Could Nasrallah’s Death be a Game Changer?

Everyone seems worried that Israel’s assassination Friday of Hassan Nasrallah, by massive bombing of a Lebanese building complex, might lead to all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel. No one can predict anything with confidence in these uncertain times, but I think the opposite is possible. Nasrallah’s assassination has the potential to convince Iran’s leaders that the course they have been pursuing simply isn’t working. Here’s why.

All the analysis I have read of Iran falls into two general categories: (1) its weapons development, including drones, missiles and nukes, and (2) the evil and suspected imperial intentions of its current religious leaders. Little, if any, analysis focuses on Iran’s rich history, its recent development, and the mostly unseen recent changes in its people.

In other words, we’ve focused obsessively on the weapons and the leaders—especially the recent religious fanatics—but not the whole society. This, in my view, is a big mistake. Five glaring truths about Iran are AWOL from most analysis I have read.


1. History. In its guise as Persia, Iran is a very old nation with a rich history. It fought a big imperial war with the Ottoman Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. After a stalemate with the Ottomans, the Shah then in power attacked the Mughal Empire in India, the Ottomans (again), Georgia, and Dagestan. At the end of all this carnage, the borders of Persia/Iran ended up exactly where they had begun.

This same phenomenon occurred after we Americans and our allies enticed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to attack Iran shortly after its Islamic Revolution. In that 1980-1981 war, over a million people lost their lives on one side or the other. Again, Iran’s borders remained right where they had been at the start. It is not a nation with a long or recent history of successful conquest.

Whatever else the Ayatollahs may be, they are good students of history. Might that be why they operate through proxies today, like (in order of decreasing power) Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houtis? Bear in mind that, while all Iran’s big imperial wars were going on, today’s “big powers” on the Arabian Peninsula, including what eventually became Saudi Arabia, were nomadic tribes of traders on camelback.

2. Age.Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 85 years old. Our own supreme leader, Joe Biden, just had the wisdom and patriotism to step down at 81 and let the next generation take the reins. Our ex-president, Donald Trump, seems on a path to lose his bid to regain the White House, although he’s “only” 77. Do you think that Iran’s people, over 60% of whom are under thirty—let alone all the mid-level leaders in between—are eager to let their national and individual fates be decided in geriatric councils?

3. Islam and how it revived. Today we think of Iran as a rogue nation ruled by a bunch of religious fanatics, including the Ayatollahs and the Assembly of Experts, who are elected from amongcandidates they and the Ayatollahs choose. But Iran was not always so, not until recently. In the early 1950s, Iran was a democracy, with an elected leader named Mohammed Mossadegh. Like many emerging leaders in what’s now the EU, Mossadegh was a mild democratic socialist.

During the Cold War, we feared that Iran, by trending toward socialism, would drift into the Soviet camp. So with the help of the Brits’ spooks, our CIA engineered a coup, toppled Mossadegh, and arranged for a return of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (then a sort of titular monarch like the Queen of England, but in exile) to real power. With Western help, he built up a dreaded secret police, the Savak, and then ruled with an iron fist, filling up Evin prison with political prisoners and torturing many there.

Apparently, the only thing strong enough to loosen the Shah’s iron grip was religion. So in 1979, Islamic revolutionaries toppled the Shah and held Americans and a few Canadians hostage for 444 days. The ruling Ayatollah released the hostages on the first day of Ronald Reagan’s new administration, cementing his reputation as a foreign-policy magician.

In this way did Iran’s religious leaders secure the best possible revenge: one served cold. They enhanced the undeserved reputation of a president who used his undeniable charm in the service of selfishness, private wealth and big business, thus helping produce the amoral, thoroughly corrupt society we have today. (Evidence of cahoots between Islamic Iran and the Reagan Administration became stronger with the subsequent “Iran-Contra” scandal, in which the Reagan Administration bought arms from Iran to be shipped to right-wing counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua.)

4. Proxies.Whatever else the Ayatollahs may be, they are not stupid. They have spent their lives steeped in abstract thought, mostly about religion and Iran’s tortured history. If you want to know why they do virtually all their dirty work through proxies like Hezbollah and the Houtis, you need look no further than today’s ruins of Gaza and parts of Beirut.

However much you may protest Irans’ proxies’ acts of violence, you have to admit one thing. No part of Tehran or Qom (Iran’s religious capital) looks or recently has looked anything like the ruins of Gaza or the parts of Beirut hit with 2,000-pound bombs in Nasrallah’s assassination.

Through their violent proxies, the Ayatollahs and their Assembly of Experts have kept Iran’s people from the devastation and suffering of war, with which they are intimately familiar from their long history and their Pyrrhic stalemate with Iraq as recently as 33 years ago. Think maybe they’d like to keep things that way?

5. Nasrallah’s Assassination. If Iran’s Ayatollahs and their Assembly of Experts ever hoped to establish a wider Islamic Revolution throughout their neighborhood, Nasrallah’s death has disabused them of that notion. In their eyes, he was the “best of the best.” He was charismatic, a superb motivator, a gifted organizer, and adroit (until now) at keeping himself and his leadership safe from Israel’s Mossad.

Now he is gone, as is much of Hezbollah’s lesser leadership. Now Hamas’ leaders, if alive at all, are either in secret exile or holed up in tunnels in Gaza, trapped like rats. The Ayatollahs know this, and I think they will look for any sensible way out. So will their new, more moderate president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who has minority Kurdish roots.

Two final points. I have never believed that the Ayatollahs were hell bent on developing nuclear weapons. They are religious men with a bit of a crazy adulation for martyrdom. But perishing in a mass casualty event that kills hundreds of thousands and destroys a whole city, leaving it radioactive and uninhabitable for decades or centuries, is not martyrdom. It’s useless, senseless and catastrophic destruction of human life and civilization. The Ayatollahs are smart enough and (I believe) religious enough to figure that out.

So why do the centrifuges keep spinning? And why does Iran hide some underground nuclear facilities from international inspectors? In my view these are bargaining chips, to be surrendered for concessions that will finally bring some benefit to Iranians from the Ayatollahs’ tortured rule, including revival of their failing economy.

Lastly, why do the Ayatollahs seem to hate Israelis so? Are they really anti-Semitic? I think not: Iran has been dealing with foreign religions, including during the Crusades, for millennia.

To me, the answer is simple: they view Israel as an outside power imposed on their region by us, and they hate us. They and much of the Iranian people hate us because we deposed their first democratic leader and then, three decades later, incited Saddam’s Iraq to make a war on them that killed roughly half a million of theirs, only later to invade Saddam’s Iraq and oversee his execution.

Iran is a nation in a difficult region with a long history. It was busy fighting imperial wars long before the Enlightenment and colonization of North American that spawned our nation began. Its people are proud and rather well educated. (I got to know an Iranian student at Berkeley during the sixties and found him smart, funny, and a good person, with perhaps an outsized interest in American girls.) Again, 60% of its population is under 30, so Iran has vast capacity for change.

As for Russia, Iran knows the history of its centuries-long wars with Islamic lands to its south. Do you think Iran’s leaders are really eager to see Russia conquer all of Ukraine? Are they sure that Putin will next turn his imperial attentions to the rest of Europe, rather than next seek to annex the various Islamic “stans” to its south?

With Nasrallah dead and Iran’s dreams of victorious proxy wars in shambles, now is the time to treat its leaders and its people as equals, as we have never done. Now is a time to negotiate seriously for regional stability without preconditions. And we could well begin by apologizing, as a nation, for the damage we have done to Iran and its people by deposing Mossadegh and inciting Saddam’s Iraq to attack it.

Of course none of this can begin, and none of it can even be discussed, until our current election is resolved. But the Harris campaign could begin, in secret, to make progress in this regard a priority of the Harris Administration. They might even borrow a page from Richard Nixon in Vietnam and declare a “secret plan to end the war.” Their “secret plan” would be old-fashioned, even handed, respectful diplomacy, based on the advantages that recent events confer and the senselessly destructive trend of the ongoing conflict, which all involved can appreciate.



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