“Help is on its way,” Donald Trump told the people of Iran on Tuesday as he urged them to keep protesting and “take over your institutions”. The US president had earlier declared that America was “locked and loaded”, ready to intervene militarily in Iran if the authorities started killing peaceful protesters en masse, and announced 25% tariffs, “effective immediately”, on any nation that did business with Iran.
More than 2,500 people, including security personnel, have died in the unrest, according to human rights groups, although many fear the true toll is much higher than that. The demonstrations, which seem to have partially subsided in recent days, began in the bazaars of Tehran on 28 December, fuelled by anger over Iran’s collapsing currency, and spread across the country.
The regime responded last week by imposing an internet blackout and stepping up its repressive tactics. In a defiant address last Friday, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called protesters “troublemakers”, who were trying “to please the president of the US”. The regime warned that, in the event of a US attack on Iran, it would consider Israel and all US bases to be “legitimate targets”.
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No clear alternative
The bravery of Iranian protesters in standing up to their “murderous regime” is extraordinary, said The Daily Telegraph. Alas, it has cost them dear. Security forces have fired on crowds, leaving hospitals overwhelmed. Bodies recovered by families show that some victims were shot at close range and in the eyes; parents have been told they can’t take children home for burial. We can only hope that these terrible scenes mark the death throes of the mullahs’ 47-year rule. Iran has suffered enough, agreed The Independent. “That the fall of the Islamic Republic would cause jubilation in Washington and Jerusalem is not a reason to oppose or regret it.”
It’s unclear where Iran’s protests will go from here, said The Economist. Some Iran-watchers fear it is entering a long period of internal strife that will consolidate the power of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its brutal militia, the Basij, resulting in months or years of martial law. Others think the IRGC is too weak to resist a full-blown uprising. The worry then, though, is that there’s no clear alternative to the regime, which could mean chaos. Although some protesters have been chanting the name of Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran, he lives in the US and isn’t thought to have sufficient sway to return to Iran and take control.
Conditions are dire in Iran, said Alireza Nader and Nik Kowsar on Foreign Policy. Even once comfortably middle-class households now struggle to feed themselves properly. Tehran is facing rolling electricity blackouts and water rationing. But if these pressures are to precipitate regime change, Iran will first need a united opposition with a credible “day after” plan.
Rotting republic
Trump is in a similar position to Barack Obama in 2013, when he warned that the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime in Syria would cross a “red line”, said Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh in The Wall Street Journal. Obama didn’t act on his words, but Trump must. Iranians would likely cheer US strikes on IRGC bases, and such interventions “could tip the balance” against the regime. The case for surgical strikes on Iran’s “machinery of repression” is overwhelming, agreed David Patrikarakos in the Daily Mail. The aim would not be to conquer or occupy, but to help “create the conditions for regime collapse from within”.
While the “moral imperative for targeting Tehran may be compelling”, US strikes would likely achieve little beyond temporarily disrupting the crackdown, said Suzanne Maloney in The New York Times. “Regime change is not a one-and-done matter.” Even taking out the regime’s top leadership wouldn’t make that much difference. “Tehran has patience and a deep bench.” Khamenei presides over a vast power structure of officials who have much to lose from the fall of the theocracy. Rather than intervening militarily, and risking retaliation from a desperate regime, the US should stick to cyberattacks and applying economic pressure.
It is division among the leadership, rather than the loss of legitimacy, that ultimately dooms tyrannical regimes, said William Hague in The Times. “So far, the Ayatollah, the IRGC and their cronies have stuck together.” But for how much longer will that last, asked David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Iran’s rulers must understand that these escalating protests keep happening because the republic “is rotting, politically and economically, and the whole country knows it”. While neighbouring nations are embracing a dynamic economic future, they’re clinging to a “repressive, retrograde regime” that can’t even provide basic services. That’s unsustainable.
