A surprising number of Iranians who are spoken to after arriving at Istanbul airport want American military strikes on their country. That would be unusual for any country. This is especially true for Iran, because foreign interventions have caused a lot of harm in the country’s history.
In the current situation it is even more unusual, because the American president’s original threats of attack gave many Iranians the courage to take to the streets, for which they then had to pay bitterly. Donald Trump’s statements appear to have incited the Iranian regime to end the protests with demonstrative brutality as quickly as possible. So one would understand if most Iranians had lost all trust in Trump. The fact that there are still calls for military intervention shows how great the desperation is. You hear sentences like: “We can’t do it alone.”
Air strikes will not put an end to the regime
Soberly speaking, it would be difficult to bring about regime change with air strikes alone. Even though Trump has now ordered his military to present him with “decisive” options. This could consist of further weakening the Revolutionary Guard. To drive up the price of their policies. Killing parts of the leadership. This would by no means guarantee a less repressive policy.
But an end to Ali Khamenei’s rule, in whatever way, could at least enable the course corrections that the Supreme Leader has always resisted. In the 37 years of his rule, he was rarely willing to back down. The lesson he learned from the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the collapse of the Soviet Union was that concessions were the beginning of the end. With this mentality he drove his country to ruin. He has replaced competent people with loyalists throughout the apparatus.
This text comes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
Despite the brutality with which the regime forces have cracked down on defenseless demonstrators, there have so far been no credible reports of high-ranking regime officials disobeying orders or switching sides. The power apparatus still seems intact. One can only assume that there is an intense struggle behind the scenes about how the regime can be preserved in the long term. The likelihood that Khamenei will have to give in to pressure from within seems at least greater than a fall of the entire system. A strategy that attempts to co-opt parts of the elite from outside could make a contribution to this.
For now, the Iranian regime has used force to buy time. But if you take the past few years as a benchmark, the next wave of protests will soon follow. After all, the reasons that drove people onto the streets still exist. Especially since this time business people who had previously relied on the status quo also joined in.
In addition to the dissatisfaction with corruption, incompetence and mismanagement, hatred of the murderers is now added. It is not the first time that protests have been brutally suppressed in Iran. But the excesses used to take place in the periphery. This time, regime forces fired machine guns into the crowds in major cities such as Tehran, Isfahan and Mashhad. No state can be created through force alone.
