The internal and external crises have worsened for the Iranian mullahs’ regime since the US withdrew from the nuclear deal. But the recent period has witnessed an unprecedented deepening of their troubles. The system is facing crises that besiege it from all sides.
The most striking sign of the magnitude of the danger felt by the mullahs came when the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, Ali Khamenei, rose from the pulpit on Friday, after an eight-year hiatus, to lead the mullahs’ followers and try to mobilize and rally the regime’s supporters around him in this dangerous phase.
Khamenei gave his last sermon in 2012, when he was responding to a statement by US President Barack Obama, who said all options were on the table regarding Iran’s nuclear program. It was a clear message to strengthen the position of the Iranian negotiator at the start of the marathon rounds of negotiations that led to the signing of the nuclear agreement with the P5+1 group in 2015.
But today, the scene seems to have changed. This appearance is aimed less at strengthening the political position of the regime than at maintaining its cohesion, lest it collapse in the face of external pressures and popular protests.
Thus, a personal appearance of Khamenei at the pulpit has several implications. His state of health in recent years did not allow him to preside over the faithful during Friday prayers. His return, despite his state of health, reveals the magnitude of the risks and challenges to which the system is exposed.
Khamenei knows that he is the only person capable of mobilizing the various wings of the regime at the moment. His speech, described as crucial in the Iranian media, has a symbolism that deserves to be analysed.
Khamenei had a sniper rifle at his side, signaling that the regime was mobilized with all its might in a desperate attempt to escape the slowly approaching destiny.
The mullahs’ regime not only faces not only the economic collapse caused by the tightening of US sanctions in the past two years, but also parallel crises with potentially more serious consequences than the economic collapse that mainly affects the Iranian people.
The regime’s other catastrophe is the crash of the Ukrainian airliner as a result of a fatal military error by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. This mistake provoked popular protests in Iranian cities against the successive crises caused by mullahs-backed militias. Before that, there was the crisis of the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, followed by the carefully calculated Iranian military response and the fear of a counter-American response to the Iranian missile attack on two US Military bases in Iraq.
Khamenei’s speech in Friday’s sermon was no exception to expectations. He made a point of denying his regime’s role in triggering regional conflicts. “A big lie,” he called the fact that Iran has a role in triggering proxy wars in the region. Yet he gave no reason why the regime has spent billions of dollars of the Iranian people’s money to fund sectarian militias in several Arab countries and the role these militias play in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Khamenei also made a point of overestimating the effects of the calculated missile attack launched by the Revolutionary Guards on two military bases housing US troops in Iraq. He stressed that the “slap” of the Revolutionary Guard at the American base of Ein al-Assad in Iraq is a “blow to the prestige and arrogance of America. “They have been slapped by the strong hand of the resistance.” Moreover, it does not deviate from the context of the tactical propaganda discourse specifically aimed at supporters of the Vali-ye Faqih and his regime at home and abroad, apart from any objective calculation of the scale and level of the Iranian response.
The Iranian response revealed the falsity of the regime’s claims and its readiness to avoid military confrontation with the US and its awareness of the huge differences in the strategic balance of power and its reliance on a very limited military response to keep its face and bet only on the pro-Mullah propaganda machine to make a big story of the regime’s response.
Although the vocabulary of insults directed at Western states and the US in particular is strongly present in such positions, a classic performance by the Iranian leader and his mullahs, Khamenei has never addressed any other Iranian military action challenging the US. He merely said that “the American crime of assassinating leaders Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was committed in a cowardly and malicious manner” and tried to boost the morale of the regime’s supporters and convince them of the merits of responding to his death.
It may be that Khamenei’s appearance in his Friday sermon was merely an attempt to boost morale and rally the system in the face of the most serious challenge to the regime since 1979.
No new political positions of the Iranian regime were raised in the sermon. The Iranian regime has sensed the seriousness of the unprecedented challenges and fears that mayhem could erupt at this unique historical turning point. The regime could collapse under internal and external pressures, or slide into unrealistic decisions that could open the door to the beginning of its end.
