“The Islamic Republic emerged victorious,” Ali Khamenei declared, in a video message filmed from an undisclosed location.
The fatuous remarks, broadcast to Iranians on state television Thursday, counted as Khamenei’s first public comments since the US bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities last week.
That he’s still filming from a bunker testifies against Khamenei’s triumphalism. And if Iran’s deterrence isn’t in shambles, then why the need to pre-record?
I could go on. But it’s scarcely worth pointing out the glaring absurdities in Khamenei’s propaganda. Everyone, including and especially the besieged residents of Tehran, understands the last two weeks for what they were: An unmitigated disaster for the regime. A series of body blows punctuating an Israeli dismemberment campaign which in September cost Khamenei his only good arm.
Khamenei’s penchant for overwrought, Pyongyang-style bellicosity is anachronistic, and although it’s obviously too late to change tack now (the regime can’t exactly adopt a new PR strategy at this late stage in the game), Khamenei would do well to remember that he’s dealing with a petulant child in Donald Trump.
Yes, Trump seems to understand that keeping up appearances domestically is an imperative for Khamenei. That if Iran’s not allowed to, for example, lob missiles at US airbases following unprecedented American strikes on the regime’s most sensitive assets, the government might fall in a messy popular revolt or worse, the IRGC might overthrow the theocracy and establish a military junta.
But expecting a man like Trump to sit idly by while Khamenei says, as he did on Thursday (or whenever the message was actually recorded) that Iran “delivered a harsh slap to America’s face,” is asking too much of a man who can’t suffer even the slightest criticism, even when it’s in jest.
The leaked US intelligence brief suggesting Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites might’ve only set the regime’s weapons program back a few months makes this situation all the more perilous. Trump spent the better part of 36 hours engaged in a constant effort to refute the report, insisting over and over again that in fact, “obliterated” was an accurate description of the damage done to Fordo. His peacekeeper pretensions aside, Trump may still feel like he has something to prove vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Trump knows Khamenei’s propaganda isn’t any more serious than Kim Jong-Un threatening to blow up Los Angeles (a move Trump might actually support in light of recent events). And it’s important to note that Tehran’s back-channeling with Washington every day in an effort to sustain the ceasefire.
But, again, you can’t depend on Trump keeping a level head when Iran’s jeering him, even as he’s fully aware that Khamenei’s taunts are intended for a domestic audience only.
In the same message, Khamenei claimed, ludicrously, that Trump only entered the war because he “felt that if [he] didn’t, the Zionist regime would be completely destroyed.” There are any number of ways to explain Trump’s decision to enter the fray. That isn’t one of them.
On Thursday, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Radio France Internationale that the centrifuges at Fordo no longer work. “We can’t assess the degree of damage, but given the power of [the bombs] and the technical characteristics of a centrifuge, we already know that these centrifuges are no longer operational,” he said. “They are fairly precise machines: There are rotors [and] the vibrations have completely destroyed them.”
I mentioned this on Wednesday in reply to a reader comment, but I’ll reiterate it here: The only way this awkward setup where the regime in Tehran continues to traffic in threats and belligerence despite being exposed as largely defenseless and completely inept on the counterintelligence front, can go on is if Khamenei pops up with a crude bomb and makes it clear, as the Kim dynasty did, that attempts to bring about regime change could carry nuclear consequences.
From what I’m hearing out of Khamenei, and based on Benjamin Netanyahu’s willingness even to entertain a ceasefire rather than press his advantage to topple the regime, I don’t think that’s on the cards.
H: I know it’s not your bailiwick to speculate on the particulars or timings of markets or geopolitics, but, I would love to hear your opinion on how the endgame might play out: which factions within IRGC could end up filling the power vacuum; who else is a candidate (MOIS? Other theocrats?); the degree to which Mossad might try to place its thumb on the scales of power, and whom they might choose to back.
The quick-and-dirty bomb angle (pun intended) is an interesting one, but if memory services, nascent nuclear powers have typically announced their presence with a test. If Iran is having trouble scraping together enough sufficiently-enriched fissile material for a crude bomb, they’re not very likely to pull off a successful small-yield test.
There’s an entire nuclear physics angle that I could educate myself on, but in truth, the subject is boring to me; it seems that few believe that a functioning bomb is a near-term achievable goal.
Okay, I followed the link to the RFI article, and I have a question for Rafael Grossi. Unfortunately, he’s not returning my calls, so I’ll just send my question out into the æther.
I get that the centrifuges are hugely delicate machines, and can see how any vibrations or imbalance could destroy them. But isn’t that only true when they’re running? Aren’t they a whole lot less fragile if they’re turned off? Were they actually running when the bombs dropped? And if so, why in Allah’s name would they do that?
I mean, look, I think the truth’s somewhere in the middle here. I don’t buy Trump’s “obliterated” remark, but who did? Nobody. Sure, people quoted him. I quoted him. But nobody ever takes him 100% literally. So why’s everybody pretending, days later, like it’s this big betrayal of the public trust? “Oh my God, you mean Trump exaggerated? No! Say it ain’t so!”
This is a guy who still insists that US economic growth during his first term constituted “a boom the likes of which the world’s never seen before,” despite there being no evidence (none, not a shred nor a morsel) to back up that claim.
I’m not defending the guy, I’m just saying that given what we know about him, it almost seems more disingenuous for us to pretend to have believed him in the first place than it does for him to have de facto lied.
I suspect our collective disdain for the man is causing us, in this situation, to imply something that’s a little bit ridiculous. I don’t want to sound like Karoline Leavitt here, but you are going to do some damage when you drop 360,000 pounds of explosives on something.
I don’t care if Fordo’s made of Adamantium: Trump destroyed something on or under that mountain. We just don’t know if it was — you know — a cafeteria, a gamerooom or something more important.
I try to emphasize this occasionally, and I think this is probably as good a time as any to reiterate it: Whatever you want to say about Trump and Netanyahu, you don’t want to accidentally end up rooting for Khamenei to get a nuclear weapon. It’s kind of the same principle as when I used to have to remind myself that just because I found the US presence in Iraq to be abhorrent didn’t thereby make Qassem Soleimani some kind of hero for running a network of militias that maimed and killed American servicemembers. Soleimani, fascinated though I was with the man, was a murderous monster. So’s Khamenei. The fact that Trump’s a crazy clown and Netanyahu’s evil doesn’t change that.
I can just see it now, Trump’s next post on Truth Social: “I can assure all Americans, according to our very fine intelligence, that the gameroom at Fordo was COMPLETELY OBLITERATED!”
Your last paragraph is important to remember. In the context of “be careful of what you wish for.”
Some years back during the last intifada I was passing some earnest young pro-Palestinian demonstrators. I told a couple of them that I supported their concerns about how Palestinian people were being treated. But then I asked “But seriously, would you want to live under a strict Islamic regime like Iran? You know, women covered up and no beer or weed?”
That was met with some foot shuffling and hems & haws
The Federal Reserve put out some numbers last week on its expectations for the economy. It took down GDP growth for this year from 1.7 to 1.4.
That matches the World Bank number that came out a couple of weeks ago.
In 2024, the economy grew 2.8 percent.
In Trump’s first year, it looks like we are on track to grow exactly half of what we grew in Biden’s last year.
And unemployment is likely to hit 4.5 percent by the end of this year.
The Fed is now more concerned about the economy than they were three months ago.
When you’re moving towards slower growth, more unemployment and higher interest rates, that not the direction you want to be moving.