“During and after the Dey uprising many protesters and opposition groups—from a former prime minister under house arrest to mothers whose children were killed in earlier waves of repression—insisted on the need for a social revolution from within Iran itself; others felt desperate enough to call for US military action to open the way beyond the Islamic Republic or even to the restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy”
“Still reeling from January’s crackdown, Iranian citizens must wonder if they have any say in what comes next—if this is a war for regime change or state collapse”
“January’s protests were not just the prelude to a geopolitical contest. They offer a window into the fortunes of Iran’s citizens, the changing structure of its state, and the trajectory of the regime the US now seeks to obliterate”
“Authoritarian regimes born out of revolutions—as opposed to coups or foreign interventions—tend to be durable”
“From China to Cuba, such social-revolutionary regimes have developed cohesive ruling elites and loyal apparatuses of coercion. Iran has been no exception”
“Iran has no equivalent to, say, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) founded in Mexico after its 1920 revolution—let alone to the Chinese Communist Party. Here power has been far more diffuse, coalitional, and prone to factionalism”
“Iranians have come to refer to the president and his cabinet as the government (dowlat), and the parallel web-like set of organizations under the leader’s informal, discretionary authority as the state (hukoumat) or regime (nezam)”
“the leader-aligned incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared victorious after a hotly contested election that drew over 85 precent of the electorate to the ballot box”
“The nezam strove to keep society disorganized, and a wide range of Iranians came to feel disenchanted with institutional politics. The reformists never regained the same footing”
“At a moment when most global attention had turned to Iran’s nuclear program and the US and other countries were ratcheting up sanctions on Iran’s oil and financial system, including its central bank, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad were busy restructuring the country’s political economy”
“Since the heady days of revolution and war Iran had built up state bureaucracies that enjoyed regulatory oversight over the economy and society. Much of this new professional class had supported the pragmatist turn of the 1990s and the reformist agenda it inspired. But conservative forces—including younger members of the nezam—feared that these technocrats would restrict the power of the parastatal organizations under the leader’s authority, such as religious foundations and security units. Over time those forces grew increasingly suspicious of the bureaucracy, and to an extent of expertise itself”
“Embodying this populist current, between 2005 and 2013 Ahmadinejad presided over a DOGE-like process of dismantling the regulatory apparatus”
“From decaying infrastructure to poor ecological management, Iranians have been living with the effects of a hollowed-out state ever since”
“At the same time Khamenei sanctioned what he called an “economic revolution.” The nationalization or transfer of factories, land, and companies had been a crucial way for the state to redistribute wealth since 1979”
“Shortly after Ahmadinejad’s first election victory, the leader issued a directive reinterpreting the constitution to give more leeway to private entities in economic domains previously reserved for the public sector, such as banking, energy, and heavy industry. Ostensibly designed to introduce competition, improve efficiency, generate jobs, and encourage exports, privatization had the initial support of reformist politicians and neoliberal economists, who imagined that economic freedoms would in turn catalyze political liberty”
“Instead it allowed unaccountable branches of the state to acquire a new measure of control over major public assets and vast swaths of the economy”
“In total close to $150 billion worth of shares in state-owned enterprises were “privatized” in this way, in effect bringing them more closely under the leader’s oversight”
“The US-led sanctions reenforced the most corrosive aspects of this system”
“Social provision evaporated”
“As the country’s access to global markets narrowed, a grey economy of shell companies and offshore enterprises—often tied to corporations or individuals who reaped the rewards of privatization—assumed an increasingly important part in brokering Iran’s dealings with the rest of the world”
“Ida Nikou, who has conducted extensive research on neoliberalism in Iran, put it still more directly: within the country’s “sanctioned political economy,” she recently wrote, “austerity becomes a governing tool, and scarcity generates profit for those with privileged access.””
“A general sentiment was spreading that the regime was less and less willing or able to address the nation’s demands; with each cycle chants of “death to the dictator, death to Khameini” grew more common”
“On the eve of the Dey protests, Iranians increasingly turned to the vocabulary of desperation and impasse to describe their lives. On one side was an unaccountable political elite presiding over an austerity economy; on the other was a US hegemon with little to offer the world but threats from its bloated military”
“Desperate for change, a growing number of the country’s citizens looked to the US war machine as their savior, implicitly or explicitly backing the naïve if not nefarious notion that Trump could bring about regime change without sending in troops”
“The people that actually did rise up in Iran were not necessarily the ones these regime-change advocates had expected. The steady stream of social protests in the past quarter century had generally not taken place in the country’s main bazaars, where the merchants had grown beholden to IRGC brokers and black markets for access to commodities and hard currency”
“But on December 28, under ever more strain as the rial plummetted, shopkeepers in Tehran’s cell phone and electronics shopping centers launched a demonstration”
“Loosely labeled bazaaris, these traders, moneylenders, and artisans have a rich history of social protest going back to the Constitutional Revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, the oil nationalization movement in the mid-century, and the 1979 revolution, in which they provided funding, a social constituency, and physical spaces in which to make claims upon despotic rulers”
“Although central Tehran’s shops, offices, and workshops are no longer as significant a part of Iran’s economy, and have left behind their former level of political mobilization, the shuttering of these shops still had symbolic significance for Iranians”
“The merchants’ nationwide networks of credit and commodity distribution also worked to transmit news and grievances. Within a day shopkeepers in other major cities, small provincial towns, and even in the Persian Gulf free trade zone of Qeshm Island joined the protests”
“By the third day university students back in Tehran and other major cities had swelled the ranks of the demonstrations chanting the now common refrain of “death to the dictator,” along with “women, life, freedom” and newer chants—“long live the shah,” “this is the final battle, Pahlavi will return,” and “man, homeland, prosperity.””
“On January 6 the son of Iran’s former shah, Reza Pahlavi, and the leaders of several Kurdish parties called for Iranians to take to the streets at 8 PM on Thursday, January 8. A few days earlier Pahlavi had confidently predicted that “seizing the streets…would significantly accelerate the regime’s fall…. The regime will quickly lose both the capacity and the will to repress.””
“We may never know to what extent this self-proclaimed “transitional figure” inspired what followed. A similar message from Pahlavi during the twelve-day war was unheeded, and there had already been ten days of popular mobilization in the capital and across many provinces. But the streets did indeed fill with protesters, and mounting chants of “long live the shah” reflected a new political climate”
“Members of the judiciary and the security forces were starting to echo Khameini’s distinction between protesters, whom “officials must talk to,” and “rioters,” who had to be “put in their place.””
“Iran’s decision-makers had ridden out previous protests with far less repression, making tactical concessions and waiting for social exhaustion and apathy to set in. This time, however, they clearly felt they had too much to lose. What appeared to be a display of the regime’s strength was also a measure of its political weakness”
“The US and its close allies’ indifference to violations of international law and bloodbaths in the past three years—in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, and Congo—has made civilians more vulnerable around the world, including in Iran”
“The war the Pentagon has named “Epic Fury” seems to be based on a number of profound misreadings. Trump and his advisers appear to think the Iranian government is significantly more vulnerable than it is—not to mention that they trust that aerial bombing can lead to regime change in the first place”
“The country’s spiraling economy and the protests launched by its determined citizens have exposed the limitations of the Islamic Republic’s current structure, and it may ultimately be overwhelmed by the most powerful military that the world has ever seen”
“But it was not a state splintering and on the verge of collapse. It was never going to fall along with the leader in a single strike, and the US might well mistake the workings of its networked councils and military units for a loss of command and control”
“It is almost impossible to decipher what the expressed goal of the US–Israeli mission is, but if it is in fact regime change, then the Islamic Republic has no compromise option; it has to choose between committing suicide or raising the costs of war for the US through military endurance”
“The regime’s decentralized, weblike structure anchors it in many different parts of society, including employees of the various regime-controlled organizations and their families, giving a significant number of Iranians a stake in its survival”
“Meanwhile the majority of the country’s people, who have been chafing under the clerical–security establishment, now also have to contend with what Pete Hegseth has plainly called “death and destruction from the sky.””