All right, I had another conversation with my wife about unfolding events as we watched some Farsi-language news coverage. I asked her some of the questions that have been raised above.
Midway through the conversation, she took a tangent into some historical background, but I think it’s important for context so I’m going to put it up front. Specifically, there are two facts about the 1979 revolution that she thinks have bearing on the future here.
First, for the vast majority of people in Iran, that revolution was not about installing an Islamic government. It was simply a revolt against the abuses of the Shah, and a toppling of his dictatorship. While people were celebrating the Shah’s removal, Khomeini returned from exile and quickly filled the power vacuum. He did not have the support of anything resembling a majority; he simply took advantage of the chaos and the lack of a viable alternative, and seized control. Most Iranians had no idea they were suddenly living in an Islamic Republic until it was too late.
However — and this is the second thing — one of the ways Khomeini cemented his authority was directing the people’s attention to a revenge campaign against the Shah’s residual forces. There was an aggressive effort to hunt down and eliminate any person even vaguely connected to that hated regime. She told me about a six-year-old boy who was hidden in her village and eventually smuggled out of the country: his father was executed for being a mid-level clerk in the Shah’s finance ministry, and the little boy had the same name, so reprisal forces were actively searching for the kid.
In short, while the brand-new Islamic government was not seen as legitimate (there were widespread anti-Islamic protests in the wake of the transition), it was able to earn a grace period of sorts by focusing its violence on a common enemy — the Shah’s old regime — and during that period, thousands and thousands of people were executed or simply murdered. Khomeini appointed an ally named Sadegh Khalkhali as the head of the “revolutionary courts” and gave him a free hand in rooting out allies of the old government. In the first few months, these courts killed maybe 1500 people, focusing on leaders of the Shah’s secret police and other easy villains. The death toll rose rapidly as the scope of the repression expanded, coming to around 10,000 in the first year, with Khalkhali decentralizing the work and empowering regional committees to take the revenge campaign into the neighborhoods and streets. My wife says the real total here is more like 30,000 as the Islamic government tightened its grip over the course of four or five years.
This is important for my wife’s perspective because she believes it’s unlikely Iran would dissolve into a “true” civil war the way most people understand it. Iran has a homogeneous identity in terms of language (Farsi vs Arabic), religion (Shi’a vs Sunni), and historical culture, and would not split along sectarian lines as seen in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. Instead, she sees the divisions as institutional — factions of power rather than identity. And if one of those factions is able to get a foothold against the current Islamic regime, they can use basically the same approach as was used in 1979 to consolidate power, turning the Islamists’ own tactic back against them.
My wife repeated this several times during the conversation: Outsiders simply don’t understand how angry the Iranian people are, how the last 40-odd years of violent repression have created a pressure cooker of rage. She still doesn’t give the current uprising a good chance of success, but she does see the fall of the Islamic government as inevitable — if not this time, then perhaps next time. And when it does happen, she says, it’ll be a bloodbath (her word), but not a “civil war” type of multi-faction free-for-all. No — whoever manages to wrest control away from the Islamists, they will invite and encourage brutal vengeance against corrupt Islamic institutions (the clergy and the IRGC) as their chief tactic in establishing legitimacy and winning the people’s loyalty, and the population will enthusiastically accept and embrace that invitation, because that’s exactly what happened before.
Okay, so, with that background established, I took four major points away from the conversation with my wife.
First: She agrees that the current crackdown seems to be succeeding, but it’s not definitive because the regime has been able to turn the corner on information suppression. It looks from the outside like the protests might be dying down only because significantly less street-level video is escaping (or being filmed in the first place). Iran has become an informational black hole; while it’s possible this is because the regime is winning, it’s also possible the riots are continuing but we simply aren’t seeing them or getting the reports. She has friends and family in Iran, and she hasn’t been able to contact a single one of them in a couple of days. Previously, it was possible to get through to them, but a much stronger curtain has now been pulled around the country. Her view is that it will be a while before we have any idea what’s actually happening right now.
Second: She reminded me that it’s wrong to talk about “the Iranian military.” There are, in fact, two entirely different Iranian military forces. The one that’s most visible from the outside, the one that gets all the news coverage, is the Revolutionary Guard, but they are not “the” military. Their job is to protect “the revolution,” i.e. the Islamic regime. But then there’s a wholly separate parallel military whose job is to protect the territorial integrity of the country itself — the Artesh. And when I say these are separate and parallel, I’m not exaggerating. Each has its own navy, its own air force, its own bases, its own training facilities, its own vehicles and armories, its own command administration… they are literally entirely independent militaries.
There’s a very good 15-minute video here which goes into the history of this division and the mission of each force. Or, if you don’t have that kind of time, Al Jazeera posted a much shorter video explainer (less than a minute) on their Instagram showing the overall org chart.
When you see videos showing military suppression of the uprisings in Iran, these are never Artesh forces. For small protests, it’s the Basij that gets deployed. For larger-scale events like we’re seeing now, the Revolutionary Guard joins them. But not Artesh soldiers. Never Artesh.
Iran has mandatory military service for all young men. When you are conscripted into such service, you are almost certainly serving on the Artesh side. This is the conventional, professional military, as contrasted with the IRGC as the ideological army. Artesh leadership are nationalists, not Islamists. And if you exclude the Basij irregulars, Artesh forces outnumber the IRGC two to one. (As a side note, you don’t simply join the IRGC the same way. There’s a separate recruitment process — application, vetting, sponsorship — to ensure the members of the Guard are strictly loyal to the Islamic regime, and the regime alone.)
For this reason, many observers hang the hope of regime change on the possibility that Artesh leadership get fed up with the IRGC directly attacking the Iranian people, and stage a military takeover. There are two problems. First, because the IRGC defends the regime and not the country, they are greatly favored financially; they’re smaller, but they have better equipment and facilities. They can also call in Basiji irregulars, who by comparison are poorly equipped but are numerous and highly decentralized throughout the country. Further, IRGC leadership have spent the last few decades insinuating themselves into Iran’s industries and economy; something like 30 to 40 percent of Iran’s productivity is directly or indirectly controlled by the IRGC, via board memberships, majority ownership, bribery and client-company operation, and so on. If the Artesh were to suddenly lance the IRGC boil, they’d create instant economic chaos and cut Iran’s financial throat, which would be catastrophically painful for a country already suffering such hardship.
Nevertheless, if things get bad enough, this kind of scenario does remain as a possibility. And to address the question above about how the US might choose military targets in Iran, any such effort would need to be very carefully considered, but there is a potential path. If one simply starts bombing indiscriminately, the country will unify against the external threat, IRGC and Artesh together. This would be stupid and counterproductive (so it’s probably what Trump and his morons will do). However, if one takes the time to carefully recruit and cultivate potential allies on the Artesh side without attracting IRGC attention, and if one then bombs only IRGC (and Basij) facilities while clearing a path for Artesh forces, then such an operation could quite quickly tip the balance of power toward the Iranian nationalists. However, Artesh leadership would be not at all receptive to any proposal that they become an American puppet regime in the aftermath (the way the Trumpers seem to be going in Venezuela), and even in a best case outcome, they’d be yet another anti-democratic military junta installed by American interests, which is not a recipe for stability. Any saber-rattling American hawk who sees an “opportunity” to remove the Islamic regime by boosting Artesh should be cautioned that this is an exceptionally high-risk strategy that would be far from simple to execute.
The takeaway point here is that it’s insufficient to refer to “the Iranian military.” They don’t have one, they have two. And you need to know what you’re talking about if you’re trying to make an argument about what “the military” wants or what they might do. (I confess, looking back over some of my past posts, I’ve been sloppy about this myself. In the conversation last night, my wife forcefully corrected me, and I’ve adjusted my perceptions accordingly.)
A hypothetical transitional period where Artesh displaces the Islamic regime and takes control leads to the third point my wife and I discussed — the potential role of Reza Pahlavi, son of the old Shah and “crown prince” in exile. Per my earlier post, he’s deliberately offering himself as a purely symbolic figure, a representative of national unity without any meaningful political ambitions of his own beyond helping to shepherd Iran into a brighter future. My wife agrees with my assessment that his sunny but extremely vague vision for Iran suggests that either he does have a plan (and some sort of sponsorship) but he’s deliberately not sharing it, or he’s a coddled idiot who’s far out of his depth and who will ride in like a hero only to be assassinated in a year or two.
However, to these two possibilities, she offered another explanation: The fact that he doesn’t have a plan is his plan — he’s consciously intending to play things by ear, in a highly fluid situation, because nobody ever has a plan. This, my wife says, is just how things are done by Iranians. She told me about a Persian cultural advocacy committee back in Seattle which was very successful at organizing various events (music and dance performances, food festivals, art exhibitions, author readings, and so on) promoting and sharing Persian culture in the city. There was one very energetic guy who was doing most of the work and who was responsible for most of the group’s successes, which engendered jealousy among others in the community. During the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests in 2022, this guy apparently invited a specific political lobbying group to participate in a symposium, and the others pounced, accusing him of partisanship and narrow-mindedness and hounding him until he got frustrated and quit. Now that group is entirely dysfunctional, broken apart by infighting, and they haven’t been able to stage a major cultural event in almost two years. My wife sees this kind of thing as a microcosmic analogy of what Pahlavi would face, even allowing for the unlikely possibility that he’s not an idiot and he really does mean well. Iranians, she says, simply don’t trust people with plans and ambitions, so Pahlavi isn’t just avoiding talking about his agenda, he’s deliberately avoiding making one at all. Nevertheless, my wife believes that Pahlavi’s tenure, if it happens, would be unstable and brief.
Now, on to the fourth point, which I found to be the most interesting — the hints that there might be an emerging rift in the clergy, as I mentioned previously.
As events continue to unfold, my wife thinks there’s an additional motivating factor, beyond the economic division we talked about earlier (i.e., the small minority of the clergy that’s directly involved with regime politics are insulated from the country’s suffering, while the much more numerous everyday clergy are directly affected by it). Recall the reprisal campaign of 1979-1980 described above, wherein rage against the Shah led to thousands of deaths. My wife thinks many members of the clergy are extremely aware of popular anger about Islamic repression, and they quite reasonably fear becoming victims of vengeance in the event of a major political shift — so they’re peeling away from the government solely as a matter of survival. In short, they want to be able to position themselves so they can look the people in the eye and say “hey, look, I was on your side” after the regime falls, and avoid being set on fire or hung from a lamppost.
This, my wife thinks, will be the real signal that the Islamic government is weakening to the point of collapse — large segments of the mainstream Islamic clergy showing direct opposition to the state, not for ideological reasons, but simply to protect themselves from being put against the wall in the aftermath. That, my wife thinks, could be part of what’s happening in Qom, and explains why it terrifies the government so badly. If purely religious hardliners break away, saying, “We continue to be faithful, but we’re not corrupt like those guys, so don’t confuse us with them,” that’s a canary-in-the-coal-mine moment where the regime realizes it’s losing its grip on power.
All this being said, however, my wife did caution me strongly that nobody knows what’s going to happen. All the above represents her understanding and interpretation of events as they unfold and as information emerges. As things happen, she grasps them quickly and clearly, and explains them to me. But trying to predict what might be coming in the immediate future, day to day? She has no idea, and she says anyone who says they know what to expect is a fool. She’s pretty confident about the long term trends, which is why she dismisses Pahlavi as a dead end, but regarding the next week, the next month, she’s waiting to see like everyone else.
Again, though, like before, she got angry and depressed, and we changed to a different topic, so that’s all I have to report at the moment. I’ll come back with more if and as I can.