Iran’s mullahs are stronger than ever Blame their brutality and a feckless diaspora

Three years ago this month, Iran’s morality police arrested a 22-year-old woman named Jina Mahsa Amini, allegedly for not covering her hair sufficiently, as required by the Islamic Republic’s dress code. She soon died in police custody after what witnesses described as a severe beating. News of the incident triggered mass protests across the country — the largest in more than a decade, according to rights groups. The movement’s slogan: “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

Ever since, Iranians both inside the country and in the diaspora have debated when and how the system can be either drastically reformed — or altogether overthrown. Yet here we are, three years later, and the Islamic Republic appears in command of the home front. Indeed, the regime is arguably stronger now, amid the 12-Day War’s rally-around-the-flag effect, than it was before the Israeli invasion.

So what happened? The short answer is a profound dearth of leadership, which persists despite the hopes, nurtured by hawks in Jerusalem and Washington, of meme-ing Reza Pahlavi, the US-based son of the last shah, onto the Peacock Throne.

The Islamic Republic has met with opposition ever since its founding in 1979. Invariably, leaders and activists end up in prison either for (multiple) short stints or for long stretches at a time. Beyond the repression it endures, the opposition itself is far from united. Generally speaking, there are two broad camps.

The first agitates for internal reform of the Islamic system along the lines of former President Mohammad Khatami. The reformists wish to infuse the system with freedom of speech, freedom of protest, and free elections. And they seek a diplomatic and economic opening to the West. All this, while maintaining the Islamic nature of both the government and of society. In this vision, the supreme leader would offer mere guidance — as opposed to ruling directly, as the aging Ali Khamenei has done since taking over from the regime’s founder, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

More recently, some reformists have abandoned their hopes. They’ve come to believe that only a new referendum and new constitution can help the country escape its current nadir. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the former prime minister and presidential candidate who launched the Green Movement is perhaps the most prominent among them; he and his wife have been living under house arrest since 2011.

The second camp seeks the overthrow of the regime and, therefore, operates largely among the diaspora. Its most prominent face is, of course, Pahlavi. The 12-Day War with Israel kindled hopes of an uprising that would bring down the Islamic Republic, perhaps in favor of a Pahlavi restoration. This not only failed to materialize, but the conflict had the opposite effect, with many Iranians rallying to national sovereignty in spite of an extreme malaise in society.

It is impossible to know if Israel also hoped that the regime would fall. But at least some in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu did. In recent years, the Israeli government has been courting Pahlavi, inviting him to the Jewish state in 2023, where he met with Netanyahu and visited the Western Wall. The visit came only months after the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests (but before Hamas’s terrorist rampage in southern Israel on Oct. 7). Perhaps Israel and the Pahlavi camp decided that the protests had created an opportune moment to bait the Iranian regime by having the former crown prince tour its declared second-greatest enemy (after the United States).

From its inception, the Islamic Republic has considered Israel a mortal enemy. Yet some Iranians, especially younger men and women, have held a more sanguine view of the Jewish state; many more believe that Iran has no dog in the Israeli-Arab conflict and thus shouldn’t be expending both treasure and reputation by allying with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Indeed, while Iranian governments have supported the Palestinian cause with arms and treasure, there has never been universal support inside the country for the Iranian position on Palestine: a one-state solution that would effectively end the Jewish state. Even so, some Iranians did wonder if Pahlavi — having never garnered much support from the US government as an alternative to the regime — had decided to go with Israel as his principal backer. The idea being that he would usher in a redux of his father’s rule, with Israel replacing America as a post-Islamic Republic patron.

The problem is that Iranians, while deeply dissatisfied with the current isolation they face, are generally hesitant to return to the status of a vassal. Few people — especially a nationalist population like Iran’s — appreciate having their destiny controlled by outsiders. There is also the persistent memory of the Western-backed 1953 coup to oust an elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq. Moreover, for some monarchists, their loathing of Jimmy Carter owes precisely to their belief that he abandoned the Shah to Khomeini, illustrating the danger of relying on a foreign patron to maintain a desirable status quo. 

The Jewish state is especially ill-placed to serve in the role of patron, given mounting horror, shared by even many anti-regime Iranians, at the brutality of its war in Gaza. The monarchists, who often fly the Israeli flag alongside Iran’s Pahlavi-era standard, are decidedly in the minority on this front. Their position became even more tenuous after Israel’s attack in June, which claimed the lives of about 1,000 civilians.

The 12-Day War needn’t have damaged Pahlavi to the extent it did. Indeed, had he appropriately risen to the occasion and displayed genuinely kingly grandeur, it might have redounded to his political benefit. He might have partly blamed the Tehran regime for the attack, but to win hearts,  he also needed to condemn — or at least, deplore — the attack, while pledging to do all he could to bring the invasion to a close.

Instead, to the surprise of many Iranians inside and outside the country, Pahlavi neither condemned the violation of his homeland’s sovereignty nor mourned the deaths of innocents, nor even publicly sympathized with the families of the dead. Instead, he placed all the blame on the Iranian regime — he called the attack on Iran “our Berlin Wall moment” — and called on Iranians to take to the streets to topple it (rather hard to do when there are bombs falling). He doubled down on his support for Israel by dispatching a delegation to meet with Israeli leaders two months after the attack on Iran. 

Pahlavi, in other words, made it a little too obvious that he was hoping to be installed on his father’s throne by IDF aircraft. Undoubtedly, there are those in Tehran so fed up with the regime that they would welcome a Westernized secularist like Pahlavi being imposed by foreign invasion. For many, however, siding with the country that just bombed them was unforgivable. 

In the diaspora, even some of the Shah’s former military men — such as Faramarz Dadras who served in the Shah’s own guard and lives in exile in France — took Pahlavi to task for siding with an enemy. In some ways, Pahlavi’s performance recalled that of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, the Islamo-Marxist opposition group that sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War in the Eighties. The MEK — though feted by some American and European hawks — is deeply hated inside the country for this reason.

MEK leaders were so certain of a cakewalk march to Tehran during Iraq’s war against their homeland that the group launched an attack on Iranian soil with members of its own militia, only to be mowed down by Iranian troops who had received advance warning of the attack. A childhood friend of mine, who had been brainwashed by the cult-like organization, was among those killed; his body was bulldozed over by the Iranian forces, never to be identified or marked with a grave.

It was this war on its own people that has made the MEK, now headquartered in Albania and Paris, even more hated than the regime by Iranians, no matter their political leanings. Never side with an external enemy against the nation: how Pahlavi came to forget this crucial lesson of modern Iranian history will be a subject for historians.

The tragedy, of course, is that the regime has mastered the art of neutralizing internal oppositionists who’d have credibility where the likes of Pahlavi have surrendered it. And today, few Iranians want to take to the streets, it seems, only to be beaten or even killed when there is no viable leader to hang their hopes on. Thus, as much as Western politicians and commentators may wish that the Islamic Republic were on its last legs, soon to be replaced with something more to Western tastes, the reality is that the prospect of regime change remains far off.

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