Iran They Explained Clearly

I see the system in Iran um as fighting for its survival. This is an existential war one that they anticipated coming because last summer's 12-day war ended without any agreement. It was a ceasefire that they accepted and became very clear that it was unraveling over time and I think they were also prepared to a certain degree that the US and Israel would resume and resume with decapitation strategies that they've used over the past few years and indeed the US and Israel were successful at killing Iran's supreme leader and three layers of military command and leadership but the people that have come up and the people that are making the key decisions today are known quantities. They're not unknowns that have emerged from the

depths of the Iranian bureaucracy and to me the structure is still consensus-based. They build consensus among themselves. They vote in the supreme national security council on key decisions like the signing of the MOU that was signed in June and 12 out of 13 members voted in favor of that MOU. So much remains the same. What has changed and what is the unknown in this equation is the thinking and role of Iran's new supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his of ill health. Of course he was having seen him we haven't seen him. He's also of course still recovering from injuries from February 28th, but we don't know where he sits within the system what his views are.

We've seen other American officials saying you know we killed some terrible hardliners and now there are pragmatists who were delighted to find on the other side of the table. But do the terms hardliner and moderate mean kind of neat simple things? Is this idea that you've killed the hardliners and they'll be replaced by pragmatists? I mean, how do you use these terms even? And I think often times um Western depictions of Iranian politics are over simplistic. Iran's politics has always been factionalized and always divided between reformists, moderates, pragmatists, and conservatives and neoconservatives. And their um allegiances to these groups and their ideas shift over time. Ali Larijani used

to be a hard-time conservative and then slowly was perceived to be a pragmatist. Um and so his killing was you know quite a surprise um although celebrated by some quite a surprise because he was seen to be an interlocutor and a pragmatic negotiator. So, I think we have to be careful um in how we describe these individuals, see their ideologies as much more fluid. They're united in the preservation of uh the regime's security and stability uh but perhaps have tactical differences on policy if not strategy. Um and you know they're they're not neat clean lines. So often in the West you find political leaders who have a trope image of Iran that it is one thing and it's usually uh

theocrats um motivated purely by hatred of the United States and its values and so on and so forth. Uh and that is just wrong. Uh Iran like most countries has uh a national security strategy uh in which they do things which offend uh the United States and the West, but one of the reasons why they do that is because they perceive themselves to be ringed by opponents and enemies and therefore they tend to take a position of forward defense in which they are quite active within the region advancing what they see as their interests. And I think that's important because unless we start to understand why Iran does what Iran does, we'll come up with the wrong conclusions. So the worst of all possible phrases is

mad bullets cuz they're actually intensely rational. And then you get to the question about how much power the Ayatollahs and the clerical establishment has. They are rational by their lights and by their perception of the world, which would certainly not be ours, but there is a logic to it. Although many of the figures within the current setup are well known to us, nevertheless, the balance of influence has certainly shifted in my view to the IRGC, the Revolutionary Guards, at the moment. We don't know what will happen when the fighting stops because sometimes the system rebalances and goes back to much more the sort of consensus

operated model which Sanam quite accurately described. There is one other unknown, which is very important. Ali Khamenei had been at the top of the Iranian tree for 40 years as president and as supreme leader. He was hugely respected by those people who supported the regime, reviled of course by those who didn't. He had a massive network of patronage, all senior judicial appointments, all senior military appointments had been approved by him over many years, and he was a past master at doing what Sanam referred to, which is balancing the system, achieving consensus where consensus looked difficult, and finding solutions which the whole of the regime could come around. We don't know quite

how that's going to work with Mojtaba. He doesn't have his father's personality from what we can tell. He certainly doesn't have his status, albeit of course he was an assistant to his father for quite a number of years, and he has been suffering following the injuries that he took on the 28th of February and the loss of a number of very, very close family members, which you would think will have had an effect on him. So, we're still missing some quite important pieces of information about how this is going to work. As Sanam says, once this starts to evolve.