If David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist, still represents the voice of conventional Washington wisdom, they severely misunderstand what is happening in Iran. In that light his most recent column, considering Iran, reflects that misunderstanding sharply. He opens with a reflection on the Iranian regime and continues by characterizing it:
The Iranian regime is on a one-way street to disaster. A senior European diplomat in Tehran shared that assessment with me several years ago, and it remains true. Iran has powerful security tools, but they’re getting rusty. The regime couldn’t protect its proxies Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. And most important, Iran couldn’t shield itself from Israel’s systematic assault in June. The regime is on a losing streak.
“The Islamic Republic is today a zombie regime,” argues Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Its legitimacy, ideology, economy and leader are dead or dying. What keeps it alive is lethal force. It kills to live and lives to kill. Brutality can delay the regime’s funeral, but it can’t restore the pulse.”
concluding:
The wild card this year is whether the regime’s hard-liners have lost their edge. Like the Soviet Union during its last years, the security agencies may have lost their ideological commitment and discipline. They’ve watched helplessly as their proxy forces were crushed in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. And they’ve suffered the same scourge of inflation and economic stagnation as the rest of the nation. They’re not broken, but they appear more fragile than in the past.
Let’s think again about what’s going through the heads of those 12 members of the Supreme National Security Council. They know Iran is stagnant. Their budget for the next fiscal year will likely raise taxes and cut subsidies to fund defense spending. They’re waiting for the political transition that will come when Khamenei dies, but for the moment they are lurching forward as a wounded dispirited nation.
As the council members look south across the Gulf to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, they see their neighbors racing to embrace artificial intelligence and a dynamic economic future. Meanwhile, they cling to a repressive, retrograde regime that can barely feed its people. Revolutions are impossible to predict. But when you look at Iran, it’s obvious that eventually something is going to crack wide open.
The highlight is mine. I’m afraid he has several misconceptions. The Iranian regime is theocratic. It bases its authority on religious beliefs not popular support. In their own light they are not decaying institutions; they are custodians of divine mandate. As long as Iran is governed by True Believers, they will hold onto power by whatever means necessary. They must. Secular Westerners find that very difficult to understand.
Also, the analogy he considers in the body of the column, to the last days of the Soviet Union in the passage highlighted above, is correct but he does not take it far enough. A Marxist regime can drift into cynicism. A theocracy cannot. When belief dies, so does authority. Until then, repression is not a policy choice it is a theological obligation. The Soviet Union persisted until it was no longer governed by anyone who remembered the revolution. When that happened it collapsed rapidly.
The Soviet gerontocracy governed out of habit. The Iranian leadership governs out of covenant.
Sadly, Iran is still governed by actual religious revolutionaries. The question is not whether they will suppress unrest but whether they can.
Iran is a large land mass. It is not as large as the US, China, or Russia, but it requires a large bureaucracy to govern or control. As such, it can sustain itself much longer than most people imagine, but any fall will be swift.
If history is any indication, the replacement government will be much worse. Revolutions tend to end in bloodshed.
At OTB, Dr. Taylor had a very good post about the particulars of revolutions, and the American Revolution was not a revolution. I think the difference was that it was not a change in the type of government. Basically, everything was mostly the same, but the English were no longer in charge.
I would imagine that is why India is a relatively stable country despite its size. On the other hand, the French Revolution ended in bloodshed.
One other thing, the Arabs are a backward people. The Iranians (Persians) are not. They may be able to host large data centers, but the idea of them developing the technology is ludicrous.