ‘Destruction of Israel’ clock in Palestine Square, the internal security headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards”

This ceasefire is a mistake. As I wrote a year ago in Iran, Israel and Decisive Shock Battle:

Seeking decisive shock battle with the Iranian military (and only the military) that decides the conflict once and for all, seems to increasingly be the less risky option for Israel.

Kill the IRGC down through five layers of management, and then see what the Iranian people can do. Unlike Iraq they’re not pushing for more Islamisation but less – much less.