Axis

AT PALESTINE SQUARE in Tehran, a mural that came up early this week captures an exhausted Islamic Revolution’s art of desperation: soaring missiles with the caption ‘Prepare Your Coffins’. This morbid triumphalism, quite characteristic of any Book-born system that trades in the cult of death, is a celebratory nod to Iran’s recent extraterritorial revenge strikes, targets ranging from Syria to Iraq to Pakistan. Each strike is justified as a response to attacks on Iran by Israel or Sunni rebels, including the Islamic State. As Gaza burns and starves and a new battle front opens in the Red Sea, the Iranian aggression makes the Middle East even more incendiary.

What began on October 7 in Southern Israel has become a war with multiple fronts, and its subterranean axis can be traced to Tehran. There may not be concrete evidence, even from Israelis, that implicates Iran in Hamas’ genocidal rage, but that Hamas gets its spiritual as well as military aid from the Islamic Republic is no secret. The Houthis, the new entrant to the war, are Iran’s proxy warriors operating from Yemen’s capital Sanaa. The missile and drone attacks by the rebels on Western ships passing through the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb in the Red Sea, a lifeline of international trade, are a declaration of solidarity with the “freedom fighters” of Hamas. Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Israel’s permanent enemy on the northern border, too, reports to Tehran. The beleaguered mullahs presiding over a deflated revolution sustained by a prison state have the power to unmake the already fragile formula of coexistence in the Middle East. Some strategic readings of October 7 see it as an Iran-backed operation to kill the normalisation process between Saudi Arabia and Israel. It is Iran’s version of chaos theory.

And chaos is what Iran, facing angry streets and periodic security humiliations at home and abroad, needs to keep up the façade of revolutionary bravado. Is Tehran getting away with its sponsorship and export of terrorism? Iran may not have changed from its position of War on the Great Satan, but the West has never abandoned its efforts to engage with Tehran. The Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, which rescued it from severe international sanctions in return for a promise on slowing down its pursuit of nuclear weapons, was the best example of a peace deal with a country feasting on regional disruption, and in retrospect, even as it added to the aura of Obama as a reconciler, the accord pushed the West into the mullahs’ trap. Trump reversed it; and Biden can’t restore it.

Iran, meanwhile, continued with its holy mission of arming and abetting the war on the Great Satan. Hamas, whose primary goal is not the creation of a Palestinian state but an Islamic state, taking a cue from its benefactor, too, realises the uses of photogenic victimhood: the killed and the maimed and the displaced in war-ravaged Gaza are weapons as powerful as the missiles supplied by the patron state. They will fight for more of both. Iran may not be able to send missiles and drones to Satan’s den directly but the Houthis can hit the Devil’s vessels passing through the treacherous strait that leads to the Suez Canal. Hezbollah, militarily Tehran’s strongest proxy, keeps Israel on its toes along the northern border. Prepare your coffins.

Iran’s Triple-H proxy wars are no longer a display of revolutionary confidence. More than four decades on, the Great Islamic Revolution is unravelling, with the ailing Ayatollah Khamenei not sure how long his grip on the prisons, overflowing with heretics and apostates, will last. The regime may extend the prison term of peace activist and Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi and continue to live in fear of short skirts and loosened hair, but the streets are learning new ways to survive the Council of Guardians. The ghost of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old anti-hijab activist who died in police custody three days after her arrest in 2022, still haunts urban Iran. The streets and stadiums are now swaying to a new rebellion of song-and-dance, the public display of which is a crime in the Islamic Republic. When a generation overcomes fear, prisons can’t contain anger and sorrow, as it happened in Eastern Europe in 1989, a decade after Iran lost its freedom to the biggest Book-born revolution outside communism. The original Ayatollah’s weaponisation of Islam inspired global jihad and allowed the ghettos of the Middle East to dream of the Purest Alternative. That was a long time ago.

Every revolution has a lifespan. Iran’s proxy wars cannot conceal the last gasps of a revolution. Prepare your coffins.

AyatollahEuropeGazaGreat Islamic RevolutionHamasIranMiddle East