While I keep telling myself not to get my hopes up about Iran until Ayatollah Khamenei is seen dangling from a lamppost (my personal preference) or on a jet bound for Moscow, most indications now point to the regime perhaps not lasting out the week.
The latest indicator comes from no less than President Donald Trump, promising to help Make Iran Great Again. “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” Trump posted to Truth Social on Tuesday morning. “Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS.”
Trump concluded with: “HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.”
All caps in the original, of course. BECAUSE TRUMP!!!
Even German Chancellor Friedrich Merz got into the act, announcing today that the Islamic Republic of Iran has “no legitimacy” and is in its “final days and weeks.” Merz saying that is a big deal. Since that dustup in 1939, Germany learned to be circumspect (to the point of supine) in its foreign policy.
The German foreign ministry added, “The Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on its own population is shocking,” and the French foreign minister called Tehran’s crackdown — that’s reportedly left thousands dead (activist estimates range from 2,000 to far higher) — “state violence unquestioningly unleashed on peaceful protesters.”
Europe doesn’t often — ever? — make this much noise about a regime that’s been happy to supply them with cheap oil. Noise is probably all Europe will make, but Trump’s announcement indicates something much more serious is in the air. Like, maybe taking off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, home of the B-2 Spirit bomber.
That’s an exaggeration, folks. We discussed yesterday how high-level bombing isn’t much good against “security” troops and snipers all mixed up in the streets with the anti-regime protestors.
So if the regime falls the day after tomorrow or the week after next — again, without getting my hopes up after decades of disappointment — will there still be a single Iran for the new regime to govern?
The question is hardly academic.
Iran is only about 60% Persian, with the bulk of the remainder being Turkic Azeris in the northwest, Kurds in the West, and Lurs in the southwest. The Kurds are used to statelessness, and Iraq’s Kurds even refused a state two decades ago. The Azeris? Who knows — maybe Iran would prefer to join up with their brethren in post-Soviet Azerbaijan.
Radical Islam helped keep Iran together following the fall of the Shah in 1978, but Islam ain’t what it used to be in the Islamic Republic. Historian — and mandatory X follow — Edward Luttwak noted on Sunday that “Iran is more than 50% post-Islamic, as its empty mosques attest.” Two years ago, All Arab News reported: “Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi, a senior cleric for Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, delivered a speech to a group of religious students in which he stated that 50,000 of Iran’s 75,000 mosques have closed their doors.”
If post-Ayatollah Iran requires a binding agent to hold its disparate ethnic groups together, Islam — even a kinder, gentler version — might not be it.
Still, there’s an awful lot of shared history within Iran’s current borders. Maybe that’s enough.
Brookings’ Suzanne Maloney reminded readers recently of something she wrote six years ago, that “the prospect of meaningful change in Iran forever lies somewhere between unthinkable and inevitable,” but now believes that Iranians have “launched their revolution; with an American-led effort to apply unprecedented pressure on the regime and provide additional support to the opposition, they can prevail.”
Hopefully, Iranians of all ethnicities might prevail — and in a single Iran.
Nevertheless, I refuse to get my hopes up until I see Khamenei swinging from that lamppost.
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