No analyst would doubt that the Iranian regime is facing its worst crisis since it came to power in 1979. In previous eras, the regime faced tribulations but possessed strategic alternatives that enabled it to navigate them without catastrophic losses or, more precisely, with constrained detriments.
However, this time, the crisis appears altogether distinct. The Iranian regime has been subjected to total national humiliation and degradation with the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh—the head of the political bureau of Hamas—in the heart of Tehran, without possessing the capability to confront or retaliate in a manner that would restore even a modicum of its prestige and dignity without such a response having more severe ramifications.
The Iranian regime’s bewilderment after Haniyeh’s assassination was more acute than the repercussions of the downing of the helicopter of former President Ebrahim Raisi and confirmation of his demise along with his companions. The challenge in this assassination operation is manifest and the intelligence confrontation is direct and overt, striking at the regime’s ability to safeguard the country and undermining all its repeated assertions over recent years about its level of military and technological advancement.
After all, a regime that cannot protect a diminutive room in a central residential complex guarded by its militias that spread terror across the Middle East cannot be trusted to protect its senior leaders at home and abroad, let alone protect its allies and armaments dispersed across the region. The reactions to Haniyeh’s assassination have opened the floodgates to derision of the Iranian regime, renowned for its iron grip on its citizens, within the country itself. Its image has crumbled, and its national face has been debased, rendering its continuous rhetoric of defending Iran a subject of mockery for millions of ordinary people suffering from economic conditions and security restrictions.
For the first time, the Iranian regime finds its hands bound from a genuine military response that would restore its pride, especially since the theatrics it carried out in response to the targeting of the Iranian consulate in Damascus did not convince anyone. Instead, it devolved into a subject of ridicule and mockery of the Iranian regime and its leaders. How can it respond, this time, to an intelligence breach by Israel that targeted the Iranian interior?
Patently, the senior Iranian leaders, headed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, have a profound, authentic desire to retaliate and exact revenge. However, this desire is completely separate from the ability to translate it into actions on the ground, given the magnitude of the potential costs of any actual retaliation that would ensure the restoration of national pride for this regime, whose sole concern is survival and continuity. The fate of the regime is the true lodestar for any Iranian conduct.
In such arduous predicaments, the mullahs typically resort to the principle of Taqiyya—political realism and pragmatism—invoking the public interest and political and strategic balances. They show the opposite of their intentions, taking refuge in their thoughts and fantasies that depict for them what they desire instead of confronting the reality from which they flee.
