The United States and Israel are methodically dismantling Iran's ability to make war, create weapons of mass destruction, build long-range missiles to threaten Israel's cities, and violently oppress their citizens.
The effort is going spectacularly well. Decapitation strikes have taken out, and continue to take out, a large percentage of Iranian civilian, clerical, and military leaders. Their nuclear program is gone, and their ballistic missiles are being systematically destroyed.
"The Islamic Republic now operates less as a unified state than as a dispersed system under sustained pressure from Israel and the United States," reports Iran International. "Authority increasingly runs through provincial clerical networks, IRGC commanders and Basij structures."
"Iran International suggests that what 'appears as resilience may instead reflect dispersal without coordination — a system that survives but no longer acts as one,'" I wrote on Thursday.
For Iran, that will be enough for it to declare "victory."
It's not a victory in any tactical sense. Iran's military is blown to bits, its economy is lifeless and barely moving, and its ability to govern its vast nation is questionable.
Unless there is some tangible evidence that the ruling clerics are no longer in charge, Iran can declare itself the winner in its war against the "Great Satan" and the "Lesser Satan." Even if only a figurehead cleric like the current Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, survives and the Revolutionary Guards are pulling the strings, it will be very hard to say that the U.S. and Israel "won" the war.
The Gaza War is instructive.
Over the past two and a half years, Gaza has suffered devastating destruction. Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed. Hospitals, schools, roads, and public services have been reduced to rubble, and thousands of civilians have lost their lives. Yet Hamas survived as an organization, its armed members are still visible in the streets, and in the end, it presented survival itself as victory. As soon as the ceasefire was announced, Hamas members poured into the streets, beating Palestinians and executing “traitors,” those who dared to object to Hamas rule. For the Islamic Republic, Hamas’s main patron, that was the most important lesson: in an ideological war, military asymmetry does not automatically mean defeat. Like Hamas, if the ayatollah-led dictatorship remains in power and its security institutions, especially the IRGC, remain intact, it can frame the outcome as a success.
"That is why the destruction of the country is neither decisive nor important to the regime," writes MEF's Saeid Golkar.
As every enemy America has gone to war against since Vietnam has tried to do, the goal of our adversaries is not outright "victory," but rather exhausting America politically. Enduring the titanic blows by the U.S. and Israel while hunkering down and surviving is Iran's primary objective now.
"The regime’s main goal is to prolong the war, widen its economic consequences, and create pressure on global markets and Western public opinion," writes Golkar. In that vein, the Democrats and the left are the regime's best friends.
For the Islamic Republic, then, the real battlefield is not only in the sky or at sea. It is also in the streets, in the media, and in the minds of both supporters and opponents. This is why survival has both military and political meanings. That is also why the regime is more focused on preserving the perception that it remains sovereign, feared, and unavoidable than on any other single objective.
This is especially important under the leadership of Mojtaba Khamenei. If he remains in power and the regime survives, it will present itself as having passed the test. The destruction of factories, ports, refineries, and civilian life will be treated as an acceptable price for the preservation of velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist. In the ideological logic of the Islamic Republic, the country may bleed, but the regime must live.
"This is the essence of asymmetric war as Ayatollahs and their IRGC bodyguards understand it," writes Golkar. "Keep the coercive core intact, terrorize your people, and declare victory simply because you are still there.'
Being "there" might seem a very small victory. But once the Democrats start the drumbeat of "failure" because the regime is still intact, it will seem like a humiliating defeat.
Just as the Democrats hope it will be seen.
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