Iran is not Iraq, Syria or Libya

Khamenei may die, but the Islamic Republic was built to survive him. And that’s what makes it dangerous.

Netanyahu says the war would end if Khamenei died. Some in Washington nod along, imagining the collapse of the Islamic Republic as a sequel to Saddam or Gaddafi. A sudden vacuum. The regime imploding under its own weight. Fireworks over Tehran.

But Iran is not Iraq. And Khamenei is not the state.

That fantasy rests on a shallow reading of authoritarian collapse — one that assumes personalist regimes are inherently brittle. In some cases, they are. The fall of a strongman leaves behind a hollowed-out shell. Libya had no real institutions when Gaddafi fell. Ba’athist Iraq had no internal redundancy — it was held together by fear and fiction. Syria, too, became a death cult with flags.

Iran is different. Its authority does not rest on one man. It is distributed, sometimes chaotically, across military, clerical, bureaucratic, and civil layers. It has redundancy. It has competition. It has enemies — but also constituencies. That’s what makes it dangerous. And durable.

Yes, the Supreme Leader holds immense power. But the Islamic Republic is not a personal fiefdom. It is a system — a hybrid theocracy that has built enough ideological, institutional, and military scaffolding to survive trauma. The state has taken body blows before. It survived the death of Khomeini. It survived an eight-year war in its infancy, a war that chewed through a generation and forced the regime to mature under siege.

It has also survived sanctions, assassinations, cyberattacks, protests, and isolation. Each time, it absorbed the blow. Not without pain. But without collapse.

That’s why today’s escalation matters. Not just because of the missiles or the dead generals. But because of what the state chooses to reveal about itself under fire.

When Israeli strikes hit IRIB — the state broadcaster — many in the West assumed the attack was symbolic. Who would risk their life for propaganda? But the journalists kept reporting. Not out of fear. Not out of loyalty. Because the lines between state and society in Iran are not as clean as we’d like them to be.

IRIB is not just a mouthpiece. It is a contested, layered institution embedded in a political culture that sees itself — rightly or wrongly — as legitimate. That kind of resilience doesn’t come from a cult. It comes from a sense of rootedness. Of continuity. Even now.

This is not to absolve the Islamic Republic. It is violent, repressive, and deeply unjust. It brutalizes dissent. It exploits faith. It polices thought. But it is also a state — with ministries, elections, budgets, factions, and history. Its parliaments may be curated, but they are not empty. Its elites are not ornamental. They fight each other. They plan. They survive.

And they are planning now.

The West has a habit of misreading enemy states — projecting fragility where there is flexibility. That misreading led to Iraq. It led to Libya. It turned regime change into a kind of performance art — televised collapse followed by years of chaos.

But Iran will not collapse on cue. Khamenei’s death will be a moment. Not a reckoning.

The question is not whether the system will fall. It’s how it will adapt. How it will absorb yet another shock. How it will calibrate the next phase of confrontation — possibly with Israel, possibly with the United States.

That’s the danger. And the design.

Iran’s political theology is built to outlast its leaders. That was Khomeini’s greatest insight — to embed the revolution in institutions, not just charisma. The result is a state that limps, improvises, survives.

Khamenei’s death would not be the end of the war. It would be the beginning of the next chapter.