What happens if the Iranian regime falls?
Photo byWhat will happen in Iran if the Islamic Republic's regime falls? Would Iran descend into instability? This is a question — perhaps the question — often posed about Middle Eastern countries facing potential political transition. The thinking often goes that while dictatorships may be unpalatable, at least they guarantee stability. And that stability is better for the international community even if it comes at the expense of the people under oppression. It is time to abandon this problematic approach to the Middle East.
Syria provides some hard lessons. In 2011, the Syrian people protested peacefully against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It was Iran and its main proxy Hezbollah that swiftly advised Assad that making concessions to the protesters would be a projection of weakness. After all, just two years earlier Iran had witnessed the Green Movement —peaceful protests calling for regime change, sparked by popular rejection of the results of that year's presidential elections, which granted then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term. The Iranian authorities violently and quickly cracked down on the protesters. Assad heeded Tehran's advice. With Iran and Hezbollah's help, the Assad regime brutally attacked the Syrian protesters.
Despite this, many in the international community expressed worry that were Assad to go, Syria would descend into war like what happened next door in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 or in Libya in 2011 after the ousting of Muammar Qaddafi. This line of thinking ignored that neither in Iraq nor in Libya was there a viable stabilisation and transition plan in place for the day after. It is not that the end of dictatorships automatically brings chaos. Chaos happens when there are no sober pre-emptive plans for handling obvious challenges like weak social cohesion or the absence of state institutions; deeply flawed, externally incubated governance formulas are parachuted on countries in transition; the voices of the local population are ignored; and foreign actors enter the picture as spoilers.
The result in Syria was not regime change but a conflict that lasted almost a decade and a half and which would have been preventable had the international community not largely regarded Assad as the lesser of two evils — the dictator vs the unknown. Following the harrowing scenes from Assad's prisons that flooded the public domain after he was finally ousted in December last year, the world can now clearly see that virtually nothing could have been worse for Syrians than the continuation of Assad in power.
In clinging to his position throughout the Syrian conflict, Assad was following the Iranian regime's playbook. He sacrificed the Syrian economy, state institutions, and the Syrian people for the sake of survival. The Islamic Republic is the same in its pursuit of regime preservation. Iran has been under sanctions for years and yet it has not modified its behaviour (such as funding foreign proxies) so that its economy can recover. Iran's prisons may not be getting much attention from the international media, but they are rife with torture. The justice system is not independent, with many imprisoned or executed without a fair trial. The Tehran regime would rather see large numbers of Iranian citizens suffer than give up power.
The Assad regime was never defined by stability. Assad manipulated Islamist jihadists to cross the border into Iraq to attack British and American troops after 2003 and in 2011 he released many imprisoned jihadists to frame the uprising against him as an Islamist terrorist plot, paving the way for the emergence of Isis. He also allowed Hezbollah and Iran to use Syria as a thoroughfare for funds and weapons and a site for the training of militias.
Anyone worried today about instability spilling over were the Tehran regime to fall must remember that the spillover has already happened and has been going on for decades. Iran has been the Middle East's main cause of instability since the birth of the Islamic Republic in 1979 and this threat has extended beyond the region. Iran has been cooperating tactically with al-Qaeda and Isis across the Middle East and Africa, in addition to supporting Shia militias in Iraq and Lebanon among others. Iran and Hezbollah have conducted numerous terrorist operations worldwide including in Latin America and Europe. And Iran bears part of the responsibility for Hamas's 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.
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The Syrian people suffered unnecessarily because the international community selectively ignored Assad's role in fostering terrorism both in the region and worldwide; was paralyzed by concern about who would rule Syria after Assad; and was not forthcoming about providing Syrians with the international assistance necessary for political transition. The Iranian people have been suffering for decades and deserve to be trusted to lead their country into a better future. But as the Iraq, Libya, and Syria scenarios demonstrate, the Iranian people need thoughtful and adequate international support in managing the transition. If the regime were to fall, the international community needs to abandon cliched thinking about the Middle East and work together with the Iranian people so that both Iranians and the world can recover from the ills of the Islamic Republic.
[See more: Will Iran surrender?]
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South Wales Guardian
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- South Wales Guardian
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South Wales Argus
23 minutes ago
- South Wales Argus
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The Independent
38 minutes ago
- The Independent
Hope of change by my fellow Iranians has turned to horror - our pain was primed for Israel's exploitation
'When are the Americans coming to save us from these mullahs?' my fellow Iranians would ask when I started my journalism career in Tehran some 22 years ago. That was just before the Middle East was transformed by the US's reverse Midas touch. Within a few years Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya had been reduced to rubble and ruin at the hands of US intervention. So salvation from the clerics shrank to two options: reform from within or revolt. Iran's hardline conservatives in charge would not abide either. Just as the Green Movement's promises of rights and rapprochement with the West seemed within reach, they were predictably extinguished, along with every ember of dissent that has come before and after. The closest Iranians came to change was three years ago, when the country erupted into mass protests sparked by the morality police's killing of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini. It was the biggest uprising since the 1979 revolution. The regime had never appeared so vulnerable, or so aware of its frailty, as revealed by an internal missive meant for IRGC top brass but leaked to the world by hackers. The short bulletin revealed a flailing apparatus with a micromanaging Supreme Leader at the helm, disdainful of timorous officials. It concluded that with three quarters of the population supporting the protests, the country was in a state of revolution. This unprecedented situation demanded an unprecedented response: protesters were blinded, arrested, raped, tortured, and executed in a brutal wave of violence that has not ended. It was no surprise, then, that the first couple of days after Israel's unexpected attack were met with as much optimism as trepidation – as well as humour. One meme showed IRGC commander-in-chief Hossein Salami alongside a picture of his namesake sausage with the heading 'Salami becomes salami'. Messages of thanks to 'Dear Bibi' were posted on social media. But as the death toll rose – hundreds of civilians have been killed so far, and thousands injured – hope turned to terror. I've spent the last two decades covering the Middle East, and the last 20 months investigating Israel's war crimes in Gaza and its increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Spoiler alert – despite Dear Bibi's protestations he is saving the Persian people, Israel's intentions in Iran are not altruistic. And it's not just Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Israel's dismantling of the rules-based world order – executed with the same callous disregard as its killing of Palestinians – may have eased its journey to attacking Iran, but the road to this bombing campaign was paved long ago. Journalists of my generation did not need the latest US intelligence to debunk Israel's claim it attacked Iran because the mullahs were months away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. I've covered Israel's histrionic warnings about Iran's imminent nuclear bomb too many times over the years. According to Israel, Iran has been months away from a bomb for, well, hundreds of months. Even my bad maths knows Israel's timeline doesn't add up. For as long, Israel has been drawing from the colonial script of divide and rule to ensure its dream of a fragmented, conflict-riddled Middle East becomes a reality. Israeli medics stitched up Sunni fighters, including extremist Islamists, during the Syrian war. It has long supported Kurdish rebels. It is now using the Druze to stoke up ethnic tensions in Syria. And so, Israel's desire for my motherland is an Iran unravelled, its fabric shredded along ethnic lines, a nation undone by design - another carefully engineered fracture in the region. With the regime hanging so many of its citizens from nooses across the country, our pain was primed for Israel's exploitation. The ethnic minorities bore the brunt of the regime's butchery; Baluchis, Ahvazis and Kurds had their own axes to grind, and Israel offered the whetstone. Now, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is a cornered rat with nowhere to go. His best chance at survival would be to evoke his spiritual superior and the regime's architect, Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1988, the war with Iraq was ended when Khomeini announced a ceasefire, saying he had been forced to drink the 'poisoned chalice'. But it is unlikely that Khamenei will do the same. As black smoke rises over my beloved city Tehran, I fear civil war. I hope I am wrong, and that Israel will be satisfied with a unified Iran with a puppet leadership; another client state of the USA ready to trade underpriced oil. Loss of dignity a small price to pay for peace. But I am old enough also to know how that story ends… and so the cycle will continue. One thing I am sure about is that it is not for me, nor my fellow compatriots in the diaspora who have spent most of our lives in safety and security, to decide the fate of our nation. It is for my fellow Iranians who survived the Iran-Iraq war, who have survived the regime's savagery, to decide.
