Mick Hartley

Simon Sebag Montefiore expands on his earlier tweet on Iran, in the Times this morning:

In Iran, the conditions for a successful revolution against a hated, brutal dictatorship seem ideal: aged dictator, corrupt and cruel regime, economic collapse, a resonant cause, brave crowds. In this era of lightning connectivity, the Ultra Age, we expect an instant revolution. But as so often with the Middle East, the sensations of social media are important but do not reflect the whole reality.

On January 12, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, emerged. “Last night in Tehran vandals damaged buildings just to please the US president,” he said. “Everyone knows the Islamic Republic came to power with the blood of hundreds of thousands of honourable people. It will not back down in the face of saboteurs. The Iranian people will not tolerate the hirelings of foreign powers.” Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the chief justice, declared that protesters faced “decisive, maximum punishment” — death. Then they blocked the internet and unleashed a massacre.

Regime sources confirm more than 3,700 protesters have been killed which means the real numbers are much larger, probably 12,000-20,000. As Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history, writes in his book Iran: “From 1963 to the departure of the shah, a total of 3,164 had died in all forms of resistance.”

So as Karim Sadjadpour, one of the best Iranian commentators, puts it: “The Islamic Republic has already killed far more protesters (as much as five times as many) in two weeks than were killed in 13 months of the 1979 revolution.”

The internal politics of Iran are much debated, but as a historian of power, what does history tell us? First, the cruel mechanics of dictatorship. It is rare for crowds to depose dictators defended by security forces who are willing to kill unarmed people. Iranian security forces are not only inspired by self-preservation — they will be killed in a revolution — and invested in a crony economy but they are also believers in a radical Shia mission that allows the courageous protesters to be seen as “enemies of God”.

The Islamic regime may have bankrupted Iran but it has consistently invested in its repressive organs: 190,000 revolutionary guards (IRGC) and 600,000 Basij militiamen who revere Khamenei as a sacred monarch. Most Iranians despise the clergy and their myrmidons but a strong 20 per cent — ten million — are devotees.…

The ability of a regime to survive is always multiplied by the savagery of the forces at its disposal and its likelihood of falling is in inverse proportion to its willingness to deploy uninhibited butchery. In the Arab Spring, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad faced a popular revolt but unleashed security forces, including paramilitaries known as the Ghosts, whose slogan was “Assad — or we burn the country”. The country was indeed burnt and 600,000 killed in Assad’s “human slaughterhouses”, much of it made by possible by his chief allies, Vladimir Putin and Iran.

Successful revolutions begin in the streets but are consummated in the palaces. The greatest peril for Khamenei, apart from an American missile, is retirement by his own courtiers and generals. The despot is 87 and has ruled for 47 years. The elite is in crisis — of course they have prepared escape plans. On Thursday, the anonymous daughter of an IRGC or clerical leader who secretly backs the protests phoned the opposition ManotoNews and, sobbing at the slaughter, revealed the “houses, so many dollars, false passports are all prepared for us”.

Rumours of Khamenei’s illnesses and plans to flee to Moscow may be true — who among that leadership would not have a plan to reach Moscow or Qatar? And surely the IRGC commander has at least considered seizing power and retiring the old man? But for now the autocracy is united in an effort to save itself — by killing. It worked in 2009 and 2022.…

The power balance in Iran could be changed by US intervention, hitting security headquarters or beheading the regime. This would not be some quixotic adventure: Maga or no Maga, the fall of the regime is an essential American interest. Iran has been the persistent enemy of the US, warmonger and bully of the Middle East, puppetmaster of murderous militias and orchestrator of terrorism and extremism for 50 years.

Until recently, Khamenei had enjoyed two decades of success against American power and Israeli existence, seeing nuclear weapons as guarantee of preservation. As his comrade/rival President Rafsanjani explained in 2001: “The use of one atomic bomb in Israel leaves nothing left but in the Islamic world there will only be damage.” Such is the nihilism of Islamist apocalypse.

After the American destruction of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, the Iranians forged an informal empire of states and parastates through Iraq and Assad’s Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen, creating what General Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s international Quds force called the Seven Armies to defend Iran and menace Israel.…

During his Sixties and Seventies heyday the shah, a visionary but ultimately flawed autocrat, was successful: he made Iran the arbiter of the Middle East until he lost control of his own reforms, disappointing the new urban impoverished class that turned to Islam, alienating first the clergy, then the bazaar merchants, his cancer enervating him and exposing the weakness of one-man rule.

His fall in 1979 reveals how Iran has a singular place in the western mind. In 1978, as the revolution gained momentum, the shah was denounced as the most evil tyrant while Ayatollah Khomeini was hailed by many westerners as a grandfatherly pacifist. Khomeini was a sly tactician, inscrutable, grim and murderous, who gathered a coalition of leftists, liberals and Islamists and played the western media brilliantly.

The bewildered President Carter negotiated secretly with Khomeini. This week, the BBC published documents revealing that in return for America stopping the Iranian army from crushing the revolt, Khomeini promised Carter “we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans”, and that he would sell them oil and “restore the constitution”. Carter responded “we do not say the constitution cannot be changed” — allowing Khomeini to take power.

US diplomats said he was “like Gandhi”; Foucault hailed him as a “saint”. In The New York Times, the Princeton professor Richard Falk wrote that Khomeini’s “depiction as fanatical reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems happily false”; his entourage was “uniformly composed of moderate progressives” with a “notable record for human rights”; and his “popular revolution” would “provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for the Third World.”

For 40 years, Iranian dissidents nicknamed the British broadcaster “BBC Ayatollah” and in the last three weeks, the BBC and Sky initially avoided the protests. Ironically the comedian Omid Djalili was providing better coverage. The UN, long protecting Iran, abetted by its allies Russia and China, ignored it altogether.

Only on Thursday did the security council hold a session at which the dissident Masih Alinejad, whom the regime had tried to assassinate, reprimanded António Guterres, the disgraceful secretary-general: “[He] has not spoken publicly against the massacre … Secretary-general why are you afraid of the Islamic Republic?”

Western activists have resisted backing the revolution: “Where is the left now? Where are the ‘pro-Palestinian’ and ‘anti-war’ activists when the Islamic Republic is killing innocent Iranians?” asks Alinejad. The Iranian Yale lecturer Arash Azizi reflects: “You would have thought leftists would understand the killing of Iranians on the streets fighting against a brutal capitalist regime. But unfortunately they don’t. The western leftist movements hate the West. They hate their own societies.”…

The bravest and best of a generation have been murdered but the dictatorship is fatally wounded. Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, gloated: “After three days of terrorist operations, we’re in control, there’s calm.” If so, it is the calm of death.

The consequences of the downfall would be positively colossal: ending Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas as local players; diminishing the Russia-China axis; reducing Qatar’s relevance and maybe discrediting the plague of resistance Islamism itself.

Unless American intervention beheads the snake, the road to Iranian revolution will be hard, resisted by the cruel and paved with the bodies of the brave. But fall it will.

It’s a long piece – the Times Weekend Essay – but worth reading in full. I’ve put in so much here because it’s behind the Times paywall.