Hey, it's not just the Wall Street Journal asking this question. I've been asking since Operation Grim Beeper, and then as the echoes of the collapse of Fordow last June. Two months ago, when Iran faced a water crisis that might force the relocation of its capital, I wrote:
On top of those strategic decisions, the regime operates on the principles of fealty and punishment of heresy rather than the promotion of competence and accomplishment. That is a common feature of all tyrannical regimes, theocratic or not, and the result is the kind of incompetence in all aspects that this crisis has exposed. For that matter, that same incompetence got exposed in the Twelve-Day War, when it took Israel only a few hours to impose air superiority over Tehran and almost the entirety of Iran.
Tyrannical regimes generally don't survive for long when their incompetence becomes this clear to its population. Any attempt to relocate the capital will not just confirm that failure, but the chaos that this relocation will create will almost certainly provide a catalyst for a popular uprising that could and likely will spell the end of the mullahs' reign. That's especially true considering the implications of a drought crisis for a regime supposedly based on divine authority.
Think about that for a moment. You can bet that Iranians are already considering that as the mullahs keep asking for prayer to get rain. The storm is coming, one way or the other.
The mullahs relied on the claim of divine authority to enforce their cruel oppression. They rested their authority on the premise that Allah had granted it to them to defeat the Joooooooos and the West, and that they would prevail because their god was on their side. As I noted more than once during the Twelve Day War, that claim didn't hold up well with IDF fighters and bombers operating at will over Tehran and other major cities, while the mullahs' forces were powerless to stop them.
The rest of us can chuckle at these claims by remembering the words of Comte de Bussy-Rabutin: "Providence is always on the side of the big battalions." That knowing cynicism may fit well into the post-Enlightenment thinking of the West, not to mention centuries of warfare that has proven it out in ever bloodier fashion. That mindset does not exist in Islamist tyrannies like Iran, whose regimes rely on brittle claims to divine authority. The only justification for the oppression that they impose on their peoples is that their deity will deliver them from their enemies and grant them worldly power.
Instead, the water has dried up, the Israelis have humiliated the Iranian armed forces, and now the regime has allowed what little prosperity Iran enjoyed to get wiped out in a currency collapse. Small wonder that the Iranian people have finally reached a critical-mass rejection of the notion of divine authority, as the WSJ reports today:
The ayatollahs’ rule was shaped by the bloody eight-year war that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launched in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The social compact that endured since that trauma was that Iranians would acquiesce to hardship and restrictions in return for a strong state that protects them from foreign attack.
That assumption came crashing down when Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel in 2023, triggering a regional war that brought death and destruction into the heart of Tehran last summer.
Israeli strikes across Iran destroyed much of its military leadership, and the follow-on U.S. bombing campaign struck a heavy blow against Iran’s nuclear program. It was a humiliation for a regime that had invested so much of the country’s national wealth into a proxy network that was designed to deter exactly this sort of assault on the homeland. ...
June’s 12-day war gave the regime a “temporary sugar high, which many mistakenly believed was a national rallying around the flag,” said Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointing out that the Islamic Republic, since its inception in 1979, had chosen to wage a war of choice, rather than a war of necessity, against Israel. “External wars tend to strengthen revolutionary regimes in their early years, but military humiliations expose the brittleness of late-stage dictatorships.”
As the WSJ subhed declares, that humiliation "shattered" the mullahs' "last claim to legitimacy." A nation of ten million people absolutely shattered the military of a nation of 90 million people, a nation which long ago transformed into a military state with a theocracy sitting uncomfortably atop it.
What happens now? The military state will do what it can to survive. They may decide to ditch the theocrats and declare the military a force for reformation, but with the IRGC and Basij murdering Iranians by the hundreds this week, those claims will be just as convincing as Ali Khamenei's claims to divine authority. The storm has well and truly arrived, and the result may end up being a protracted mess:
Many of Iran’s neighbors fear that the country of more than 90 million people could plunge into a Syria-style civil war, with separatist uprisings in provinces populated by Iranian Kurds, Baluchis and other minorities spilling across borders.
“The perception among Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf is that they prefer to deal with an Iran that they know, rather than something new or a zone of instability,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, research associate professor at the Gulf Studies Center of Qatar University. “The Arab neighbors, despite all the problems and contradictions, want to see a weakened Iran, but an Iran that they understand. Let’s not have illusions that a regime change in Iran would necessarily lead to a more friendly regime there.”
Ahem. It's difficult to imagine a less friendly Iran than the present regime, with its proxy armies attempting to encircle the Sunni states and Hezbollah, especially running terror and assassination squads worldwide. At a certain point, the same calculation applies externally as well as internally: we have nothing to lose with the collapse of this regime, and even a failed state might represent less risk than the IRGCs and the terror-loving mullahs of the present.
In the meantime, pray for the brave Iranians who are literally putting their lives on the line to end one of the worst regimes in human history. May their courage be rewarded not with a failed state but with real liberty and self-determination.
