What Iran’s Regime Tries To Achieve By Kicking The Can Down The Road – OpEd

The principle reason Iran’s regime is not reformable is mainly because according to the regime’s own constitution, the Supreme Leader is above the law. Everything must pass through the Supreme Leader’s filter: even the law, Majlis (parliament), judiciary, executive branch, and even how the nation’s provisions are supplied. Thus, any reform or reformist maneuver is merely a political game aimed at deceiving audiences and opponents, both inside and outside the country.

Based on this, it can also be deduced about the regime has no way forward other than contraction. Even if it spins the ball of deceptive reforms for a while, it tightens the bonds of contraction elsewhere. Look at the sudden increase in the number of executions and the rise in prices after Masoud Pezeshkian was appointed as the regime’s president.

The regime is in a deadlock, and any effort to escape that deadlock only drives a larger nail into the framework of their own impasse. The embodiment of this situation is Khamenei’s appointment of Mohammad Mokhber as his advisor and assistant. Mokhber was the vice president of the now-deceased Ebrahim Raisi, who epitomized the worst crimes of the regime. In fact, Khamenei, in his view, seeks to break the deadlock of diplomacy and foreign policy with Pezeshkian and to maintain Raisi’s shadow for the military forces with Mokhber, while continuing repression and executions. This essentially establishes an unofficial government in the shadow of the official government.

Khamenei, with this appointment, believes that he is continuing the political apparatus of repression with the same strategy that brought the Raisi to power and healing the deep wounds of factional splits and infighting between regime factions after Pezeshkian’s arrival. However, experienced realities will again prove that Khamenei’s actions will only exacerbate the splits and turmoil within the regime far more than in the past two or three months.

It can be observed that powerful factors such as:

– The mass boycott of sham elections

– The continuation and expansion of protests by various social groups

– The rise in resistance of political prisoners

– Thehistoric reportof Professor Javaid Rehman, the former the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Iran, proving Khomeini and his successors to be criminals

– The widening poverty, deprivation, and class divide

– And the blowback from the regime’s foreign warmongering and terrorism

All these factors have presented Khamenei with a picture of a society primed to explode. These external factors continually strike the regime’s structure, and the regime has realized that maneuvering with Pezeshkian and Mokhber has neither healed nor provided any hopeful outlook.

Considering this situation facing the regime, Khamenei has realized that even the slightest opening maneuver will immediately lead to the unraveling of the regime’s structure, resulting in internal collapse and external uprisings.

The above realities indicate that the regime’s structure is turbulent on the inside and has no way out from the external conditions of uprising and revolution. The regime’s tactics of kicking the can down the road only deepens the regime’s crises and brings it closer to its final confrontation with the people.