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An Islamic Republic With Its Back Against the Wall

By Roger Cohen

The New York Times: Beneath Israel’s bombs lies an unpopular and repressive Iranian regime that has spent billions of dollars on a nuclear program and on projecting the Islamic Revolution through armed regional proxies, while presiding over a domestic economic disaster and stifling paralysis.

An 86-year-old autocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rules this restive nation, as he has for 36 years, in his role as guardian of the revolution, a conservative calling at which he has proved adept. The supreme leader is no gambler. But his system, remote from a youthful and aspirational society, looks sclerotic to many, and he is now up against the wall.

Over six days of fighting, Israel has struck the Natanz enrichment facility where a majority of Iran’s nuclear fuel is produced, killed at least eleven of the regime’s top generals and several nuclear scientists, bombed oil-and-energy facilities, taken complete control of Iranian air space, and sent tens of thousands of people into flight from Tehran.

At least 224 people had been killed across Iran as of Sunday, a majority of them civilians, a spokesman for Iran’s ministry of health said. But the figure was sure to have grown as Israel’s bombardment continued in the days since. Iranian missiles have killed at least 24 Israelis.

“The Islamic Republic is a rotten tooth waiting to be plucked, like the Soviet Union in its latter years,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Khamenei is in the most difficult situation he has ever faced.”

The ayatollah has faced threats to his rule before, though, and come out with his supremacy intact. In 2009, when millions of people took to the streets of Tehran to protest what was seen as a stolen presidential election, I watched as state-licensed thugs repeatedly beat brave women demanding dignity and freedom. For a few days, the future of the regime stood on a knife-edge. But with utter ruthlessness it prevailed. Many demonstrators were dragged off to be tortured, sodomized, and in the case of several hundred of them, killed.

Whether the current difficulty facing Iran’s regime will lead to its demise remains to be seen. Isolated cries of “Death to Khamenei” rise into the night sky, but popular protests are impossible under bombs, and always risky under the thumb of the government. There are no obvious leaders to steer any political transition for the same reason.

Ayatollah Khamenei remains defiant. He responded on Wednesday to President Trump’s threat to his life and call for “unconditional surrender” by saying that “Iran stands firm in the face of imposed war, just as it will stand firm against imposed peace, and it will not yield to any imposition.”

These were words typical of a proud nation that rose against the West almost a half-century ago through Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution, deposing the Shah and imposing “Death to America” as its weekly refrain.

But the insurrection never delivered the freedom it had promised. Frustration, whether over hijabs imposed on women with no desire to wear them or over chronic and crippling mismanagement, grew.

Iran’s gross domestic product, or total output, has fallen 45 percent since 2012, and many people are desperate. Crippling international sanctions over the nuclear program contributed to this downward spiral, but so did corruption, a bungled privatization program and bloated state companies. Iran did reach a nuclear agreement with the United States in the last years of the Obama administration, but Mr. Trump shredded it in his first term.

“The one message the Iranian people wants to get across is that having done all this and wreaked this kind of havoc, make sure the end of this is that the horrendous regime is gone,” said an Iranian businessman based in the United Arab Emirates, who requested anonymity because of the Islamic Republic’s habit of imprisoning its opponents.

At the same time, as the Israeli bombing persists, there are signs of a patriotic surge even among opponents of the regime who have spent time in prison. For some, Iran’s now demonstrated vulnerability is proof of its need for a nuclear bomb, like North Korea’s, to protect itself. In Iran’s neighborhood, Pakistan, India, Russia and Israel all have nuclear warheads >>>