Iran Exposed

In 2002 Israel revealed to the world the existence of an advanced Iranian nuclear program. The previous year, in his first State of the Union address after September 11, President George W. Bush had included the Islamic Republic in what he called the “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea, and he later encouraged the people of Iran, “held hostage by a small clerical elite,” to “win your own freedom.” In 2005 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—a prototype for the untamable populists who now run much of the world—caused consternation in the West and exhilaration among many Arabs when he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

Those events raised questions that have kept analysts of Iran busy ever since. Will the Islamic Republic go to war with Israel and the US, will it be overthrown—whether by foreign powers, revolution, or a combination of the two—and will it build a nuclear bomb? No longer are these the remote contingencies they appeared to be two decades ago when I was living in Iran and reporting in these pages on Bush’s “war on terror.”

The Islamic Republic is already engaged in a sordid undercover war with Israel and the United States that until recently consisted of assaults by proxy forces, assassinations, and acts of sabotage. Iran has relied on a combination of distance and deniability to protect itself from the full force of Israel’s incomparably better-equipped military. But the war has come closer to Iran since Hamas, one of its proxies, launched its hideous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Benjamin Netanyahu started to reorder the eastern Mediterranean, first by obliterating Hamas in Gaza, which he has only partially achieved, and then, on October 1, 2024, by invading Lebanon with the aim of extirpating Iran’s proxy Hezbollah, which is based there.

Iran’s response to Israel’s devastation of Gaza was to encourage Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis to attack the Jewish state with missiles—but not too hard. When Hamas officials met their Iranian sponsors shortly after October 7, they reportedly complained about the lack of help the Iranians were giving them. Iran did not strike Israel directly until six months into the war, and then only in response to an Israeli air strike on its embassy in Damascus that killed a senior Revolutionary Guard commander. It gave prior warning before launching its drones and missiles, which were duly shot down by Israel and its allies, and six days later Israel launched retaliatory air strikes against an Iranian air defense site. Hezbollah’s missile volleys into northern Israel, meanwhile, not only failed to curb Israel’s excesses in Gaza but provoked Netanyahu into assassinating Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, with an air strike on the group’s headquarters in Beirut on September 27 and launching his invasion of Lebanon four days later.

“Neither procrastinating nor acting impulsively” is how Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, describes his policy of supporting the Palestinians while trying to avoid giving Netanyahu an excuse to escalate further and draw the US into the conflict, which could imperil the very existence of the Islamic Republic. It’s an uncomfortable path for a revolutionary state to follow, and Khamenei has suffered humiliation after humiliation at the hands of his Israeli foe.

On July 30 Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of the country’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian. The following morning Haniyeh was killed by a bomb that had been planted, apparently by the Israelis, in the government guesthouse where he was staying. Then Nasrallah’s death and Israel’s pager and radio attacks of mid-September, which killed dozens of Hezbollah operatives and maimed and blinded many more, robbed Iran of its most experienced ally and demonstrated the extent to which it and its proxies have been penetrated by their Israeli foes.

On October 4 Khamenei led Friday prayers in Tehran before a huge crowd that included virtually every senior official in the Islamic Republic. Holding a rifle to symbolize his readiness for combat, he gave trenchant assessments of Israel as “a blood-sucking, wolflike regime, America’s rabid dog” and of Hamas’s attacks as “correct, logical, and legal.” In the streets of the capital, among a populace that has grown cynical and disenchanted after years of political oppression, economic misrule, and international isolation, a joke circulated to the effect that the Mossad had been on the verge of bombing the prayer hall and killing the officials when one of the Israelis interjected, “Hold on! We can’t do that. They’re our agents!”

Ali Motahari, a prominent former parliamentarian and the son of a senior cleric who was gunned down shortly after the Shah’s overthrow in 1979, has criticized the government for its failure to retaliate with sufficient robustness against Israeli aggression. He wrote on X that “Iran’s procrastination in responding to the assassination of Martyr Haniyeh in Tehran, precisely when the world expected such a reaction, emboldened the Zionist regime to kill [Nasrallah].”

Iran finally avenged Haniyeh’s murder on October 1. A few dozen of the roughly 180 ballistic missiles it launched that day penetrated Israel’s defenses, causing little damage and taking a single life, that of a Palestinian who was hit by falling missile debris. Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, has vowed retribution that will be “lethal, pinpoint accurate, and…surprising.” Naftali Bennett, Israel’s right-wing prime minister between 2021 and 2022, wrote on X:

Israel has now its greatest opportunity in 50 years, to change the face of the Middle East…. We must act *now* to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, its central energy facilities, and to fatally cripple this terrorist regime…. Now that Hezbollah and Hamas are paralyzed, Iran stands exposed.

The Israelis have reportedly told the US that they will restrict their retaliation against Iran to military targets and not strike nuclear or oil installations. On October 16 Iran’s foreign minister promised a “decisive” response to any Israeli attack. The road to further escalation is wide open. An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be risky. One of them, at Fordow, near the shrine city of Qom, is buried in a mountain and may be impenetrable even to Israel’s most powerful bombs. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which has inspectors in the country, estimates that Iran has enough fissile material to produce three nuclear bombs in just a few weeks, though it could take months to build the other components necessary for a nuclear weapon, which would then need to be mounted on aircraft or missiles and tested: Iran’s announcement to the world that it is a nuclear power. On October 9 one of Khamenei’s senior advisers made clear that if Israel were to attack Iran’s nuclear sites, the supreme leader might be prompted to reconsider his earlier rulings outlawing the use of weapons of mass destruction. And that would free Iran, from a religious perspective, to go forward with a bomb.

Addressing “the noble Persian people” on September 30, Netanyahu warned that their leaders are bringing them “closer to the abyss.” In terms that recalled George W. Bush’s address to the citizens of Iraq in the first weeks of the 2003 invasion, he urged Iranians to look forward to a time when their country “is finally free” and able to “thrive as never before,” while benefiting from “global investment, massive tourism, [and] brilliant technical innovation…. Doesn’t that sound better than endless poverty, repression, and war?”

The citizens of the Islamic Republic don’t need Netanyahu to tell them what a better future looks like. Over the winter of 2022–2023, millions of them agitated for such a future without prompting from abroad. The protest movement that got underway in September 2022 was sparked by the killing in police custody of a young Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini; at least 550 protesters were killed before the movement was finally suppressed six months later.^*

Netanyahu doesn’t have the means to effect regime change in Iran, and as a result of the failure of the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, no American president will topple Khamenei for him. Donald Trump’s aversion to sending US troops to the region is as strong as that of Joe Biden, who completed the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan shortly after assuming the presidency.

In 2001 the US-led coalition that toppled the Taliban handed power to an exiled Pashtun leader, Hamid Karzai, during whose twelve-year tenure as Afghanistan’s president corruption and instability were rampant. When the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, their bright hope for the country was Ahmed Chalabi, a charismatic bullshitter who fed the Pentagon half-baked intelligence, exaggerated his familiarity with a country he hadn’t seen in almost half a century, and, while occupying a series of top positions in post-Saddam Iraq, epitomized the cynicism, arrogance, and cluelessness of the occupation.

Rhetorically at least we are now back in the days of Bush, this time with Israel posing as a “friend” of the Iranian people, and sixty-three-year-old Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah, in the Chalabi role. Pahlavi’s father was overthrown in a popular revolution, and he himself hasn’t set foot in his homeland in forty-five years, but that has not deterred him from claiming a mandate from Iranians within and outside the country.

The self-styled crown prince is a strong supporter of Israel, which he visited in the spring of 2023, meeting Netanyahu, visiting Yad Vashem, and touring a water desalination plant whose technology would no doubt be useful in Iran. In the “message to the friends of the Iranian people across the Middle East” that he posted on the anniversary of the Hamas attacks, Pahlavi announced that once the Islamic Republic has fallen he will “step forward—at [the people’s] call—to oversee [the] peaceful transition to democracy and Iran’s return to the community of nations.”

Pahlavi is scathing of what he considers the Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran and its deluded attachment to the idea that the issue of the country’s nuclear program can be resolved through negotiations. (President Pezeshkian recently indicated Iran’s readiness to restart stalled negotiations with world powers, adding that “dialogue on other issues can follow.”) Pahlavi reserves particular hatred for those of his compatriots who argue for reforming the clerical regime. On the contrary, he told an enthusiastic audience at the Israeli-American Council on September 20, what’s needed is a global coalition that will put “maximum pressure on the Islamic Republic,” offer “maximum support to the people of Iran,” and “facilitate maximum defections from the regime so that we can peacefully transition from this criminal dictatorship to the secular democracy the Iranian people are fighting for.”

It wouldn’t look good for Pahlavi to advocate a foreign invasion of his own country. When searching for a possible catalyst for the regime “collapse” he so confidently predicts, one needn’t go further than the air strikes that are currently being contemplated by the Netanyahu government, particularly if they are lethal, accurate, and surprising enough to provoke an Iranian response that drags the US into the conflict.

After Israel announced on October 17 that it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, House Speaker Mike Johnson posted on X:

The Biden-Harris administration must now work in tandem with Israel to apply a maximum pressure campaign against the head of the snake: Iran…. We cannot let this moment go to waste.

Trump’s recent comments on Iran have been characteristically erratic: he urged Netanyahu to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities while also declaring that he would do a deal with the mullahs. But it was Trump who in 2018 withdrew from the nuclear deal that had protected Iran from the threat of regime change, and his support for Israel is unconditional. If he reenters the White House, Pahlavi is likely to come knocking with assurances that his compatriots are on the brink of rebellion against their clerical rulers.

The Islamic Republic is more vulnerable to the wrath of its citizens than at any time since the early 1980s, but that does not mean it is on the verge of collapse. The more Israel talks about further attacks on Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, the more moderate, reformist, and nationalist Iranians find themselves falling—however reluctantly—behind the only government and the only military they have.

Pahlavi’s friendship with Israel has caused unease among Iranians who, while resenting the Islamic Republic’s expenditures on proxies and struggles far from home, are disgusted by the savagery of Israel’s response to October 7. These include the reformists for whom Pahlavi reserves such derision. In the words of Ardeshir Amir Arjomand, one of the leaders of the 2009 protests,

no honourable Iranian is obliged to choose between “domestic tyranny and foreign intervention.” Any incitement…of a military attack on the country is a betrayal of Iran and its brave and wounded people.

In recent weeks Iran’s foreign minister has been warning the Gulf Arab states not to allow their airspace to be used by Israel for its attack or they will face disruption of their oil trade. Netanyahu would do well to bear in mind that, for all the Islamic Republic’s exhaustion and brittleness, it is the same Islamic Republic that with much heroism and unbreakable will waged an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein and his Western backers in the 1980s. Most Iranians have lived under sanctions all their lives. Adversity is nothing new, and the majority, whether religious or not, are fiercely protective of their country.

Regime change through outside intervention usually ends in disaster. When I lived in Iran in the early 2000s, it was an island of stability between the chaos of Iraq and Afghanistan. With growing speed and the promise of much misery, that island is now threatened by vast forces, and the consequences are difficult to predict.

—October 23, 2024