‘The dry and the wet burn together’ is a Persian expression invoked when a fire spreads without discrimination. Once the blaze begins, distinctions collapse: between the combustible and the damp, the guilty and the innocent, perpetrators and victims.
The war launched against Iran by the United States and Israel is a war of choice and of hubris. There is scarcely even the pretence that it was compelled by evidence of an Iranian dash for a bomb or an imminent attack. Such claims do not survive scrutiny; they barely withstand repetition. We are witnessing the realisation of a long-cherished ambition, a neoconservative fever dream that Benjamin Netanyahu has lobbied for, in one form or another, for decades. What sanctions could not achieve, what covert action, assassinations and cyber-warfare failed to deliver, direct military force would now accomplish, with the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as its centrepiece.
Trump and Netanyahu made their maximalist aims clear at the outset. This would be about ‘regime change’. What kind of regime would follow was left opaque, for the rest of the world to speculate on with trepidation. It’s a destructive and failed policy that Trump once vowed to retire for good. Like his mendacious pledges to restore dignity to the American working class, the promise was jettisoned as soon as he assumed office.
In a farcical re-enactment of the Iraq War script, we were told that the Islamic Republic would collapse like a house of cards. But unlike in 2003, there has been little attempt to persuade the wider world, or even the US Congress. The rhetorical labour that accompanied the invasion of Iraq, however flawed or dishonest, has largely been abandoned. Even senior US military officials have struggled to explain how the campaign’s objectives would be achieved swiftly or decisively. The assumption of inevitability has replaced the burden of argument.
The absence of justification is not incidental. It is a morbid symptom of an international system in crisis. The certainties of the United States’ hegemonic stewardship of the ‘international rules-based order’ have been deformed beyond recognition by the Gaza genocide, but no alternative architecture has cohered in their place. Instead there is a politics of gangster imperialism that has neither international nor domestic consent.
The premise of the war rests on a profound misreading of the Islamic Republic. For all its internal fissures and its battered legitimacy, it is not a brittle personalist dictatorship like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. Iran’s formative experience was the eight-year conflict with Iraq, when it was diplomatically isolated and militarily outgunned, yet survived through a combination of ideological mobilisation and asymmetrical adaptation. Since then, the regime has invested in decentralised command structures, missile and drone capabilities, and regional networks designed precisely for the scenario now unfolding: a confrontation with conventionally superior adversaries. Whether it can survive a full-blown war with the globe’s largest purveyor of organised violence is an open question, but it was always unlikely to collapse in the first days of the conflict.
Iran’s aim now seems to be not to secure immediate victory but to raise the cost of the war to prohibitive levels. It sees the conflict as existential. If regime change is the declared objective, then compromise is not an option. What follows is a strategy of endurance and attrition. The Islamic Republic has long prepared for the possibility that the US and Israel might eventually opt for direct confrontation.
The killing of Khamenei may have altered the internal calculus. For years, he was seen, even by critics within the system, as cautiously seeking balance among competing power centres. His death removes a figure who, for all his rigidity, sometimes acted as a brake on more adventurous impulses – such as widening the retaliation to include the Gulf states that form part of the American imperial archipelago. This strategy may yet backfire on its authors. But for now, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – firmly in the driving seat – seems determined to pursue it.
None of this is to deny the profound polarisation within Iranian society. Many people have a deep and visceral hatred of the regime. Years of economic mismanagement, corruption, repression and squandered opportunity have corroded the social contract. The upheavals of recent years, including the protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 and the horrific massacre of several thousand demonstrators in January, revealed generational, class and ideological divides that may prove insurmountable.
War alters political psychology in ways that are rarely linear. Those who loathe the clerical establishment may still recoil at the spectacle of foreign jets in Iranian skies and the explicit declaration that their state is to be dismantled. External assault does not erase internal grievance, but it can reorder it. Anger at the regime may be temporarily subordinated to anger at the attacker. What in peacetime appears as irreconcilable fracture can, under bombardment, assume the form of brittle solidarity. The Islamic Republic’s capacity to mobilise people is diminished from its revolutionary zenith, but it has not evaporated. It remains adept at recoding the conflict in civilisational and defensive terms, using a rhetoric of sovereignty, martyrdom and resistance that has been cultivated for decades and acquires renewed force when missiles fall.
Khamenei’s legacy was far from secure. Aged 86, he presided over an era of deepening securitisation: the throttling of reformist and dissident currents, the crushing of the Green Movement in 2009, the brutal suppression of the Mahsa uprising in 2022-23, and a long accumulation of grievances that defy enumeration. Strategic autonomy and deterrence were prioritised over civil liberties, political pluralism and domestic reform, while he advanced a conservative vision that railed against ‘cultural assault’ (tahajom-e farhangi) from without. His central preoccupation was survival – of the regime, of the state, of Iran’s independence – in a region where the fates of Iraq, Libya and Syria served as constant warnings. For many Iranians, this security-first doctrine came at an intolerable cost, and they unambiguously rejected it.
But in Shia political theology, martyrdom carries a particular force. The memory of Karbala and the death of Imam Hussain are not abstract motifs but part of a living political language and religious practice, in which suffering at the hands of an unjust power acquires moral authority. To be killed by an external enemy does not simply remove a leader; it can recast him. No modern Iranian head of state has met such an end. Naser al-Din Shah was assassinated in 1896 by a domestic radical. The last Qajar monarchs died abroad, in Paris and San Remo. The Pahlavis ended their lives in exile, in Johannesburg and Cairo. Khamenei’s death, by contrast, will be narrated across official channels as the ultimate sacrifice in the face of foreign assault. In death, he may acquire a clarity and coherence that eluded him in life.
Many Iranians, and not a few Syrians, have openly celebrated his death, seeing in it the end of a grisly domestic legacy and a regional policy that helped sustain the catastrophic civil war in Syria. But his followers – and they are not few – regarded him as more than a political figure. For them he was a marja’ al-taqlid (‘source of emulation’). His standing did not approach that of Grand Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq, yet his authority extended well beyond Iran’s borders to millions of Shia faithful. The manner of his death may salvage, even elevate, a legacy that had become deeply contested at home and resented abroad.
Some of the most prominent slogans of the past decade targeted him directly: ‘Death to Khamenei’; ‘Death to the Dictator’; ‘This is the year of blood, Sayyid Ali will be overthrown.’ The rage was personalised. Khamenei was not merely a political office-holder (with considerable personal power and a penchant for micro-management) but the patriarchal embodiment of the system. If Trump’s intention was to remove Khamenei from the political landscape, he may instead have fixed him in it, recast in the eyes of his devotees as a figure of sacrifice rather than failure.
Trump’s foreign policy has long oscillated between the language of retrenchment and sudden maximalist displays of force. In this instance, paleoconservative instincts appear to have fused with neoconservative zeal. Netanyahu’s influence is not incidental. For decades he has insisted that only decisive military action could secure Israel’s unchecked regional domination. The degradation of Hizbullah and the collapse of Assad were read in Tel Aviv as evidence that Iran’s regional position had been fatally compromised. There was truth in this: both developments were serious blows to Tehran, and both Washington and Tel Aviv moved swiftly to exploit the moment. But Iran’s deterrence was never reducible to its alliances, many of which were forged in the crucible of US and Israeli overreach. Its strategy was also domestic, layered, decentralised and internally anchored. The expectation that sufficient pressure would trigger the regime’s collapse confused attrition with exhaustion, and vulnerability with surrender.
The consequences are already radiating outward: missile exchanges; attacks on bases, hotels and ports; the activation of allied networks across the region. American officials now admit uncertainty about the campaign’s duration and scope, or even their preparedness to commit ground troops to this reckless endeavour. This is not a limited operation with predictable outcomes. It is an expanding confrontation whose boundaries are increasingly difficult to define.
The war will not restore equilibrium. It will reorder the region both violently and unpredictably. The Islamic Republic is likely to emerge transformed or weakened in ways not yet visible. But the notion that it would simply dissolve under pressure was always fanciful. States formed in revolution and hardened by protracted siege do not yield easily to external diktat.
The dry and the wet burn together. One hundred and sixty-five graves have been dug in Minab, in Hormozgan province, for those killed when US or Israeli missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh school on Saturday morning as classes began. Most of the dead were girls aged between seven and twelve. Washington and Tel Aviv have sought to distance themselves from the carnage; the photographic record of the desolation remains.
Trump has spoken of a campaign lasting weeks; the Islamic Republic’s current leadership has vowed to fight on. Wars of choice rarely confine themselves to their intended targets. They consume not only the combatants but the assumptions that animate them. What began as an attempt to alter the regional balance may instead hasten the erosion of the order that presumed it could interfere with impunity.