Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian-Kurdish woman, has become a martyr for Iranians seeking freedom. Arrested for not wearing her hijab according to the Islamic Republic’s fundamentalist reading of Islamic Law, Iran’s morality police—the Guidance Patrol—beat her to death while she was in their custody. Protests ensued, with Iranian women leading the charge; as the authorities rain down fire on them, they defiantly chant “zan, zendegi, azadi”: women, life, freedom.
Recent years have demonstrated that unrest and the Islamic Republic are intertwined. But today’s protests—three weeks strong—are markedly different from anything that came before. Iran’s most widespread uprisings in the last decade were between 2017 and 2019, caused by inflation and food shortages. This time around, however, the protests did not morph from economic to political; they were politically charged from the start. Mandatory hijab is a pillar of the Islamic Republic’s reign of terror, instituted shortly after the 1979 revolution: to challenge forced veiling is to challenge the bedrock of the regime’s power.
In the face of such unrest—with protests sprawling across over 80 cities—Iran’s largest reformist party, the Union of Islamic Iran People’s Party, recently demanded a repeal of obligatory hijab laws and respect for peaceful demonstrations. Though remote from the corridors of power, the party is still legal—run by the former aids of ex-president Khatami, and thus operating in Iran’s Islamist political environment. Yet contrary to previous waves of demonstrations like the 2009 Green Movement protests over election rigging, today any hope of the Islamic Republic honoring the democratic promises of its constitution, including free elections and basic civil liberties, is long gone. That a legal party in Iran wishes to modify a foundational doctrine of the Islamic Republic’s ideology just goes to show how little legitimacy the regime possesses in the eyes of the Iranian people. Today’s protests seek regime change, far beyond reform—hence chants like “death to the dictator,” referencing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Unsurprisingly for a government founded on thuggery, the regime’s crackdown on the protests has been unsparingly cruel. Iran Human Rights, an Oslo-based civil rights group, estimates authorities have murdered over 154 protestors and detained scores of others. Police shoot freely at protestors, who, though mostly unarmed, fight back courageously. Sources indicate that as high-schoolers joined the demonstrations, they too were killed by the regime’s security forces; authorities secretly buried one young victim, Nika Shakarami, while threatening her family to keep her death secret. Although Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi has sworn to “deal decisively” with the discontented masses—signaling yet more repression to come—the government cannot easily extinguish their rage. Although the Islamic Republic can survive through this round of bloodshed—the massacre of innocent citizens is rooted in the regime’s history—its loyalist core shrinks by the day. With a population of over 60% under the age of 30 according to some estimates, most Iranians see the state’s Islamist ideology as antithetical to their values and priorities. By severing the social contract with the citizenry, Khamenei, Raisi, and the rest of the nation’s clerical leadership have committed themselves to maintaining order through sheer terror.
Yet terror is no panacea for the regime’s woes. As ideological purists become rarer by the day, the clerics will have to increasingly empty their pockets to maintain the state’s repressive apparatus. The revolutionary class—electrified by Khomeinei’s radical islamist strand of Shi’a Islam—will continue to die off, yielding to an elite of selfish condottieri, thugs who will happily brutalize their fellow citizens for power and coin, but who are devoid of any meaningful ideological commitment to the Islamic Republic as a political project.
The West can play a major role in undermining the Islamic Republic’s foundations—to the point of triggering regime change—by preventing the clerical elite from financing their repressive agents. While sanctions have choked off major sectors of the Iranian economy, regime loyalists like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) still run sophisticated operations in secret. The drug, weapons, and petroleum trades are particular favorites; yet the Guards run everything from the construction sector to telecommunications as well. Cracking down on these sources of revenue—seizing trade in goods that violate international law, sanctioning the Guards’ contacts in the West—would foster increased competition for resources between the ideological clerics and their henchmen, who will demand ever-higher recompense for their savage services.
Just as many a Roman emperor was massacred by his imperial guard, so can the IRGC bring down any cleric in power—even Khamenei himself. As the clerics and their ideological soft power die off, only the praetorians will remain. And if the struggle for financial resources between them is strong enough, they will eventually fracture in the face of a citizen uprising.
Finally, when considering how the West should react, it is helpful to consider the Obama administration’s catastrophic response to the 2009 Green Movement. Instead of capitalizing on a wave of democratic discontent, and accepting the leaders of the movement’s plea for American aid, the Obama administration prioritized peace with the Islamists. Credible reporting by Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon subsequently revealed the president had withheld aid to the protests’ leaders, despite the promise of helping democratic movements rise up against dictators being standard US policy. The Biden administration should not make the same mistake today: the thugs in charge of Iran do not represent the will of the Iranian people, and cannot be trusted to keep any agreement akin to the now-dead Nuclear Deal. To seek concord with the ayatollahs would demonstrate US weakness and crush Iranian hopes for American support. Contrary to Obama’s failed policy of negotiating with the clerics, Biden and his advisors must make the utmost effort to contact today’s protest leaders, severed from contact with the Western world, with the aim of facilitating eventual regime change.
The clerics in Iran took years to overthrow the Shah. Now, the countless waves of Iranian protests are starting to bear their fruits: for the first time since 1979, the clerics tremble before the fervor of the Iranian people claiming their fundamental rights. If not today, then tomorrow, or next week, or next year—the Islamic Republic will fall. The mullahs must now choose: willingly surrender power to the people, in hopes of a secure exit out of politics, or be dragged out onto the streets by the fury of the masses they so long oppressed.