Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 20: Regime change in Iran? What the 1979 revolution can teach us.

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Twenty-four people have been killed in Israel since the outbreak of the direct Israel-Iran war. The Air Force is busy hunting launchers inside Iran to constrain Iran's ability to fire missiles at Israeli cities. Parts of Tehran are being evacuated as Israel continues to hunt down the IRGC leadership and demolish the country's nuclear program.But enormous questions remain unanswered. Can Israel actually destroy the nuclear program all by itself? If it can't, and America doesn't join the airstrikes, then what's the goal? Could Israel be hoping to achieve regime change?We raise these questions and others, and then pay a short visit to the 1979 revolution that felled the oppressive Shah in a vast uprising by nearly all parts of Iranian society - and was then taken over and subverted by Khomeini into the theocracy we're still dealing with today. What does that historical perspective tell us about the Iranian regime's staying power?This episode is sponsored by an anonymous donor who dedicated it to the incredible female lone soldiers of the IDF hailing from Silver Spring, Maryland.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail].

Hi, everybody. Welcome to Ask Kaviv Anything. This is an update from the war. My usual background is gone. My home office has been dismantled because we put it together in the bomb shelter in our apartment. And that bomb shelter is now a place where my four kids have slept for four nights because we have been woken up once or twice each night as missiles from Iran head to our area. There have been a couple dozen pieces of broken up missiles that have fallen within a couple of kilometers of our home. So even when the missiles are intercepted, there are dangers. Iranian missiles have already killed at least one person that I know of from pieces of an intercepted missile

falling from a very high altitude after carrying a great deal of momentum when it is hit by an Israeli interceptor. So it's been, I'm exhausted. It's been sleepless nights and being happy for the kids and trying to be involved and being there with neighbors and all of that. But I wanted to come to you now, not so much with a news update on the war, because you know, you're getting that from all the Internet. There are now, I believe, 27 dead in Israel from the missiles that Iran is lobbying at our cities. there are many, many more than that, an order of magnitude more than that, wounded, and this isn't going to end soon. And so what I wanted to try and give was a perspective,

a perspective that is rooted in history about what Israel can achieve in this war with its current strategy, as I understand it, what it maybe can't, and how it's trying to navigate those possibilities and those potentialities available to it. So let's dive into it. But before we dive into it, I want to tell you that this episode is dedicated by an anonymous sponsor

from Silver Spring, Maryland to the incredible female lone soldiers of the IDF. These are young women who, without their parents, come to Israel to serve and to protect us all and to protect my kids. I actually had a conversation a couple of nights ago with my teenage son, who doesn't feel, because teenagers are courageous, it's a very unhealthy thing, like he should run to the bomb shelter when the siren sounds. He feels like that's a

kind of surrender to the enemy. The enemy is trying to terrorize, and his job is not to be terrorized. I love that response profoundly, but I also need him in the bomb shelter. So I told him about the soldiers, but all of them. Some of those unbelievably courageous people flying over Iran right now. No Israeli pilot has been downed, but they're obviously in that great immense danger. We know we have people on the ground. I don't know how many of them are Israelis. I don't know if any of them are Israelis, but I can't imagine that the entire massive Mossad

infrastructure that we have learned about on Iranian soil over the last four days isn't people who are fighting to protect us. Maybe many of them are Iranians fighting to fell that regime, but we owe them, and we owe them a great debt, and they're putting themselves in harm's way so that we can be safe. And I told my son, his one duty right now, he's 14. When he's 18, he'll be that soldier who tells the rest of us what to do, but right now he's 14, and his job is to be safe

so that their sacrifice isn't for naught. Thank you to the soldier. of the IDF. And thank you to the sponsor from Silver Spring, Maryland. I want to dive into, again, forgive the production value. Everything is a little bit fly-by-night. Our wonderful video and audio guy, Guy, is not available. He is spending the week taking care of his family in this terrible situation. So there's not going to be a lot of video inserts. There's hopefully the audio was good. It's whatever I know how to do. So just put that out there. I want to say that the central question I think that I have been asked, and I think that a lot of Israelis are asking, but also a lot

of people watching from overseas are asking. I certainly think the Iranian regime is asking, is what the goal of the war is. The destruction of the nuclear program and the infrastructures of the nuclear program is going apace. It's going well. It's going far better than anyone assumed we would be in this stage. A lot of the enrichment infrastructure in Natanz appears to have been destroyed. Again, it's hard to know from within Iran, but that's the things that are reported by people who theoretically have some deep insight into what's happening on the ground. The great question, of course, are the places that Israeli munitions can't penetrate,

primarily and chiefly and famously, Fordo, where the great enrichment halls are still safely buried under a mountain. That's why people say that Israel is hoping America comes in with its 30,000 pound penetrators and the kinds of munitions carried by the B-2 bombers that can penetrate that mountain. They can essentially flatten that mountain. That has driven, of course, part of the debate in America by people who don't like Israel very much about American troops dying for Israel and all these little keyboard warriors saying, I ain't going to die for Israel.

But the question is serious, even if it's being manipulated for various prejudices and political peccadillos. The question is a serious one. What can Israel achieve without America? Can Israel go after fordo? And we've seen over the last couple of days an expansion of the Israeli strikes beyond the nuclear program and to some of the energy sector, some of the pieces of the Iranian economy of the Iranian state institutions that are controlled by the revolutionary Guard Corps that are controlled by this second army the Iranian regime possesses whose sole task is to protect the Supreme Leader and the Revolution, including from rebellion from within

Iran. And so there does appear to be this attempt to weaken the regime itself, that revolutionary superstructure that overlays the Iranian state, that robs the Iranian state and the Iranian people blind, that has taken Iran's very strong. vast natural resource fortunes. I mean, this is a country rich in oil and gas and has spent it on insane foreign wars and proxies. A great many of them, after Iranians have been forcibly spending billions on these proxies, a great many of them destroyed since October 7, since Israel decided to take its enemies' armaments and warnings seriously and go after them. So what does that mean? Does that mean that Israel is now going after the regime?

Does that mean that it wants the regime to fall? Benjamin Netanyahu said that this is a moment that Iranians could seize to become free. A lot of discourse on Twitter and other places on the Internet seems to center around this question. What does Israel want? I want to submit that Israel doesn't quite know what it wants. And the reason it doesn't know what it wants is that it doesn't really know what's available to it. Israel's a small country.

population of Austria. It doesn't have the capability to invade on the ground. So what do you mean by regime change? You mean you're going to break the Iranian regime so much that what? Who changes the regime? What other power centers in Iran could drive that regime change? I think the Israelis are calculating as follows. Israel's not trying to drive regime change because it doesn't know how resilient, just politically resilient, the Iranian regime is. Iran's regime has been revealed to be unbelievably incompetent, genuinely, profoundly incompetent. All the warnings, everything Israel could do to Chizbala, everything Israel could do in Iran, for example, the killing of Ismail Haniyah back in September,

in the guesthouse of the Supreme Leader for the inauguration of the Iranian President, one of the most protected places and moments in all of Iran and in all of the history of the regime, and an Israeli bomb exploded humiliatingly killing the personal guest of the Supreme Leader. And none of that made the Iranian leadership take the precautions of assuming that they're totally and utterly penetrated by the Mossad. That there were forces on the ground in Iran working very closely with Israeli intelligence and laying the groundwork for many years. Factories of drones were built in Iran under the nose of the Revolutionary Guards and Iranian intelligence services, and Iran did not know it.

What other tricks does Mossad have up its sleeve? Can Fordo be blown up from within, if not from without? We have no idea. We simply don't know. I would say it's wrong to assume that the Mossad doesn't have more up its sleeve, or the IDF doesn't have more up its sleeve, even if it ends up not having more. This was already quite an astonishing series of triumphs

on the way to where we are now, roughly four days into the war. Israel doesn't know if it can deliver regime change. So why does it talk about regime change? And I think it's because it figures any result of talking about regime change is a good one. If it helps mobilize factions of Iranian society that can create those power centers that can march on the regime and bring it down, why not? If it results in the regime itself, not knowing the answer to the question, can we survive in Israeli assault that crushes our capacity to oppress our own people and therefore drives regime change? change? Will we ourselves survive this regime change with half of the security and military leadership taken out by the Israelis? And that Iran, an Iran that stares into an abyss that

cares about, the suffering of people in Tehran is not something that Chamin Aene feels in his deepest soul. He's a repressive autocrat. But maybe regime change is an abyss that terrifies him and drives him to a negotiating table in which his new kind of negotiations with the administration over the removal of nuclear infrastructures from Iran actually ends the Iranian nuclear threat. It doesn't hurt to have the enemy terrified. And so talk about regime change, whether you can do it or not do it, whether you know if you can do it or don't even know whether or not it's in your capacity. Talk about regime change. So that's how people should understand Israeli conversations about regime change. I don't get a sense from Israeli officials,

and no official has set it out right in this way, that that is the goal and that they know how to get it done. It appears to be that they simply calculate that there's no downside to talking that way. And I'm not sure they're wrong. In other words, if the Wall Street Journal just reported an hour before I started recording, that in fact, Iran is trying to sue for peace. And if that's true, it's not a function of us taking out enough launchers of their ballistic missiles to deny them strategic capacity to pulverize our cities. It's a function of them seeing an end to their own regime on the horizon. Let them keep seeing that end, whether or not it's actually there. But there's another piece that I want to get to, and this is the historical perspective.

Iran has a regime that has spent 46 years basically failing at everything it has tried to do, failing economically, failing in terms of development of science and technology and innovation, failing, I would argue, culturally. Iran is a society with tremendous culture and cultural output. But the regime is very repressive, and it's very repressive toward women, and it's very repressive in the public space, and everything has to be very controlled in ways that are hard to circumvent. This is radically different up in the north compared to Tehran.

It's radically different in Arab areas, and off in the east on the border of Afghanistan. It's a vast country, an ethnically diverse country, a politically complex and not totalitarian country. The Iranian regime's perspective on how to keep control of its population is very different from, for example, North Korea. In a totalitarian state like North Korea, if you don't support us, the regime, you oppose us. You're automatically assumed to oppose, and so everybody always has to be dancing this special dance of support or the consequences are disastrous. But Iran's dictatorship, even though it is very much a dictatorship that has violently oppressed anyone who rose up against it in the last 46 years, from day one, by the way, killing thousands of potential opposition members and opponents, it's actually a regime that assumes that you're with it unless you express being against it. In other words, instead of being, if you're not with us, you're against us.

it is, if you're not against us, you're with us. And so it has a lighter hand on Iranian society. Probably because it knows that Iranian society wouldn't, culture matters. Culture changes how people and societies respond to different situations and stimuli. Probably wouldn't tolerate too heavy a hand. So it's a regime navigating a delicate dance. And what I want to tell you today is that it has always been thus. It is not only a regime navigating a delicate dance.

It's a regime that knows that it subverted the revolution of 1979. It knows that that revolution was far bigger than just the Ayatollahs, far bigger than just the rule of the jurist, theocracy that Khomeini, or Khomeini established in Iran after 1979. It knows that many of these social forces and economic power bases, remain and it knows that it only holds power by playing a complex game between many power centers. So I want to try and lay out a tiny bit of that history. As with every episode that dives into history even a little bit, the point isn't to encapsulate

the history or be the last word on the history and all you need to know, it's to give openings for you to step into an explore. You might come to different conclusions from what I come to, but this will be the background that really, I think, explains when Chaminéh himself, the Supreme Leader, is looking around him and wondering what to do and trying to figure out a path forward, he comes from a certain place and certain set of experiences and faces a certain reality interpreted through the lens of that history. And so to understand the kinds of choices that face him, how he perceives those choices and how he might actually, choose his path forward, you have to know that history. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was part of a much larger set of Muslim restorationist movements or revivalist movements all over the Muslim world, but especially in the Arab world. And they followed the perceived catastrophic failure of nationalism, secular nationalism of

Nasser, of course, the single greatest failure of Nassarist, pan-Arabist, secular Arab nationalism, which was never really fully secular, but nevertheless wasn't specifically Islamist politics, the perceived failure of it was, of course, to destroy Israel. It tried multiple times in wars to unite the Arabs and unite the Arab armies and launch a grand invasion that would finally succeed and prove that all the Arabs had to do was unite and awaken to their true selves, then Israel would be washed away. This challenge to Arab dignity and Muslim dignity would be wiped away. And the consistent failure to achieve that was the single bit, not the only, the establishment of decrepit and incompetent dictatorships was very much up there. And there were other blows

to Nazarism and at Pan-Arabism. But the failure to destroy Israel was the big one. And that failure created new impetus for a religious movement that had been there a long time. If you saw my video about the theological lineage that produced Hamas, you know that this conversation about Islamic restoration and Islamic revival as the solution to the Arab crisis of modernity, the sense of powerlessness and failure in the face of European power and European imperialist conquest, that was there. It was very much there, very powerful.

there. But the initial post-war period was a period of nationalism. And nationalism was what dominated, and nationalism created the elites and created the institutions and created the states and the power bases. The slow receding of nationalism in the face of Islamic revivalism had its version in Shia, Iran. Iran at the time was a pro-American dictatorship led by the Shah, the king, in the context of the Cold War. So the Shah was with America, opposed to the Soviets. He oppressed Islamist groups. He also oppressed Marxist groups in Iran, various leftist groups

that he thought sided with the Soviets. That's not a unique story in the 1970s or generally in the post-war period. You had, for example, South Korea. South Korea was a dictatorship, but very much within the Western American orbit in the Cold War. And that dependence and closeness to the West ended up developing South Korea quickly and democratizing South Korea. And so there was every reason to believe that Iran was on that kind of trajectory of development and democratization

because it was in that sort of democratic camp, the free world, and the Cold War. Nevertheless, life under the Shah was not great. There was a secret police that absolutely terrorized all descendants. from the Shah's regime. There was massive inequality driven by the fact that the oil wealth concentrated in very narrow, very wealthy elites while the rest of the country lived in destitution. And you had massive corruption. And so every power base, whether it was Muslim clerics, whether it was unions, whether it was merchant organizations, whether it was university intellectuals, had its own different sense and reason why the regime was, was, was

corrupt and set against them. What that reality, what that profound mismanagement and autocracy of the Shah ended up doing was unifying all of these different bases. You had liberals, you had nationalists, you had women's rights groups and feminists, you had students who were often radicalized either to the Islamist or to the communist factions. All these different kinds of groups all had a shared enemy and a shared sense of what that enemy was doing to society. and so began an uprising, a slow-moving, but incredibly broad uprising across Iranian society. And the most famous moment was in the holiday of Ashura, December 10, 1978. It was an astonishing moment, December 10 to 11, two days in 1978, in which probably as many as nine million Iranians took to the streets all over the country.

In Tehran alone, there were two to three million protesters, half of the population of the capital. And they were everybody. They were all those people. They were the religious factions under Khomeini. They were the Marxist youth movements. They were the working classes, the slum dwellers who organized in their own groups and came out. They were the middle class professionals, the intellectuals, the labor unions, the merchants of the bazaar.

They were everybody, and they marched en masse. That was the beginning of the end. It would take five more weeks for the Shah to flee, and then two weeks later, Khomeini returns from exile, and then this regime is established. The Iranian revolution was enormous and broad, and included within the coalition, people who wanted democracy,

who marched under banners, about popular sovereignty and voting and elections. And at the very beginning, there was every reason to believe that this union was the new Iran. And it could resolve itself into a kind of, you know, parliamentary, multi-faction, multi-vision kind of competitive democratic politics. And then everything started to deteriorate very quickly. Khomeini first allowed the appointment of a liberal national government, led by Bazar Ghael the head of the liberal nationalist faction in that broad coalition,

which Khomeini himself wanted in the revolution. He wanted as broad a coalition that incorporated as many different groups. But then as soon as he's in power, he begins to systematically push them aside and dismantle that grand coalition. During the revolution, the Islamists enjoyed one enormous advantage, which was the institutions, the mosques, the seminaries, the charities, the funds and endowments, and when a preacher would get up in a mosque and give a sermon,

that was a kind of conversation that could be quite subversive and much, much harder to suppress because it had that religious legitimacy than Marxist student groups at a university. And so there was this organizational capability that Khomeini built out that meant that he was the leader of all of this sort of broad-based revolution that Iranian society as a whole had conducted against the shamanian. Shah and against the tyranny of the Shah. He had a charismatic leadership style. He talked about things that sounded beautiful, that mattered, that he talked about legitimacy and justice and martyrdom

and anti-imperialism, and he didn't promise specific policies, but he did promise a better day, and he promised a more authentic political system that wasn't this terrible, powerful, wealthy elite robbing the people blind for nothing but its own edification. And so he led. And at the beginning, he actually created a mass appeal. He was very worried about bringing all the different groups that he had led to the revolutionary moment with him to legitimate his rule,

legitimate the new government that was being, the new state and regime that was being built out. So, for example, the liberal government, Bazargan was formed right after the revolution, and it was about reassuring the professional class, reassuring the merchant class, that it wasn't going to be just some Islamist theocracy. It was going to be something broader.

Bazargan himself resigns in the hostage crisis of 7980, and by the early 80s, the revolutionary regime is already purging en masse. liberal officials and technocrats and bureaucrats from throughout the state system, turning, creating a discourse of anti-American sentiment. One of the things the embassy takeover of 1979 did, those 44 days in which they held hundreds of American hostages, was distinguished clearly between the radicals and the moderates within the clerical

revolutionary class. And this was a distinction that was true. then, and it is true today. The distinction between the Rafsanjani's and the Ahmadinejad's. Google those names. Those are presidents of Iran, as these different factions all compete under the watchful eye of the supreme leader. And so you had different factions. You had a regime that knew how to subvert, how to first of all, gain the support of other parts of Iranian society, and then turn on them once it reached power and gained power. And it knew how to dismantle opposition power centers. So the Mujahideen, for example, were hunted down.

And there were mass executions. The liberals were pushed out. The Revolutionary Guards, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, built out to protect the Islamic Revolution. That's what it is. It is a second military with an Air Force, with a Navy, with ground forces, with a missile command, whose function is to protect the revolutionary religious regime from, for example, the standing

national army of Iran, from all these other power bases. An entire court system was developed that is a revolutionary court system, separate from the standard judiciary, the besiege militia that we've seen in every protest, including the protests in 2022. The most recent protests where tens of thousands were arrested and more than 550 killed, the besieged militias are an entire system that take to the streets as pro-regime thugs and beat to death or beat into submission

anyone who takes to the streets in opposition to the regime. And so they built out mechanisms of control all loyal to the supreme leader and systematically dismantled. Now, all of the things that we see in protest today were all created at the very earliest years of the regime. And what's interesting to note is that it then basically froze in place.

All of those systems exist, all of those functions, all of those, there's only been two supreme leaders, right? Khomeini and then Khomeini since 1989. And so you now have a regime that if we begin to seriously ask the question of its vulnerability to regime change because it'll maybe be weakened or humiliated in a war with Israel, we have to look at that larger story of those many different. camps in Iranian society. Commercial elites and political elites and and professional

elites and students and the poor and the merchants of the bazaar, all terribly, terribly hurt by the sanctions regime, by the fact that this religious revolutionary regime has done nothing with Iran's resources, with its people's resources, but war and has not built out what should be an incredibly wealthy, incredibly competent, incredibly educated, incredibly advanced country. Turkey is close to the West and has squadrons of F-35s. There's no reason Iran can't be close to the West and squadrons of F-35s. Just in terms of development, never mind personal identity of the national identity or religious life. You could be a conservative religious country and not fomenting revolution that kills hundreds of thousands of people just in the last

decade, and makes enemies of countries that are capable of exacting massive costs if you come after them with hundreds of ballistic missiles and try to target their children, as Iran has done with Israel. So can this regime fall? I don't know. Nobody knows. It looks like the regime itself doesn't know. But this regime is a betrayal. It's a standing betrayal of a very great and powerful and wonderful moment in Iranian life, which was the revolution of December 1978 where 9 million Iranians marched and the moment of unity

between Islamist and liberal and feminist and Marxist and lower classes and upper classes and educated professionals and bizarre shopkeepers. They all came together. Half of the population of Tehran came out into the streets from every walk of life. And the people who had the advantage because of the organization, because of the language, because the vocabulary, because they could appeal to religion,

one of the most important things to know is that thousands of street protests accompanied the 2020 protests for Marseh Amini, the young woman arrested by the modesty police back in 2022. And the regime was forced to stay in order to survive, in order to suppress the protest, arrested tens of thousands of people and killed hundreds of them. The best polling we have tells us that somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the population supports the regime at this point. And the 10 percent is among those under 30. The younger you are, the less you support the regime. A huge number of Iranians appear to be reportedly based on these kinds of studies.

secularizing, and they're secularizing for a very specific reason, because the regime has used religion as a mechanism of control, as a validating vocabulary, and as an institutional justification for what is just oppression for a generation now. And so resistance to the regime takes the form of a vocabulary of resistance to religion. And so Iran is one of the possibly fastest secularizing peoples in the region or within a thousand miles of itself. And And finally, well over 80%, and in some polls, in some ways of asking 90%, of the Iranian population simply doesn't believe that this regime can change, can bring reforms that will fundamentally change,

the fact that everybody feels that they're living on borrowed time and in dire straits. So you have a people that, not only by the history of it, but by every indication we actually have now from all the data we can muster, really hate this regime. and a regime that built out a proxy system that was meant to destroy Israel and fundamentally misunderstood the nature of Israel, the nature of the environment, the nature of its own proxy system. October 7 woke Israelis up, reminded them that the enemy, or made them believe, they had not believed, that the enemy genuinely is coming for them, and therefore convince them that there are no cost too high to pay to dismantle this enemy, because the enemy, enemy's plan for them was death. Don't convince your enemy it's a fight to the death,

unless you're willing to fight the enemy that is willing to fight to the death. And that was Iran's great strategic mistake. And on October 7, Hamas triggered that mistake. Hamas believed Iran would come to its rescue. Chazbalah would start shooting those volleys of missiles and rockets at a massive scale, not at a small scale in the north, emptying the towns of the North, which the Israelis experienced is a terrible thing, but nevertheless, not 200,000 rockets and missiles landing in Tel Aviv and setting the city on fire and dismantling it and just devastating it, which was what Chisbalah's capabilities were meant to do in the real war. The actual war Iran cared about. Hamas launched an attack misunderstanding the nature of the proxy system.

The proxy system was meant for Iran's revolutionary regime to stay safe while the Arabs around Israel both slowly degraded it, fought it, made its life miserable, and also suffered its reprisals. And Iran misunderstood its own proxy system. Iran built a proxy system to bleed Israel. And with the capabilities Israel has shown in the last 20 months, we have learned that, in fact, the proxy system bled Iran. And the Israelis fairly quickly, and with tremendous competence, destroyed those proxies. And now Iran faces in Israel that has total aerial dominance, total air supremacy over Iran itself. They have an arsenal of thousands of missiles that can be launched at Israel, but they don't have as many launchers as they need to actually sustain a high

rate of fire. And the Israelis, every time there's a launch, have basically nightly Air Force overflights of Iran hunting for more launchers. The Israeli Air Force said today that it has already taken out a quarter to a third of those launchers. I forget which number they gave, but it was either one of those fractions. Some significant peace, in part that was telling the Iranians, we know how many there are, and it's only day four. Keep launching. We're going to find him. Iran unified Israelis woke them up and reminded them of their strength. Even as this revolutionary regime whose sole accomplishment is the dismantling of Iranian society, the shattering of Iranian power bases and elites and competence,

that has been its only achievement, its own survival at the expense of the rest of Iranian society itself, it woke up the enemy to the enemy's strength, competence, and unity, while forcing the enemy to showcase before the entire region everything that it has done to Iran. It's weakening of Iran. It's transforming of Iran into this dilapidated shell of what that society could be. I don't know if regime change is available to us.

I don't know that Israel needs regime change. Iran has already sued for peace, the Wall Street Journal reported today. All Israel needs. is to drive the Iranians back to the negotiating table, instead of the idea that the American demands are the beginning of a negotiation, and every round of negotiations is the beginning of the next round of negotiation, for 15 years while it continues to develop more centrifuges and more capabilities and weaponization technologies,

instead of that kind of negotiation, the Israelis only need Iran to have the kind of negotiation that says that having the nuclear program is more dangerous for the regime than not having it, and so it's willing to part with the infrastructure for the first time. just to survive. That's a high bar, but it's a much lower bar than finding in Iranian society the kinds of movements and peoples and groups and elites and power bases that can actually bring down the regime and clerical rule. But if there isn't regime change as a result of the Israelis finally facing down this scourge

on the Middle East, then Iran, not Israel, is going to be that much worse off for it. Thank you for joining me.