Iran, Persia, and All That Jazz

along the spectrum from repressed optimism to simmering pessimism

As you may have noticed, I’ve been hesitant to write anything about the latest unrest in Iran for a whole host of reasons/excuses, but part of it is simply not wanting to get too far ahead of my skis desiring something that would truly be a world-changing event. It would be a change that would alter the landscape so dramatically that I’ve become so used to, that it is hard to view the “what’s next?”.

I was barely a teenager when the world and our nation were subjected to another monumental error by the Carter Administration and the West (mostly the French) — the betrayal of the Shah and the people of Iran.

Of course, the Iranian people had agency here. As was the habit of fuzzy-headed leftists for most of the 20th Century, in another rash externalization of their own self-loathing, the Iranian left got into a popular front with communists and whoever hated the subject of their daddy issues and wound up being led by religious absolutists who wanted to create Year Zero—in this case the fundamentalist Shia leadership.

The usual pattern through the 20th century was the communists, being the more ruthless of the various factions in popular fronts, would make short work of tearing down, compromising, and eventually lining up against the wall everyone else in their popular front until they had all the power. The smart money for those who did not appreciate the moment would have been for the communists eventually to grab power the same way in post-Shah Iran, but no…they were not against your garden-variety popular front.

Oops.

In this case, they overplayed their preferred dialectic and as such, failed to properly understand the ruthlessness of fundamental Islam (Shia flavor), and so we got the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Instead of a flawed but functioning constitutional monarchy with the Shah trying to pull its people into the modern age aligned with the West, the world was handed this foul creation that would spend the next goin-on-five-decades exporting death, terror, horror, instability, and a soul-crushing view of the future under the oppression of a retrograde religion whose driving force was to subjugate and control.

I already had friends whose parents, or at least one of them, who were from Iran when it all came apart. After the fall of the Shah, even more came over. I heard their stories growing up and going to school with their kids. Combined with the heavy Cuban influence in the Free State of Florida and the occasional grandparents of my friends who still had the tattoos on their arms from the Nazis in the 1940s, you can see how my worldview was shaped.

Like all Americans of my generation, I grew up with a hostility to the Islamic Republic. I remember well in the silence prior to the national anthem at the 1979 Gator Bowl, some hero shouted, “The Ayatollah is an assahollah!” heard through much of the stadium that my dad thought was hilarious. I can still see his smiling face.

There wasn’t, at least where I live, hostility to the Iranian people. They were our neighbors and friends. Good neighbors and friends. Heck, even today, my next door neighbor is from Iran and lives with his sons and grandson. He served our nation in Afghanistan on three tours. A great American who has a greater dislike of the Islamic Republic than I do. He puts out a great spread for Nowruz, BTW.

During my time on active duty (1988-2009), like everyone else in my cohort in the Navy, I spent a lot of time worrying and working around the Iranians. Most of us are one degree of separation from knowing someone killed or maimed by Iranian supplied weapons in the last quarter century.

You can fill a library with the stories of the malignant stain on the world emanating from the Islamic Republic. No need to catalogue it all here again.

I’ve wanted to see the Islamic Republic fall since I was a teenager, and every few years there is a false hope. Will this time be any different? Maybe.

The last significant uprising was the “Green Revolution” during the Obama Administration. Some think it could have come to something with the right support, but I’m not so sure. The Obama team were focused on working with the Islamic Republic based on their theory of the case. They weren’t interested in supporting the opposition.

Things are different now, which should give us a bit more optimism.

What’s different?

• Iran’s proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Hamas, and Yemen are the weakest they have ever been.

• Iran has thrown everything it had at Israel and the USA in the last year to little effect.

• The USA and Israel proved that they can attack Iran at will should they desire, knocking back the Iranian nuclear weapons program perhaps a decade or more.

• They just lost their New World foothold and money maker, Venezuela.

• The have lost their legitimacy in the eyes of their people, though they still hold power.

• The Crown Prince is actively involved and isn’t asking for a single American boot on the ground. Smart move, for if there were, any post Islamic Republic government would be tainted.

The stage is set, but let’s return to a phrase I used at the opening of this: the Iranian people have agency here.

Iran is a large nation in both size (2.5x the size of Texas) and population (90+ million souls). It has a culture going back thousands of years. The USA is past the era of invading nations and trying to make them…something we think they want to be. The people of Iran, if they want a future, must earn it. They will have to earn it as people often have to—with blood.

How much blood? That depends on how much the Iranian people want a different future and how much the Islamic Republic wants to remain in power. Are we looking at a Soviet Union-like collapse, a Syria-like civil war, or a fizzle and fade to the status quo ante?

I think the best bet is to watch the interaction between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regular Iranian Army, Navy, and Air Force—especially the Army.

If the IRGC sees that they have no future in a post-Islamic State Iran/Persia, and they have few safe havens who will take them, will they fight or stack arms in a deal for amnesty? Will the regular army decide to not take a chance and just “eliminate” them in a massacre like we have seen in such conflicts in this part of the world from the dawn of time?

We will have to wait and see. That is exactly what I intend to do. Watch for signs. I’m going to be careful, and I advise you to as well. Check your sources. Know their biases.

Also, you will hear a lot from people who, mostly but not exclusively in the Democratic and European Union foreign policy nomenklatura, who at best have been accommodationalist to at worst outright supporters of the Islamic Republic. From promoting the JCPOA to sending pallets of cash…those people simply need to sit down and apologize.

I want to end with this one note: the Islamic Republic’s government has shut off the internet, so that has cut off most usable information. However, Elon Musk has turned on Starlink for free in all of Iran. The best thing any nation could do—and something I hope the USA is doing—is to get as many Starlink terminals into Iran as possible. That is how you help the Iranian people leverage their agency if they desire a better future for themselves.

For all the hate the left throws at Elon Musk, from opening the free speech gates on X, to giving Ukraine a comparative advantage over the Russians (Starlink again), to this act—freedom has no great advocate today. Heck, not just advocate, creator.