Three weeks into the joint American-Israeli military operation against Iran, a pressing question occupies Washington: What will ultimately follow these strikes? The attacks themselves are already degrading Tehran’s military capacity, but the more crucial focus is the aftermath — specifically, whether the pressures now weighing on the theocracy point to a negotiated settlement, prolonged attrition, or the collapse of the Islamic Republic from within.
This month, I turn 40. I was born in Iraq, in the middle of my country’s eight-year war with Iran — another war that also involved this same regime. Forty years later, I find myself watching what may be its final chapter. I say this not to make the analysis personal, but because it is a fact that shapes how I read what is unfolding: I have lived my entire life inside the blast radius of Tehran’s decisions and I have learned to recognize the patterns that would precipitate collapse. Those patterns are all present now.
The evidence indicates the Islamic Republic is collapsing, not because of foreign intervention, but because its own internal logic is unravelling. Successive crises have undermined its foundation: A succession process at odds with ideological roots, a population in continual revolt, a gutted command structure, repeated strategic blunders, and a regional environment now decisively turned against Tehran.
Take the succession: On March 9, Iran’s Assembly of Experts named Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the assassinated supreme leader, as the third supreme leader. This decision did not follow the normal consultative or merit-based process expected by the regime’s own rules. It occurred under heavy pressure from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which influenced the assembly to move rapidly. The regime called it continuity. But anyone who understands the Sufi and Islamic mystical tradition embedded in Iranian and Iraqi political culture reads it differently: Installing a family successor runs sharply counter to the system’s founding ideology.
In this tradition, spiritual authority is earned, not inherited by blood. When power turns into a family inheritance, legitimacy dies — a pattern seen before the fall of the Umayyads, the Safavids, and the Pahlavis.
The theocracy defined itself in opposition to the Pahlavi monarchy for 47 years. Now, cornered and desperate, it has done the one thing its founding ideology forbids: installed a son in his father’s seat. The elder Khamenei reportedly opposed it. The reformists warned against it. In the Sufi and mystical tradition that shaped Iran’s political theology, legitimate authority passes through a silsila — a chain of spiritual succession where each link earns his place through merit, not blood. That chain is now broken. It carries far more weight than Western analysts tend to assign to it.
The military campaign has been measured and targeted. American and Israeli strikes have taken out key figures, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, missile sites, and military installations; The target selection has largely focused on the regime’s coercive apparatus rather than civilian infrastructure, though not without cost — a girls’ school near a naval base was struck on the first day. Further, Israel has also targeted civilian energy infrastructure.
Still, Iranians can largely see the disassembly of security forces, not the destruction of their homes. For those who survived the January 2026 massacres — when security forces carried out mass killings of protesters and the regime imported thousands of Iraqi militia fighters to help suppress them — cheers, not mourning, were heard in parts of Tehran the night Khamenei’s death was confirmed.
This dynamic — the decisive role of the Iranian street — now stands at the core of how this war will end.
The arithmetic is simple and terminal. Every time the population has risen up — 2009, 2019, 2022, January 2026 — the suppression has cost more and delivered less. More violence each round. More soldiers asked to fire on their own neighbors. More resources burned to buy a few more months. Mojtaba Khamenei inherits none of his father’s accumulated authority. Much of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ senior leadership is dead. Kharg Island is in ruins. Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, attacking tankers and choking off 20 percent of the world’s oil supply — its last card, and a wasting one, since 90 percent of its own crude exports depend on the same passage. The economic leverage that once purchased loyalty is gone. When the streets fill again — not if, when — the men with the rifles will face a question no ideology can answer: Do you kill your own people to preserve a hereditary throne that your revolution was supposed to make impossible?
How did Tehran arrive here? Not through American bombs. Through a miscalculation so profound it will be studied for decades.
Iran spent decades building a network of proxy forces — Hizballah, Hamas, the Houthis, Kataib Hizballah, and the Iraqi militias — designed to encircle and exhaust Israel without triggering a direct war. All of them assumed that the Israel they provoked on Oct. 7, 2023, was the same Israel that existed the day before. It was not. The horrendous attacks of that day broke something inside Israeli society and the way it viewed and acted to protect its security. For decades, Israel held fragile peace agreements in place, avoided launching new wars against Arab states, and dealt with its enemies through intelligence-driven operations — targeted killings, cyber sabotage, covert strikes — rather than large-scale military campaigns. After Oct. 7, that calculus broke. A state that had chosen precision over escalation decided, in a day, it would no longer tolerate existential danger on its borders or from the power behind it. Tehran read Israeli restraint as weakness. Its proxies read a society that preferred peace as one incapable of fighting.
That was the fatal error.
The destruction of Hamas’ military wing in Gaza, the killing of Hizballah’s senior command, the strikes on Iranian soil in 2025, and now the full joint operation with Washington — all of it traces back to that single misreading. The proxy network that was supposed to paralyze Israel became the provocation that brought the war to Iran’s door. Saddam Hussein made a similar bet in 1990, convinced Washington would accept the annexation of Kuwait. Powers that confuse their adversaries’ patience with permanent paralysis tend to learn the difference all at once.
Western analysts often miss a signal that is obvious to those who follow Arabic-language media. I watch it every day and in three weeks the tone has shifted in a way I have not seen before. Major Arabic networks — Gulf-backed and pan-Arab alike — are no longer covering the war as a crisis. They are now openly mapping what comes after the Islamic Republic. Commentators who for years would not go near the language of regime change are now openly mapping the post-regime future.
For years, Arab capitals hedged. Amman, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Doha, Riyadh — none of them wanted to discover what a cornered Iran would do. The Saudi-Iranian rapprochement of 2023, brokered by Beijing, reflected genuine uncertainty. Containment felt safer than confrontation.
Then Tehran showed them.
On Feb. 28, it did not limit its retaliation to Israel and American bases. It sent drones and missiles into Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates — the sovereign territory of governments that had been trying to keep a working relationship with it. One night. That is all it took to destroy whatever was left of the case for engagement. The Gulf states now understand, with the clarity that only incoming missiles provide, exactly what Tehran thinks of their sovereignty when its own survival is at stake. Nothing. That is why the Arabic channels have turned. When the region’s broadcasters start narrating the end of a system before it has actually fallen, it is not commentary. It is positioning. The people who run the region have made their assessment.
However, everyone should keep in mind that the most dangerous phase of a dying system is, exactly, the dying. A cornered power does not go gently, and Tehran has built networks over 45 years designed to inflict damage far beyond its borders.
The threat to the United States, to Europe, and to the Gulf, is real and active right now. German security officials have warned of sleeper cells across Europe after a fatwa called for holy war following Khamenei’s killing. The U.S. government has a heightened counter-terrorism posture nationwide. The threat environment is already producing violence. In Austin, a gunman wearing an Iranian flag shirt killed three people and wounded more than a dozen on March 1. The FBI is investigating a potential terrorism nexus but has not confirmed a motive. In Michigan, a Lebanese-born man rammed an explosives-laden truck into Temple Israel synagogue on March 12. The FBI classified it as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community” but the formal motive remains under investigation. The attacker had connections to suspected Hizballah members in his phone contacts and had lost family members in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon a week earlier. Neither attack has been formally attributed to Iranian-directed operations. But that distinction may matter less than the pattern — the conflict is generating a radicalization environment in which individuals with grievances, sympathies, or connections to Tehran’s network are moving from anger to action. Hizballah’s long-established networks across American cities were built precisely for a threat environment like this one.
The instability does not stay contained. It radiates outward.Afghanistan under the Taliban, with its porous borders and embedded jihadist networks, is one pressure point. Pakistan, with its Islamist faultlines and nuclear weapons, is another — especially Balochistan, where the sectarian fuse is already lit. Inside Iraq, the militias — Kataib Hizballah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, Harakat al-Nujaba — have attacked United States forces, Kurdish areas, and energy sites over the past three weeks. There are signs that the groups would sooner burn Iraq than let Iran’s project die. This is the same logic that once governed Syria: Assad, or we torch the place.
Civil war inside Iran is a real possibility. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is a web of economic empires, factional allegiances, and regional strongmen. If the center falls, some commanders will fight to keep what they hold. Ethnic tensions —Arab, Azeri, Baloch, Kurdish — could tear the state apart without a credible transition plan. Libya, Syria, and Iraq offer grim precedents.
And yet, Iran is different from Iraq.
Unlike Iraq in 2003, Iran has a population that has repeatedly organized, protested, and articulated its vision for a future—through the Green Movement, the 2019 uprisings, the Mahsa Amini revolution, and January 2026. Iranians have consistently shown a hunger for civil governance that was never possible for Iraq’s society before the Americans arrived.
Iran has an enormous, educated diaspora still deeply tied to home. It has a constitutional tradition that reaches back to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, older than most in the region. It has civil society organizations that four decades of repression have beaten down but never fully killed. And unlike Iraq, there is no foreign army in Iranian cities, no proconsul disbanding the military, no overnight demolition of the state. The precision of the current U.S.-Israel-led campaign — hitting coercive tools while leaving civilian governance intact — gives Iranians the chance to actually shape what comes next.
That is everything. Iraq’s transformation was delivered from outside by a power that did not understand what it was breaking open. And the catastrophe that followed was not primarily a failure of Iraqi society — it was the result of specific, disastrous decisions by the occupying power.
This included the dissolution of the Iraqi army, the sweeping de-Baathification that dismantled the state’s administrative capacity overnight, and the elimination of the very institutions that might have managed a transition. Even a society with deep civil capacity can be destroyed by bad post-conflict choices.
That is precisely what makes the “morning after” planning that I describe below not a policy preference, but an urgent necessity. If the Islamic Republic falls, it will be because its own people pushed it over, and because its own security forces chose, in the end, not to massacre a nation on behalf of a throne that no one asked for. That is not a repeat of 2003. It is closer to the revolution that the Iranians have been trying to finish for more than a hundred years.
The signs are converging now. Precise strikes that hollow out the system without uniting the population behind it. A hereditary succession that betrays the republic’s origin story. A street that has shown, again and again, it will risk everything. An adversary — Israel — that turned out to be nothing like what Tehran imagined after Oct. 7. And a region whose media, whose diplomats, whose money have already turned the page.
The Islamic Republic does not end with a bomb. It ends with a door opening. The bombs have weakened the lock. The people of Iran will walk through.
But let no one pretend the aftermath will be clean. The sleeper networks, the regional spillover, the risk of a state fracturing along every faultline it contains — these dangers are real, and they are imminent. The world owes the Iranian people more than hope. It owes them the discipline to plan for the morning after, so that Iran’s revolution does not join the list of revolutions that devoured themselves.
Concretely, this means several things. Western intelligence services need to treat the homeland threat as a wartime posture, not a monitoring exercise — the Austin and Michigan attacks show the threat has already moved from potential to operational. The Gulf states, who have both the resources and the regional knowledge, should be included in transition planning now, not after the fact. Their buy-in will determine whether a post-theocracy Iran finds regional partners or regional enemies. Washington must resist the temptation to install or anoint Iranian leaders from the outside — the single lesson of Iraq that cannot be repeated — and instead invest in supporting the Iranian civil society networks, diaspora organizations, and constitutional frameworks that already exist. And the international community should begin preparing humanitarian and economic stabilization packages now, not after the collapse, because the window between a regime falling and a vacuum filling is measured in weeks, not years.
There is a teaching in the Sufi tradition: When the zahir, the outward form, no longer reflects the batin, the inner truth, it must fall away. The republic’s outward form has been crumbling for years. This war did not cause its end. It exposed an emptiness that was already there. What fills that emptiness is not decided yet. It could be freedom. It could be ruin. The answer depends on whether the world learned anything from the last time it shattered a state and walked away.
Omar Mohammed, Ph.D., is a historian from Mosul, Iraq, known as the anonymous blogger “Mosul Eye,” through which he documented life under the Islamic State. He is the head of the Antisemitism Research Initiative within the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University, hosts the podcast series Mosul and the Islamic State and 36 Minutes on Antisemitism. He teaches Middle East History and Counter Terrorism at Sciences Po University in Paris.
Image: Hossein Velayati via Wikimedia Commons
