Iran’s rulers hellbent on apocalyptic stupidity

It is impossible to understand Iran’s miscalculations without grasping the mindset of its rulers and the religious fanaticism on which it is based.

An Iranian army member looks back among others, as they conclude their march, during a parade commemorating National Army Day in front of the shrine of the late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini. Vahid Salemi / AP

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Years ago, commenting on one of Iran’s periodic crises, the great American statesman Dean Acheson wryly observed that “never have so few lost so much so quickly and so stupidly”. Today, as its military capabilities continue to be battered, Iran’s ruling theocracy seems set on a repeat performance.

But rather than simply an error, its miscalculations are the inevitable result of the mindset that has defined the Iranian regime since it seized power in 1979.

Central to that mindset is a theology that harks for the decimation of unbelievers and the dawn of the Day of Judgment. The image Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, posted earlier this week on X highlighted it starkly. Captioned “Ali returns to Khaybar”, the image, which shows a man brandishing a sword as he strides into a burning fortress, refers to a well-known incident in the life of Mohammed that eventually culminated, under Umar al-Khattab, in the death and destruction of Khaybar’s entire Jewish population.

Khamenei’s reference to that incident, which prefigures the fate that awaits infidels, was scarcely an accident. While visions of the End Time permeate the great religions, they are particularly prominent in Shia Islam.

At their heart lies the expectation of a messianic leader, known as the Mahdi or Qa’im (“the riser”), who – as in Khamenei’s post – is armed with a sword that unerringly guides him to the enemies of God. Wielding that invincible sword, the “Master of the Age” will butcher Allah’s adversaries, reassert the House of Mohammad’s rights and inaugurate, over the infidels’ dead bodies, an era of peace and justice.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during Friday prayer ceremony in Tehran, Iran.

There are, for sure, factors that have at times moderated the impact of apocalyptic premonitions on Shiite communities. Thus, traditional Shiite dogma left little room for human volition in the supreme designs of the Master of the Age, encouraging Shiites to wait patiently for the Mahdi’s arrival.

Moreover, in a pattern that typifies Persian history, regimes that initially triumphed by mobilising hopes of imminent salvation – such as the Safavids, who, coming to power in 1501, established Shiism as Persia’s official religion – then cooled those expectations so as to assure their regime’s stability.

But the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept the inhibitions aside. Imbued from an early age with intense millennial expectations, one of his best-known poems prays for the day when “Two hundred million will be felled from chariots upon the darkened earth/Caesar’s gut will split; Napoleon’s heart will burst/Yet from that bombardment the world will become the eternal paradise”.

It is therefore unsurprising that apocalyptic imagery figured prominently in the 1979 Revolution and in the regime’s propaganda during the blood-soaked Iran-Iraq war.

And it is unsurprising too that without ever claiming to be the returning Mahdi, Khomeini ensured his acclamation as the Imam – a title that, since the 16th century, Shiites had never attributed to a living person.

Millennialism received a further, enduring, boost in the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013). Convinced that divine intervention had opened the eyes and ears of the delegates to the UN General Assembly when he addressed them, Ahmadinejad used apocalyptic rhetoric as a cover both for empowering (and enriching) the Revolutionary Guard and for brutally suppressing the protests that rocked Iran in 2009-10. Since then, it has repeatedly been deployed by hardliners in the face of popular revolts.

However, millennialism is not just the regime’s ideology. It is its program of action. At the outset of the Iranian revolution, Khomeini proclaimed that “state boundaries are the product of a deficient human mind; the Revolution will ignore them – and until the cry ‘There is no god but God’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle!”. If, in order to achieve that goal, it proved necessary “to destroy this world to construct the other world”, then that was a price worth paying.

Sea of hands reach out to greet Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini following his arrival at the international airport. Picture: AP

But while Khomeini conceptualised jihad as global, his primary focus was always on Israel and Jews. Not that Khomeini ever tolerated other faiths. On the contrary, he made his name by launching a campaign in 1956 for the suppression of Iran’s Bahai. Later, in a widely used codex that codifies the Shiite purity laws, Khomeini classified Christians as well as Jews as defilers whose bodies are as unclean as dogs, pigs and urine.

There is, however, no doubt that “the Jews”, who allegedly hold “secret conferences” in which they plot to rule the world, stood, for Khomeini, in a class of their own – as they always had in Muslim apocalyptics. Devious plotters endowed with mysterious powers, they could strike suddenly and unexpectedly with huge force; but faced with Islamic steadfastness, they were certain to crumble. And there could be no more important step towards the Day of Judgment than the final eradication of Israel and the subjugation of its surviving Jewish inhabitants.

All that now has immediate consequences. Iran’s theocratic rulers do not view their regime as merely a normal government. As Khomeini said immediately after the referendum that endorsed Iran’s theocratic constitution, the revolution ensured that “a satanic power departed forever, and the government of God was established in its place” – a government that had to endure, at whatever cost, “until the time when the Mahdi emerges from hiding”.

It is utterly fanciful to believe that such a government, freighted with a divine mission, will readily acknowledge defeat. Instead, unless and until it is utterly crushed, the ruling theocracy will view this battle as just another step in the “fitna” that precedes the End: the testing time of tribulation that separates true believers from the hesitant, before bestowing on the meritorious rewards 20 times those of ordinary shahids (martyrs).

As for the Revolutionary Guards, whose considerable wealth relies on the regime’s perpetuation, it is even less likely that they will make concessions unless they are comprehensively routed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference in Jerusalem. Ronen Zvulun / AP

And it is least likely of all that the regime will accept a durable and credible peace with Israel or, for that matter, the West. Rather, in accordance with the ruling that “Al-Darurat Tubihu al-Mahzurat” (“necessity permits forbidden acts”), and strictly following, like Hamas and Hezbollah, the precedent the Prophet Mohammed set with the Treaty of Hudaibiyya, it will, at most, enter into a temporary armistice agreement (“Hudna”) whose sole purpose is to allow it to rearm for the next battle with the enemies of Allah.

Nor, unfortunately, can one count on the regime being easily displaced. An internal reshuffle is certainly possible; but the reality is that the genuinely oppositional forces have been battered by repression and beset by the absence of effective leadership.

Although Iran has produced many outstanding liberal thinkers – beginning with Mirza Malkum Khan in the 19th century – it is hard to dispute Hussein Banai’s conclusion, in his magisterial history of Iranian liberalism, that “especially in times of crisis, the inability of liberals to translate their fractured practices into a coherent and unified political movement has persistently led to failure”.

As a result, the priority must now be to eliminate as comprehensively as possible the regime’s offensive military capabilities. Until our government recognises that fact, its repeated calls for peace will be nothing but hot air.