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For Iran, What Now?
"All the bodies were recognizable despite their burns," Mohammad Hassan Nami, head of Iran's Disaster Management Organization, told IRNA on Monday. There was no need for DNA testing.
It took more than 18 hours for Iranian search and rescue teams to find the crash site after a helicopter ferrying Ebrahim Raisi and Hossein Amir Abdollahian suffered what state media described as a "technical failure" near the border with Azerbaijan, where the two men attended an event to inaugurate a dam project.
The US should make every effort to drop the price of oil; in order to cut funding to these regimes that have the capacity (with enough money) to move the world towards WW3.
The funny thing is that China and Xi are moving their country to all electric vehicles faster than most countries in the world, the US included. Maybe they don’t want to be influenced by oil mongers either.
I’m no expert on Iran and so will refrain from commenting much on the internal machinations of the regime. I’d be curious to know what’s the lifestyle of all these hardliners and how many of them engage regularly in one-hour marriages (sigheh)…
But I wanted to relay some research I read some time ago about “strong but fragile” authoritarian regimes. The research suggested that the threshold for regime crumbling was around the 20-30% population support i.e., if the regime has the support of 30+% of the population, it can maintain itself indefinitely. If said support falls below 20%, its days are numbered.
The way I think about this is that – imagine you’re a dissident. If you open your mouth, you’re dead. You need to coordinate. At 30% support, if you are in a three friends group, it means you got 50% chance of speaking to a regime stooge (you know you’re one of the 2 dissidents that must exist in that group). If support is at 20%, it means that, in a group of 5 friends, you can speak to 3 out of the 4 remaining friends to coordinate and you’ll live.
I don’t know if this is a good image but it worked for me. I think people don’t want to toss a coin on being tortured and executed. Courageous people are willing to toss that coin if the odds of success are 75%.
This is a good comment. The terrifying reality for these regimes is that virtually anything — something as seemingly innocuous as a tweet or, say, a piece of graffiti, or maybe it’s the accidental death of someone in police custody — can be the beginning of a very quick end. It can all unravel within days or even hours. You just need that critical mass and a few well-placed sympathizers in the military.
If Sergei Surovikin shows up to meet Prigozhin on the highway to Moscow last June, that story ends differently for Putin. That whole episode lasted less than 18 hours. When these things start moving in the wrong direction, there’s just no time to turn it around. Bashar al-Assad was extremely lucky to get a decade-long civil war. Change a few things here or there, and he gets drug out of a drain pipe by delirious locals within a few months.
Thanks, I do try. And indeed, when you are within that 20 to 30% support zone, things must hinge on very little.
For example, the Berlin Wall fell in November ’89 in no small part b/c the border guards/the army received confusing orders/saw the confusion of the political leadership with contradicting broadcast. Had a firm order being given to shoot, things might have ended very differently.
Your comment about authoritarian regimes being strong but fragile jibes with something I was thinking about this morning, i.e., the outrageous nuclear threats emanating from Putin mouthpiece Dmitry Medvedev since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. My first (and second) thoughts about Medvedev and his rhetoric was that he was stone-cold crazy. But this morning I was struck by a different thought: What if Medvedev is telling/warning the West that if Putin goes down, it’s going to find itself with a serious loose-nukes problem on its hands.
With your article about the well telegraphed response to Israel provocations and now purported USA help locating crash site. It does seem that possibly there is more cooperation behind the scenes between USA and Iran. Not to say there is some dramatic detente in the fore, but it does seem there are channels to talk things through when mutual interests present opportunities. If so the world may be becoming a less scary place.
I also find it curious that Raisi died cabin intact. No parachute for a dignitary? Or was he alive when craft landed? Did he survive till ‘help’ arrived? We will likely never know answers to these possibilities. However it seems we are beset with a potential for truth to be stranger than any fictional scenario.