Iran holds its snap presidential election this week, with an electorate enraged by government corruption and voting manipulated by a regime terrified of change. To cover up its manifest failures the political leadership has a choice: root-and-branch reform or escalated participation in a spreading Middle East war.
So far, it has used its proxy legions — Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — to squeeze Israel and the West. Direct participation of the Iranian military or Revolutionary Guard is limited to tactical advice, weapons and training because the regime is sensitive enough to know that a massive deployment of its young men could tip the country into revolutionary anger.
The rapper Toomaj Salehi, in his song Battlefield, called his protest generation the “roaring fighters”. Now in jail, severely beaten, the charges against him include “corruption on Earth”.
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The regime is facing an existential moment. Its sinister Guardian Council has weeded out all serious reformers as potential successors to Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a somewhat mysterious helicopter crash last month.
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One moderate, the mild-mannered 69-year-old surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian, has made it on to the final selection list but this is regarded as a regime ploy to raise turnout in a country that has lost faith in any part of the political class.
The two favourites are hardliners: the former Revolutionary Guard chief Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who as a securocrat could be the man needed to guide the regime through popular turmoil; and Saeed Jalili, who used to be the chief nuclear negotiator. He stonewalled the West during talks while Iran secretly pressed ahead with its nuclear weaponisation programme.
Jalili is the most intriguing choice. Iran is moving faster towards mass production of weapons-grade uranium and whatever the purpose of this surge — to get a second Biden administration back into a sanctions-lifting nuclear-curbing deal, to mount a bluff on a new Trump presidency or to establish a deterrent for when Israel starts to hit Hezbollah hard — Jalili would at least understand how to credibly integrate a combat-ready nuclear device into the country’s foreign policy.
This month Iran admitted to the nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, that it is installing several cascades of new enrichment centrifuges. By the calculations of the well-regarded, Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, some of the declared stocks in the underground Fordow site could be enriched to make 92 kilos of weapons-grade uranium within ten days. That’s enough to make three nuclear bombs. Other Fordow stocks could be enriched to weapons grade in two months. In other words, Tehran is speeding towards “break-out”. That does not mean the automatic use of the nuclear bomb but it brings a targeted explosion inside the frame of geopolitics.
The plot could unfold like this. Jalili becomes president, probably after a second round of voting. President Jalili could put pressure on the ailing supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to ease the fatwa banning the production and use of nuclear weapons.
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Nuclear weapons were first declared contrary to Islamic teachings by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a position hardened by the use of chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s eight-year war against Iran. Khamenei is said later to have declared an “oral fatwa” against the use of nukes. Now he is ailing and may try to hand over power to one of his sons. Jalili could have the persuasive power to nudge the ayatollah into lifting or amending his fatwa. Shia clerics have in the past amended such bans.
A similar procedure could be applied if the supreme leader was convinced the very existence of the Islamic Republic was at risk. In 2021 the minister of intelligence at the time, Mahmoud Alavi, cast doubt on the self-imposed nuclear ban: “A cornered cat may behave differently from a cat that is free.” That is, the perceived threat level relativises a nuclear fatwa. The current regime shows every sign of behaving like a cornered cat.
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The scholar Emanuele Ottolenghi compared the situation to a man who visits a bicycle shop every weekend for years, coming home with one part or another. One day he invites his neighbour to his basement where there are dozens of bikes in various stages of repair. “Are you planning to build bicycles?” asks the neighbour. “I don’t know,” he replies. “I haven’t decided yet.” Do we believe him, asked Ottolenghi? Do we believe Iran, which has spent decades assembling the components of a nuclear military programme?
A different kind of leadership is emerging in Iran. It could be more open to risk if it comes to believe it can cripple Israel without serious repercussions from the United States. The days when the West could buy off the technocratic elite in Tehran, or at least encourage their self-enrichment, have gone.
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The new leadership is likely to be an unsubtle combination of Revolutionary Guard tough-nuts, police-state professionals who believe they are part of the autocratic zeitgeist, ultimate beneficiaries of the weakening of the US and the West.
The bomb, when it happens, could be merely a status symbol, a way of keeping Israel and Saudi Arabia in a state of tension. Or it could end up in the hands of one of Iran’s proxy legions. Nobody knows.
But this much is clear: week by week, the region is becoming more dangerous. The Iranian regime sees how the Gaza campaign is radicalising Muslims, both Sunni and Shia. It senses that Hezbollah, its trusted front line of last resort, may not be able to hold up to Israeli action. A dangerous moment.
