Iran is on the verge of a nervous breakdown: Can it hold?
The supreme leader was left shaken by the assassination of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, his friend and ally-in-chief. The Islamic Republic has never looked weaker.
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Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, no longer trusts his phone, and who could blame him? Iran’s phone traffic is the most heavily eavesdropped in the world. And in recent weeks pagers and walkie-talkies used by the Tehran-backed Hezbollah and the Ayatollah’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) have been infiltrated and booby-trapped by the Israelis. The result: a significant layer of Iran’s wider security establishment have had their ears and eyes blown out while checking their devices.
So when the Ayatollah was tipped off that the head of Hezbollah, the Shia-seminarian Hassan Nasrallah - his long-time friend and placeman in Beirut - was about to be targeted by the Israelis, he scrawled a message rather than phone him. The urgent advice to his fellow Islamic revolutionary: get out of Lebanon as fast as possible to the safety of Iran. The letter was delivered by a trusted Revolutionary Guard general, Abbas Nilforoushan, to Nasrallah’s supposedly bombproof shelter on September 27. Both men died soon afterwards in a bunker-busting Israeli airstrike.
That assassination has deeply affected the 85-year-old Ayatollah. In the age of drone surveillance it has become the norm for terror groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda to use couriers rather than electronics to issue commands, arrange secret rendezvous or transfer cash. But Iran has come to see itself as standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Russia and China, a soon-to-be regional leader of the Middle East. Nothing could better illustrate Iran’s lack of friends, its fall from grace, its vulnerability, than to operate like a secret society.
Khamenei is in mourning for Nasrallah but on at least two nights since the killing he has had to go into hiding. Before leading this week’s Friday prayers in Tehran, he had appeared only fleetingly in public. Taking counsel from his 54-year-old son Mojtaba, a possible candidate to replace him, he has stopped convening meetings of more than two people at a time lest they are infiltrated by spies. Another sign of the Tehran elite’s collapse in self-confidence is the nervousness about holding public funerals of IRGC commanders.
That anxiety has transferred to the Hezbollah hierarchy, with no decision yet as to how to bury many of its fallen leaders. With Nasrallah’s body, the discussion centres on whether to give him a clerically approved temporary grave and a formal burial only when the war is over. In part that is because well-attended funerals show up clearly in satellite surveillance and might encourage an airstrike or the targeted killings of high-ranking attendees. But mainly it’s because the loss of Nasrallah is such a personal humiliation for Khamenei; he would rather celebrate victories than acknowledge defeats.
“Basically Iran lost the biggest investment it had for the past decades,” says the Hezbollah expert Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish Defence Academy, speaking about the Nasrallah hit.
There is no realistic near-future prospect of the Iranian regime collapsing but three glaring weaknesses have been exposed. The first is the failing political instinct of the supreme leader as his health fades. Did he, in approving the candidacy of the supposedly modernising but largely powerless president, Masoud Pezeshkian, signal a readiness for a return to nuclear diplomacy with the West?
Was that a gamble on Kamala Harris winning the US election - since no Trump administration will countenance a diplomatic pathway that does not involve the scrapping of Tehran’s nuclear programme? The ayatollah, in other words, has designed one policy that might appeal to a Democrat administration in the knowledge that it would have to be changed if the Republicans win. To Khamenei’s domestic critics that smacks of weakness.
The second, increasingly obvious leadership failure, is that the so-called axis of revolution - the string of proxy legions aimed at projecting Iranian power in and beyond the region - is not working as intended. Hamas apparently did not inform Hezbollah or Tehran about its plans for the October 7 attacks on Israel last year.
Hezbollah did get the go ahead from Iran to fire into northern Israel shortly afterwards, but Hezbollah did not enter the Gaza fray in any significant way; restrained perhaps by Tehran, which saw Nasrallah’s troops as too valuable to waste on Hamas. The strategic logic of the proxies was a “unity of alliances”, one-for-all, all-for-one, but that didn’t work out for Hamas. And the IRGC should have been advising Hezbollah hour-to-hour as soon as it was clear the Israelis were going to launch what looked to be a prelude to a ground invasion of Lebanon. The reason: Iran had been hoping to keep Hezbollah as a counterblow should Israel try to cripple Tehran’s attempts to build a nuclear bomb.
The same goes for the Houthis in Yemen. The IRGC wants them as part of its foreign legion but only in order to protect Iranian interests. All of them - the Iraqi and Syrian Shia militias included - are expected to distract, disrupt and ultimately to die for the greater glory, or at least the survival, of the Iranian theocratic state. It is the head of the octopus that gets to survive, even if its tentacles are lopped off one by one. In return they get cash - half of Houthi salaries come from Iranian funds - they get weapons and they get IRGC instructors. That cynical outsourcing of war cannot be sustained by Iran’s economy, with inflation at well over 30 per cent in the year to March, investment at historic lows, its dependence on dodgy trading, smuggling and speculation, and more than 5,000 western sanctions (only Russia has a higher number).
When cost of living protests break out they focus on high youth unemployment (over 15 per cent), the lifting of fuel subsidies, the collapse of manufacturing industry and archaic working conditions - all arguments against bankrolling foreign wars.
President Pezeshkian, elected this summer, has promised to relieve some of the social tensions. The morality police could be reined in, he says, suggesting that two years after they beat 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for contravening dress codes, causing her death and sparking nationwide protests, women will at least be given a free choice of clothing. But his room for manoeuvre is limited by the enduring power of the security state. The IRGC is technically under the control of the supreme leader.
There are many pictures of Khamenei chatting amiably with the head of the IRGC Quds force, Qasem Soleimani - the co-ordinator of Iran’s proxy armies - as he reported back from the front. After he was killed in a 2020 drone attack ordered by Trump, Khamenei fell into a depression. Now it looks as if he sees the Nasrallah killing in a similarly bleak way: as a death knell of war outsourcing. Typically he is looking at a dynastic solution to replacing the head of Hezbollah - the new terror chief is likely to be Hashem Safieddine, married to the daughter of Soleimani. It is blood, in more ways than one, that links Tehran to its Lebanese proxy.
Hezbollah still has some fight left in it. And Russia is taking up some of the slack of funding and training the other proxies. As the partnership between Russia and Iran gets stronger, thanks to military co-operation in the war against Ukraine, so Moscow is siding increasingly with Houthi rebels in Yemen. Iranian military instructors used to be the norm for Houthi units. Now it as just as likely to be GRU, Russian military intelligence officers, doing the job. The Russians are better funded than the Iranians but co-operate on bringing weapons to the Iranian proxy. The result: in many of Iran’s proxies, Russia has made itself part of the equation.
The regime’s third great vulnerability is the fracturing of the ideological coalition between the clerics and the IRGC securocrats.
This was always due to be flushed to the surface after the supreme leader’s death (he was operated on some years ago for prostate cancer and needs naps and heavy medication to prevent his mind wandering). The current war has exposed the fact that there are malcontents within the IRGC. Back in 2018 Mossad recruited IRGC officers who were supposed to be in charge of weeding out Mossad agents in Tehran.
An astonishing high-risk break-in at Iran’s archives on nuclear development appears to have been facilitated by Mossad double agents. Now, an inquiry has been launched into how information leaked about an April meeting in Beirut between the Hezbollah expert on precision weapons, Fuad Shukr, and an IRGC commander. The Israelis got wind of the encounter and killed them both.
How did the Israelis know, asked the Hezbollah witchhunters. A leak, perhaps in the IRGC? An investigative committee was set up under the chairmanship of Sheikh Nabil Kaouk. A day after the killing of Nasrallah, Kaouk was also killed. Other Hezbollah commanders involved in the inquiry also died. The trail has conveniently gone cold. Hezbollah will certainly claim it was the all-reaching hand of Mossad, but they may just suspect that the IRGC was covering its tracks.
Trust, then, is breaking down between the IRGC and the proxy armies, between the clerics and the IRGC, between the Iranians and their rulers. The original spirit of the 1979 revolution was ruthless but it had a real following among students fed up with the Shah’s Savak secret police and the torture. Now under Khamenei, the revolution has lost its children, not because they are chasing after western luxuries but because they despise the self-enriching Revolutionary Guard and the institutionalised corruption it has brought into a shortage economy. The unworldly clerics that came in with the original supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, now feather their nests and tolerate, even demand, the suppression of women.
How to exploit these rifts? Bombing Iran’s nuclear installations has a certain logic since Iran appears to be only weeks away from enriching the quantities and potency of uranium it needs to create an arsenal.
But hit now and you could encourage Iran to use the bombs rather than lose them. Would an Israeli strike be sufficient to halt the programme, or would it need US help? Perhaps Israel would be satisfied, as it has been in the past, to set back the nuclear programme by several years. But even that leaves all the big questions unanswered - about Iranian regime change, about hiding progress on the bomb, about unreliable diplomacy. It is not just uber-cautious Joe Biden who has his doubts. An escalation ladder has to keep an attack on the nuclear industry on the very top rung.
Moreover, that kind of assault on Iran would probably have the effect of uniting the nation on what would be seen as an existential issue. The strategic point has to be to widen the cracks we can already identify and steer Iran towards better governance, turn it into an increasingly co-operative player. It still needs to be addressed, though, in the language of strength. It first needs to stop being a malign actor, and that means identifying and acting on its military vulnerabilities. Israel should restore the deterrence relationship with Iran. That could come through striking missile defence and radar sites inside Iran, suggests Matthew Savill, military sciences director at the Royal United Services Institute - a proportionate reply to Iran’s argument that it has only struck at Israeli military targets. “Ballistic missile production, storage or operation sites would serve the dual purpose of widening the gap and removing threats to Israel,” he adds.
There may be a case, though, for hitting harder to send a message to ordinary Iranians that their regime as presently constituted is ineffective at home, a lightweight abroad and definitely set on a destructive track - a government that puts guns before butter and locks up women for showing their hair. Edward Luttwak, the veteran American strategist (four years younger than the current supreme leader) has made a potent case for cracking down on the regime’s main income source: the oil that is loaded at the Kharg Island terminal, 15 miles off Iran’s southern coast in the Gulf. That may be difficult to reach for Israeli aircraft but there is a very long pipeline that could be sabotaged. This would cut off funding for Hezbollah and others.
This was not given the green light under the Obama administration for fear of the US being drawn into a war with Iran; Biden has the same reservations. But it has the merit of highlighting Tehran’s sanctions-busting use of oil, the connivance of China and other oil gobblers, and it makes use of skilled special forces operatives whose presence can later be denied. How Trump 2.0 would decide on a cloak-and-dagger operation is anyone’s guess. It could well be that Trump has become even more war averse than his Democrat predecessors. But a future president will have to address the problem of a region crowded with failed or failing states and statelets, with desperate populations and ambitious generals. The chemistry is bad, explosively bad.
One thing is for sure. Iran is at boiling point. It wouldn’t take much to tip its workers, its students, its angry young women, and its impoverished nothing-left-to-lose pensioners into an angry rejection of the status quo. A blazing war is not the only way to bring about change but it can accelerate it and spread game-shifting disillusion among coalescing parts of the population.
A year on from the dreadful October 7 massacre, a year of fighting on multiple fronts, what kind of balance sheet can be drawn? Is Israel safer? Probably not. Will the remaining hostages be freed any time soon? Sadly unlikely. But the warfare has ended a period of strategic ambiguity, called Iran’s bluff that it is the powerful regional leader-in-waiting. Its allies are losing faith in it, its Sunni rivals have lost their fear.
Israel hasn’t just given the Iranian regime a bloody nose, it has given it a nervous breakdown. The Netanyahu government boasts that it is in the process of reshaping the Middle East. That may be true. It has certainly blown away the smokescreen that surrounded Tehran.
Iran’s ally-in-chief, the late Nasrallah, turns out to have been a corrupt warlord rather than a heroic Islamic revolutionary. Hamas has fallen apart. And the people of Iran are asking: where are the clerics and the thugs of the IRGC leading us?
This article originally appeared in The Times.
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