A war in which everyone loses

From 1996 until 2005, Christopher de Bellaigue was a foreign correspondent for The Economist, first in Turkey and then in Iran. He draws on his experience of living under the Iranian mullahs' regime and his continuing connections in the country to try to put the current US and Israeli war in perspective in the New York Review of Books: Iran's New Winter. [gift link]. 

The result is pensive and sobering. This seems a war in which everyone loses, most especially ordinary citizens of Iran.

... Iran gained prestige around the world by defying its exponentially more powerful foes and not merely surviving the assassinations of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other military and civilian leaders but using them to inspire loyalists.…

As long as the country remains on high alert and public discourse is dominated by warnings of spies, sabotage, and treachery, the opposition will struggle to reemerge. War breeds tyrants.

I can't help wondering whether that conclusion might also hold true for the USofA.

In an email from the NYRB introducing de Bellaigue's piece, the author reflects:

... I think one should pull back from the minutiae of what’s happening day-to-day and consider the balance of forces in the longer term. The Iranian regime was, if not on the ropes, then in very serious trouble as recently as January, when, amid a terrible economic situation with an eviscerated middle class, a large proportion of the population—disgruntled, unhappy, insurrectionary, revolutionary—came out to protest on the streets. 

The regime’s reflexive exercise of force was a big message: we’re ready to kill thousands of our own citizens. In fact, we don’t really regard them as our own citizens but, essentially, enemy combatants in our midst. They killed thousands of Iranians and left tens of thousands more bereft, which in the end cost them even more credibility, in particular among Iranians who had otherwise been unsure where they stood on the question of regime change. There was a crisis of ever-straitening economic circumstances, terrible violence, and an ever-more unhappy population. 

Back in January it seemed there was only one way this was going to go: disaster for the regime and possibly for the populace. 

But then the war started, and it returned to the regime a lot of the legitimacy it had lost. The very government that had slaughtered its citizens in the streets was now, it seemed, heroically defending the country against the most powerful militaries in the world, and with very little in the way of advanced military hardware. And they were doing so with extraordinary bravery, dedication, and ingenuity. 

There have been two important moments in the war so far. The first was when Ayatollah Khamenei was killed. Many Iranians were pleased with that; they had wanted him to be taken out in part because they thought the regime, once decapitated, couldn’t survive. 

But then almost exactly at the same time, American bombs obliterated a girls’ school. Trump blustered and lied and displayed himself in the worst possible light ...

Iranian citizens certainly could not feel that anyone was coming to rescue them.

So the moral argument that the United States and Israel were making for regime change is dubious at best. Iranians who had wanted regime change at any cost now came to see how horrible the cost could be. They don’t want insecurity, and they no longer want, for example, the police to be disbanded because, during wartime, some force needs to prevent looting and rioting and chaos. 

The other surprising outcome was how little Khamenei’s death mattered. I lived in Iran for years, and have been writing about it even longer, and I was sure that after Khamenei’s death, power would be up for grabs. But in fact, the regime has rallied, and whatever complexities there are in the decision-making system that is now in place—and we really don’t know much about it—it has been functioning. ...

The Middle East is in a state of great flux. That sense of imperviousness and safety that the principalities and sheikhdoms on the southern coast of the Persian Gulf enjoyed for many, many years—and that they employed to offer themselves as safe havens for investment—is now in doubt. From that perspective, Iran is in a strong position. 

Where Iran remains weak is that the economy is getting worse, so dissatisfaction will return. How that will manifest is difficult to say because it is now comprehensively a security state. There is zero tolerance for political disobedience.

I just spoke to someone in Iran today—I got a call from an Italian number, which is the convoluted way Iranians have to make international calls now, through VPNs and rerouting and such workarounds. Anyway, it was an elderly woman calling to express her condolences because my father recently died. This is a typically Iranian thing to do in a time of extraordinary stress: to think of other people, to think about their moment of loss. 

But then she said to me, Everything’s been worse since Mr. Khamenei died. And this was someone who’d been praying for the end of the Islamic Republic and for the demise of Khamanei. Now that he’s dead, people are wondering if he was in fact a restraining influence on the regime. ... 

Americans are perhaps less confused than Iranians at the strange moment. Fully seventy percent of us view this as Donald Trump's war of choice, foolish, deadly, even evil, all at once. And now the Orange Toddler can't figure how to back out of it and we all live with the consequences.