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The Iranian regime is built to survive. As a result of the unique story of its emergence and the very unlikely survival of the movement in the face of both the Iraq-Iran war and the (initially) much larger socialist/student/Tudeh movement that it and its predecessor(s) utterly crushed, the IRGC is one of the most competent military bodies in the world if you consider its primary purpose the pacification of the Iranian people.
Khomeini understood that the bourgeois class would never fully support an Islamist revolution. Unlike various historical socialist revolutionaries, though, he realized that at least some of them were necessary for the economic survival of the state. He therefore set in motion a series of events that would lead to them being policed, essentially, by the sons of the devout lower middle-class, often semi-rural (but occasionally urban or rural) who would form the nexus of the IRGC and be utterly loyal to the clerical class (without whom they would go back to being nobodies). The IRGC would enrich itself, but never quite to the extent of e.g. the Egyptian or Pakistani military states, where military control of the economy is so absolute that the private sector is entirely subordinate to it in most industries.
In general, if you look at the big 3 US ‘axis of evil’ states still around, they each have a different relationship to popular protest. North Korea has almost none, not only because of the absoluteness of ideological surveillance and the ubiquitous East German style custom of informing on neighbors but because the people are completely ideologically indoctrinated into dynastic worship of the Kim family. Cuba has middling protests every 25 years where one or two people get killed and someone prominent resigns or apologizes but the regime is never under serious threat; Cubans are too lazy for revolution and those smart and ambitious enough to try it either rise within the Party or flee to America.
Only Iran actually has regular violent protests; unlike the Cubans or North Koreans, they have real, serious interest in regime change. But the IRGC is a well oiled machine with no loyalty to the protestors, and it just keeps gunning them down, hundreds a day, until order is restored. Life in Iran is bad but not hell, and to the domestic middle and upper middle classes, with their email jobs and social media, this is not worth dying over. That is why the regime stands a good chance of surviving in some form.
This is generally true. I think you're underestimating how much the IRGC dominates the economy, but very accurate overall.
You're missing a few key variables:
Absent external support or a preference cascade among security forces to stand down/switch sides, the regime might just simply kill its way out of this.
But if it does, it will still be weaker than it ever was before.
very likely bullshit to drown out eventual losses from the US/Israeli intervention. It's really hard to kill 10K people in days without heavy military operation with airstrikes and such.
Actually, no.
It's very, very fucking easy to kill 10k massed, unarmed people in mere hours with machine guns.
Reportedly, a regime official told Reuters it's 2k.
It’s certainly possible, but I would have expected the protests to disappear if the regime was willing to mow-down crowds of civilians like this.
That is what the regime hopes, yeah.
The protestors are, at a minimum, holding out for promised US support. That does seem to be what Trump has done at this point.
Evidently they are unfamiliar with the US record in this regard.
Can you think of reasons why this is not very much like the Bay of Pigs at all?
Support would be more difficult? We're no longer in a cold war? We have an even more mercurial President?
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