At least some of that is doubtless due to how thoroughly the Iranian government has shut down communications. But that’s going to start affecting the regime’s own organization, too. Or if they still have communication channels which do work, the protesters are going to eventually start adopting those.
Important or impotent?
By “recent decades”, you mean the entire forty-seven years of the Islamic Republic’s regime, right? They started out suppressing dissent against the theocracy.
The only way I see for that to happen is for military units, entire units, to go over to the side of the protesters. In that eventuality, the military on both sides will be using traditional military communications (field radios) and practices (codes).
I feel like Israel and NATO are going to drop the ball on this and allow the Iranian government to just kill the protesters.
Its my understanding that groups like Mossad are supposedly on the ground helping the protests and destroying weapons caches that the IRGC use, but I feel like the world is about the let the Iranian people down. Which is a shame, an Iran that rejects radical Islam would be really nice.
My understanding is Russia is sending weapons and Iraq is sending Shia extremists to help support the regime. Enemies of the Iranian theocracy need to be doing more. The US helped bring down Gaddafi without a massive ground invasion.
Openly attacking the Ayatollah and his forces right now could work in the protesters’ favor and help them overthrow the regime… Or it could galvinize support for the government and cause the protests to fail.
If military strikes are going to work, I’m all for them. But we should only strike of we are sure it will be beneficial.
Roughly <20% of the Iranian people support the current regime. I’m not sure if the other 80% are going to join the regime that is massacring protesters.
- Support for “the principles of the Islamic revolution and the Supreme Leader” has decreased (from 18% in 2022 to 11% in 2024).
Also there are far more subtle ways to bring down a regime than just killing the head of government. In Venezuela the US captured Maduro, but it didn’t achieve anything. The Venezuelan government is still continuing as usual under the VP and the same government infrastructure.
If Israel, the west, and arab nations want to bring down the Iranian government, they need to target the 250,000 or so personnel in the paramilitary groups who are the backbone of the regime. Target them, their weapons, their communications, etc and that’ll accomplish far more than just targeting the head of state.
Taking out the jammers, so the protestors can communicate again, might work.
It will not be beneficial. Even under the best administration the United States has ever had would such an attack be beneficial. The regime in Iran has already announced what they will do. There is zero reason to disbelieve them on that. And that means Israel will be attacked and, of course, the Jewish, Christian, and Zorastrian minorities in Iran will be attacked also. And don’t expect the US’s current regime to think beyond boom with an attack. Just look at what’s going on with them in Venezuela.
Orgasmic bombing vs intelligent, well-thought out, and diplomatic solutions. I think you already know which way is best and which way the current administration will go.
I am seeing reports of up to a thousand dead in Iranian protests. Al Jazeera reported 100 security officers dead as well (not that I trust Qatari state media about Iran).
There’s a difference between supporting your regime and supporting your country. If Iran is attacked from outside, many of those who hate the government will still rush to protect it.
And that’s important, if you want the military to switch sides.
For example: the Nationalists and the Communists in China working together during World War II, although that had some ups and major downs.
Yes, that’s the main thing. .There are a quarter million very well-trained soldiers in the Revolutionary Guard and another hundred thousand reservists in the Basij force.
That’s a lot of boots on the ground.
They control Iranian civilians at gunpoint, with rifles, not ballistic missiles. One report I saw yesterday said 10;000 protesters had been arrested. Putting that many people in handcuffs, or herding them into locked buildings, takes takes a lot of manpower.
And fighting them would take a lot of American manpower, with boots on the ground . Not aerial attacks with stealth bombers.
This is incorrect. As I’ve explained previously, the Basiji are irregular militiamen used for internal policing, not a “reservist” force.
My Persian wife has been watching a lot of coverage in Farsi-language sources and looking at actual social media coming out of Iran. As you’d expect, it’s much rawer than the sanitized stuff you see in the English-language sources, chaotic and unfiltered and immediate. The difference between what’s being reported in the West and what Iranians are actually saying to each other is pretty stark.
One thing that’s being significantly undersold in Western media is the importance of Reza Pahlavi as a rallying figure for protesters. As the son of the old Shah, he has powerful symbolic value, despite the fact that, from any practical standpoint, he’s almost entirely useless. He’s spent decades as an exiled party boy, drawing on his father’s ill-gotten wealth to support his lifestyle while occasionally half-heartedly reminding Washington politicians that he exists. My wife sees the protesters holding him up as the best option for leadership in a hypothetical post-revolution government, and she thinks it would be a disaster.
But she also understand that there literally isn’t any other option. Everyone else with any kind of political weight who has left Iran has shown zero interest in returning; they’ve turned their backs on the country and have made new lives for themselves. Pahlavi is responding enthusiastically to the protesters’ interest, making himself highly visible while not committing to anything beyond vague platitudes (and certainly not putting himself at any kind of risk). She considers him a weak, foolish aristocrat who will be eaten alive by political manipulators if he tries to insert himself as a transitional leader.
She is not optimistic for the future of Iran, one way or another. She does believe that there’s a better chance now to dislodge the regime than at any time in the past; the economic hardship has been brutal, persistent, and wide-ranging, and people are desperate. The fact that state forces are openly firing on protesters, murdering them in the street, proves that the regime regards the current movement as a genuine threat. Normally, they just bottle things up, containing the protests and allowing people to burn out their anger, and then quietly return to the status quo. The current action is a massive escalation of force, which demonstrates the regime’s urgency.
But there have been protests before, and the regime weathered them successfully. Even if the Islamic leadership is toppled, she expects Pahlavi to come galloping in at the last minute, and for things to get even worse in the aftermath as the various factions take advantage of his inexperience and incompetence to forcefully jockey for power. And all this is aside from the catastrophic results if the opportunistic morons in the Trump administration decide to join the fray.
I guess we’ll see. But if my wife’s perspective as a typical expat Iranian has any weight, we should pray for the safety of the Iranian people while hoping that a potential transition isn’t too ruinous.