People on Thursday check the damage inside a building in Tehran hit by recent Israeli strikes.Majid Saeedi/Getty Images
In the months before the Israeli and U.S. bombing attacks, Iran’s political elite were confident of two things: the strength of the country’s military defences and the capacity of Tehran to resist any foreign efforts at regime change.
As the smoke clears from the 12 days of missile strikes, the first claim has proven hollow. Iran’s air defences were largely swept away in the early days of the Israeli attacks, leaving it humiliated and badly exposed to air strikes on its cities and nuclear sites. The regime’s hubris has been shattered.
The second claim, however, might still be true. Despite predictions that the bombardment could trigger an internal uprising to topple Iran’s leadership, the Islamic Republic has seemed resilient so far.
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Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has survived the war. There are no signs of internal revolts or significant street protests against the government. The authoritarian political system seems intact, with reports this week that the police were arresting dozens of suspected opponents in a continuing crackdown.
Interviews by The Globe and Mail with Iranian politicians and analysts, in Tehran earlier this year, gave insights into the overconfident mindset of its establishment before the war. Most believed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump would see Iran as too dangerous to attack.
“They know Iran is not weak,” said Masoumeh Ebtekar, a former Iranian vice-president. “They know Iran has a sophisticated defence capability, a missile capability, drone capability.”
Dr. Ebtekar, who gained prominence as spokesperson for the Iranian students who took hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, recalled how the country had survived a war with Iraq in the 1980s when it had fewer resources. “We’re not like that now,” she told The Globe. “We’re very capable of defending ourselves and protecting Iran and our territorial integrity.”
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Pooya Mirzaei, an international affairs analyst in Tehran, predicted that the Israelis and Americans would be deterred by the risks of any potential clash.
“Iran is not Gaza or Lebanon,” he said before the war. “If they feel Iran is weaker and they can attack Iran and they commit a new war, it will be a disaster for Israel, and maybe for the Americans if they pursue it. Trump understands this.”
In the end, those assumptions were mistaken. Iran’s counterattacks were relatively weak and limited. When it tried to attack a U.S. military base in Qatar, its missiles were quickly intercepted and caused almost no damage.
But the Iranian political elite were on stronger ground when they voiced their belief that a campaign of air strikes would fail to dislodge Iran’s government. “Did the United States win in Vietnam just by bombing?” asked Manouchehr Mottaki, an Iranian parliamentarian and former foreign minister, in an interview in Tehran. “Bombing is not a war.”
Officially the Israeli and U.S. missile strikes were aimed at Iran’s nuclear program. But the leaders of both countries hinted broadly that their goals went beyond the nuclear sites.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a regime change???” Mr. Trump said in a social-media post last week.
Mr. Netanyahu, for his part, said the bombing attacks could “liberate” the Iranian people. “The time has come for the Iranian people to unite around its flag and its historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime,” he said as Israel launched its air strikes.
Predictions of regime change were based on the unpopularity of the Iranian theocracy, which has struggled to suppress waves of street protests for more than 15 years. Most Iranians are increasingly frustrated by a stagnant economy, widespread corruption, heavy damage from Western sanctions and a tightly controlled system of religious rules.
Holly Dagres, an Iranian-American and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, said the Tehran regime could be vulnerable if protests emerge or if it suffers high-level defections in its government or security forces. But so far this has not happened.
“Despite internal rot from systemic corruption and deep Israeli infiltration, the Islamic Republic is surviving for now,” she wrote in a commentary this week.
Two U.S.-based scholars, Sina Azodi and Farzin Zandi, warned that any effort at regime change could backfire by provoking chaos.
“There is a genuine risk that any push for a radical political change in Iran could backfire and alienate the population,” they said in an analysis for the Washington-based Stimson Centre on Thursday.
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“The history of forced regime collapses in the region is quite clear: Democracy cannot be achieved by bombing or starving a nation; true democracy grows organically over time.”
While there is intense debate over the extent of the missile damage at Iran’s nuclear sites, there is little question that Iran will soon begin rebuilding its military arsenal, learning lessons from its failed assumptions about its defences.
The bombardment by Israel and the United States “has strengthened Iran’s resolve to enhance its deterrence capabilities … which entails investing more in both defensive and offensive measures,” said Zakiyeh Yazdanshenas, a security studies specialist at the University of Tehran.
Some factions of Iran’s policy-making apparatus are increasingly pessimistic about diplomacy and negotiations with Western governments, she told The Globe this week. “However, I maintain that the window for diplomacy is still open.”
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, officials and activists said.
Reuters