On the night the Ayatollah Khomeini died, 3 June 1989, I was fast asleep in a guest room at the Tehran home of a famous cinematographer, a friend of my bohemian parents. The adults were glued to state TV in the living room. Contraband booze flowed, as usual, fortifying the voices of the speculators. The commotion woke me, prompting me to waddle downstairs to berate the adults: “Can’t you people see some of us are trying to sleep here!” I was four years old.
The adults recounted the episode repeatedly as I grew up. I never found it quite that funny, but they did: would that they could be as blissfully oblivious to such a world-historical drama. Many of those watching that night were secular progressives and democrats who had supported the 1979 revolution, only to watch haplessly as Khomeini built a theocracy atop the corpses of their comrades.
Would his croaking trigger a fracturing of that young regime? This was the question — hope, really — roiling them all that night, while millions of the imam’s devotees mourned him in the streets. The answer was no. Instead, the regime consolidated under Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, whose factional cunning and ruthlessness made up for what he lacked in learning as faqih, or Shiite jurisprudent.
The octogenarian Khamenei has been running the Islamic Republic for more than 35 years now — almost my entire life. He has managed this, in large part, by keeping the regime on the anti-American and anti-Israel course that was set for it by Khomeini, driving millions, my family included, into the Persian diaspora along the way. And now, amid Israel’s assault, his strategy — combining brinksmanship with incompetence and underdevelopment — has brought the regime, and maybe the country, to the brink of ruin.
Yet the question that should be roiling Western leaders today, President Trump above all, is whether they are prepared to court an even wider disaster, as Jerusalem presses for maximal military advantage? Or to put it another way: can the West avoid the same hubris that brought Khamenei’s regime to its knees?
The Iranians told an intricate moral and strategic story to explain their course. They offered a litany of grievances — some real, some not — against the US-led bloc in the Middle East going back decades. And they combined an expansive estimate of Iran’s true civilisational scope with a theological opposition to Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land and old-fashioned conspiracism: the suspicion that behind every internal failure lurks a hidden Jewish hand.
As an energy-rich but isolated middle power, the Islamic Republic adopted a strategy of proxy warfare, funding a chain of mostly (but not only) Shiite proxies from the Levant to Mesopotamia down to the Arabian Peninsula. These provided a defensive buffer, pestered the US bloc, and allowed Tehran to effectively claim territory when Sunni power faltered, just like in Iraq after George Bush’s invasion. As the Arab states more or less abandoned the Palestinian cause, Iran stepped up as its champion, garnering a respect among global Muslim audiences that was denied to it by much of the Iranian populace, especially the secular and the educated.
Through it all, blood-curdling “death-to” chants — Marg Bar Amreeka, Marg Bar Israel — rang out at regime rallies. The chants were soon married to an incipient nuclear program, ostensibly for domestic energy needs. The program almost certainly had a military dimension, but I’m no longer convinced the aim was to “wipe Israel off the map”, as many officials warned. More likely, it was intended as an insurance policy against regime change.
But here’s the thing: if you keep chanting death to a nation of people that survived an attempted genocide within living memory — and build up a nuclear program along the way — you’re taking quite a gamble. You’re raising the stakes to all in, and acting like you’re sitting on pocket aces, when really you’re holding an off-suit Jack-10 at best.
For a good while, Khamenei turned his moderately good hand into decent pots. He bluffed, yes, but he also skilfully exploited the other side’s felicitous errors. America’s post-9/11 wars and the Arab Spring uprisings created power vacuums into which Tehran projected power and presence.
The postwar government that emerged in Iraq after Saddam Hussein fell was an Iranian client protected by US airpower. Syria’s civil war threatened to take out a key proxy, the Assad regime, but the defensive operation led by Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani succeeded well enough. Saudi Arabia waged a brutal, long war against Yemen’s Tehran-backed Houthis but failed to dislodge them.
Then came the October 7 attack. As I noted at the time, citing a Persian proverb, “This ‘I hope you die’ isn’t one of those usual ‘I hope you die’s’.” Meaning: the massacre cast such serious doubt on the Jewish state’s defence capability — it so gravely called into question its entire reason for existence — that the response was bound to be a game-changer. In the immediate aftermath, there were conflicting reports and intelligence assessments about whether Hamas had freelanced the attack, or whether it was planned in coordination with (or at least, notice to) the group’s Iranian patrons.
That was the moment for Khamenei to cash out his chips. Instead, he made a deadly bluff. Instead of backing off, the rational thing to do, Iran activated its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and launched a missile barrage at northern Israel — before the Jewish state had fired a single retaliatory shot at Hamas at Gaza. I remember tuning into Persian-language pro-regime X spaces where the exuberance, and the delusional belief that the end of the Zionist entity was nigh, were palpable.
Since then, what’s been revealed is the astonishing weakness of the Shiite crescent that was supposed to shield the Islamic Republic in such a scenario. Save for the Houthis, one after another fell: Hezbollah, de-testicled and decapitated; Hamas’s leadership, assassinated at the heart of Tehran; Bashar Assad, exiled to Moscow, replaced by an al-Qaeda warrior-turned-besuited member of the Davosie.
Now this: an attack that reportedly involved, among many other daring measures, the Mossad transferring drones into the country to disable air defences ahead of the bombing raids. As an Iranian-American who cares about the old country’s safety and territorial integrity, I wish I could grab Khamenei by the collar — erm, keffiyeh — to ask: when your defences are this decrepit, when your intelligence apparatus is this porous to Mossad infiltration, why pick fights with the world’s paramount power and its Holocaust-damaged regional client?
“Why pick fights with the world’s paramount power and its Holocaust-damaged regional client?”
The maddening aspect, from the point of view of Iranian security, is that Khamenei at various points slowed down Tehran’s race to the nuke, but without seeking a broader regional compromise. He could have raced determinedly to the bomb, or he could have meaningfully thrown his weight behind across-the-board talks. But he picked the worst combination: material weakness combined with sabre-rattling and provocation. Marg Bar Israel — well, kinda, sorta.
Yet the temptation to hubris isn’t limited to Tehran. It’s possible that the US-Israeli plan (if there is a plan) aims to degrade Khamenei’s capabilities until he reaches the precipice of regime collapse and cries uncle. Maybe it’ll work. Or maybe the Iranian obsession with saving “face”, which isn’t limited to this particular regime, will drag the United States into yet another open-ended, all-out war in the Middle East.
The potential nightmare scenarios are as numerous as they are appalling: regime collapse that leads not to the restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty and the ascent to the Peacock Throne of its chubby dauphin, Reza, but warlordism and ethno-sectarian warfare that drives millions of refugees into Europe. Or a Chinese intervention in favour of a crucial energy partner and anchor of the new Eurasian bloc led by Beijing. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on the Persian Gulf monarchies.
For Washington, even being distracted from the pivot to the Pacific region is bad enough. It would give the impression of an American ruling class that is incapable of executing any of its own much-touted strategic plans. For Trump and his Trumpians, meanwhile, the danger lies in discrediting one of the central planks of their appeal to Main Street: namely, a focus on domestic reconsolidation and a determination to keep America out of a region that simply isn’t that important to an energy-rich superpower.
Khamenei’s hubris has already wrought devastation on my native land. I shudder to think that the American response might end up wasting another decade or two in my adopted home.
