Most apt for our purposes is the word “checkmate,” essentially a transliteration of Shah mat, Persian for “the king is helpless.” In other words, there is nowhere else to turn. Is there a better descriptor for the dead end into which Trump and his Know-Nothing minions have led the American superpower?

While overlooked by the Trump administration and, to a great extent, the majority of the Western Commentariat, from the outset Iran has held the strategic upper hand in many aspects of the conflict. These advantages go well beyond the considerable Iranian achievement of absorbing the initial onslaught of February 28 and surviving to fight on.

Military – The USA has created the most lethal force in history, designed to project power with few US casualties. These weapons are high-tech and very expensive. For the most part, they will do what they were designed to do. What they cannot do, is subdue by remote control a resilient state such as Iran, which is prepared to absorb enormous losses. The depletion of US missile stockpiles and the practical inability to commit ground forces are two sides of the same coin.

By contrast, Iran has a military-security apparatus fit for purpose, that is, one designed chiefly to hold off and exhaust an anticipated American attack. This can be seen in its use of proxy militias around the region, its decentralization of Command and Control, its low-cost weapons systems, and – most effective of all – its ability to choke off global shipments of oil, fertilizer, and other industrial inputs by holding hostage the Strait of Hormuz. This latter tactic has a 900-year-old history, further underscoring willful American ignorance. Advantage Iran.

Politics -- Trump has two constituencies to worry about, each unforgiving in its own way: the mid-term electorate and the financial markets, chiefly the bond market. His war is deeply unpopular with prospective voters, whose household budgets are taking a beating as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has pushed up the cost of energy, food, and other consumer goods worldwide. These same pressures have pushed up interest rates, destabilizing the bond market and adding to the cost of servicing the already crushing US national debt. Neither voters nor investors will put up with the status quo for much longer.

Iranian leaders have shown repeatedly that they are prepared to use brutal force to suppress dissent in a sizeable portion of the population. At their core, Iran’s ruling elites are bound together by complex webs of financial, religious, regional, and social ties, creating a system that survived the assassination of its top leadership without serious interruption. Post-war Iran will have to grapple with widespread popular discontent and deep economic woes, but there is no mechanism for forcing a reckoning anytime soon. Advantage Iran.

Society – Americans as a whole have no idea why the war was launched, what its goals might be, or what “victory” looks like. Instead, they have been fed a menu of war aims that changes daily with Trump’s whim, the realities of the news cycle, and the anxieties of the financial markets. Change the regime? Prevent a nuclear-armed Iran? Open a vital waterway that was free and safe to transit before the war?

Iran’s leaders are adept at playing the nationalist card, and they can fall back on more than 1,000 years of historical and cultural narrative that casts Shiite Iran as engaged in existential struggle against overwhelming odds. Where once the enemy was the Sunni Caliphate in Damascus that persecuted and killed the early Shiite leadership, now it is American colossus that threatens the faithful with annihilation. Certainly, 2,500 years of statecraft, dating back to the foundation of the Achaemenid Empire, strengthens the Iranian hand. Advantage Iran.

Compounding these structural advantages on the part of Iran is the enormous damage to US standing around the world in the immediate aftermath of the surprise attack. Few states, even the closest of allies, showed any enthusiasm for the war at the outset and global opposition has only deepened as the military and economic costs quickly mount. Trump’s appeals for support from NATO, friendly Gulf States, and others have largely gone unanswered, further unraveling any claim on the part of the Americans as leaders of the “free world.”

Six months in, the USA and Iran remain deadlocked, continuing months of stalemate that can be summed up as, No War, No Peace, No Oil. Yet for Trump the clock is ticking as the consumer economy wobbles, the cost of US indebtedness rises, and the November do-or-die election looms. He cannot bomb his way to victory (whatever that is), and a ground invasion is politically unthinkable. He cannot open the Strait without buying off the Iranians. And he cannot – or will not – withdraw.

In other words, the US president has no realistic options and is, effectively helpless. Shah mat?

Thank you for reading Signal to Noise. More information on my work can be found at https://jonathanlyons.pubsitepro.com

Recent reports that the Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei has expressed misgivings about the Memo of Understanding, billed as a roadmap to end the conflict, were seized upon in support of US claims that the Iranians were too divided to serve as reliable interlocutors.

The Americans have also chafed at the slow pace of negotiations, with some blaming the hermetic seal around the figure of Khamenei. The cleric at the top of the Iranian hierarchy has not been seen or heard in public since he replaced his father Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated by US-Israeli airstrikes on Day One.

Outsiders may think it odd that Iran’s supreme political figure would go missing at a time of national peril, and some have taken it as sign that the ruling clerical elite has ceded power to the highly visible defence and security forces under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Yet, Iranians themselves are no strangers to the notion of an absentee leader in hiding to ensure both personal safety and community continuity, a familiar trope whose roots lie in more than a millennium of sacred history.

According to Iran’s Shi’ite teaching, the first eleven religio-political leaders of the community, the imams, were all murdered by their sectarian rivals. To avoid a similar fate, the Twelfth Imam went to hiding, at first exercising his rightful authority through a series of letters or bulletins before announcing in 941 CE that he was severing his last earthly ties and would only return at the End Times to oversee an age of perfect peace and justice. To this day, the faithful pray for the imminent return of the Hidden Imam.

The historical analogy with the fate of Mojtaba Khamenei would not be lost on the Iranian public. After all, the USA and Israel, have already murdered his father, the previous Supreme Leader, as well as his mother, his wife, and much of the Old Guard leadership, with threats of more to come. Some reports say Mojtaba Khamenei himself was badly wounded in the attack on February 28, and the odds of survival should he show himself are uncertain. Meanwhile, his position of authority in Iran’s political system remains, at least for now.

It is impossible to know how much the new Supreme Leader’s seclusion represents a bid for religious legitimacy. It could simply be a matter of prudent statecraft, given Trump’s repeated threats against the lives of top officials and even his vow to obliterate the entire Iranian nation.

However, the clerical establishment has a long history of manipulating Shi’ite symbolism for political gain. The 1979 referendum approving the creation of an ill-defined “Islamic” republic used green ballots – the colour associated with the Prophet Mohammad – for Yes and red ones – the colour of the imams’ persecutors – for No. Black turbans, denoting membership in the lineage of the Prophet, generally give clerics status above that of their white-turbaned colleagues.

Yet, tying Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei and the political system he represents too closely to Shi’ite sacred history is a parlous road, for it risks highlighting the degree to which Iran’s so-called Islamic Republic is neither recognizably republican nor legitimately Islamic. While the first proposition, that real power in Iran does not lie with its citizenry, is self-evident, the fact that it also contravenes centuries of established Shi’ite political theory and jurisprudence remains the Dirty Secret of the Islamic Republic.

The disappearance of the Twelfth Imam more than 1,000 years ago deprived the Shi’ite community of both political authority and religious leadership. Over the centuries, the clergy gradually assumed the latter role, extending their power over religious matters, including the collection of religious taxes, the imposition of legal sanctions, and the leading of Friday congregational prayers.

But the disappearance of the Twelfth Imam posed a very different problem in the political realm, for there was no institution able to claim temporal power in his place. For centuries of Shi’ite scholars, politics by its very nature is corrupt and illegitimate in the absence of the Imam, and to take part is to risk the imposition of religious despotism that would subjugate the people and undermine the foundations of Twelver Shi’ism.

This is, of course, exactly what has happened to Iran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini formulated his revolutionary political doctrine of clerical rule in the 1960s and then realized his vision with the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The recent appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei – the Missing Ayatollah – to succeed his father as the third Supreme Leader only further undercuts the current Islamic system, for it smacks of nepotism and political expediency at the cost of any claim on religious legitimacy or merit. All the while, a silent majority of Iranian clerics, including many of the ulama’s most senior figures, are steadfast in their opposition to Khomeinism, even as they remain largely silent, out of fear of repression or in keeping with a long-standing quietist tradition.

The internal contradictions that have plagued the nation for almost 50 years must still be addressed, and it is not hard to see how the current conflict with the USA and Israel, however it is resolved, may well hasten the sort of deep structural change that Iran’s opposition forces – democratic, royalist, religious, or nationalist – have long demanded.

So it might surprise readers – not to mention Trump and his war cabinet – to know that the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Day One single-handedly removed a significant institutional barrier to just such an enterprise.

More than two decades before his assassination, Khamenei issued a religious edict, or fatwa, ruling that nuclear weapons were wrong in theological terms and that their use would amount to a grave sin against Islam. For years, the fatwa has been referenced by Iran’s negotiators seeking to reassure a skeptical West that its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes only. And it has drawn the ire of Iran’s hardliners.

No written copy of the edict has been made public, but an entry on Khamenei’s official Web site, dated 2012, recounts its central finding as follows: “The Islamic Republic of Iran considers the use of nuclear, chemical, and similar weapons as a great and unforgivable sin.”

In line with Shia juridical tradition, however, a fatwa does not survive its author. In other words, killing off Khamenei also killed off this religious prohibition, removing one obstacle to any nuclear ambitions Iran’s new leadership may harbour.

True, this fatwa has had a long and, at times, contentious history, particularly among academics, think-tank analysts, and journalists affiliated with Iran’s bitter rival Israel. These critics have questioned whether Khamenei had sufficient religious standing to make such a ruling, and some have suggested the fatwa was issued in line with the Shia practice of taqiyyah, or dissembling for the protection of the faith. In other words, a religious red herring designed to obscure Iran’s true plans.

Yet, there is considerable internal evidence that the fatwa was legitimate. For one, it is fully consistent with the stance of his predecessor Ayatollah Khomeini against weapons of mass destruction, even after Iran suffered devastating chemical attacks in its eight-year war with Iraq. And it fits with Islam’s traditional teachings on war, in particular its explicit bans on indiscriminate killing, which is, of course, a hallmark of WMD.

In recent years, Khamenei’s order had come under mounting pressure from elements of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the backbone of Iran’s security establishment, to modify or nullify the fatwa in the face of existential threats from Israel and the United States. However, the order remained in effect at the time of the Supreme Leader’s death on February 28.

With the assassination of Khamenei and many other top leaders in the war’s early days, the survivors among the IRGC will no longer feel bound by the nuclear fatwa. At the same time, they must surely recognise that Iran would never have been attacked were it already a nuclear power. A war ostensibly launched to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran has so far set back that very goal, perhaps irredeemably.

Clausewitz, On War

The enemy gets a vote.

U.S. Military

A week into the death and destruction unleashed by the US-Israeli attack on Iran, The New York Times featured a headline that I cannot get out of my mind: “How Trump and His Advisors Miscalculated Iran’s Response to War.” Perhaps it was the phrase’s banality, perched atop the kind of process story beloved of the Washington press corps.

My first reaction was a quick mental rewrite, something along the lines of, “How Could They Possibly Have Miscaulated…?” After all, Iran has lived under military, political, and economic threats for decades, with ample time and means to draw up comprehensive plans in the event of an existential threat. And every military planner, armchair strategist, and oil trader knew full well that Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz was – dare I say? – its trump card.

The real question has little to do with Who said What to whom… Where and When, all covered in the NYT piece. No, the proper question is, Why? – the last of journalism’s Five W’s, elements of circumstance whose roots lie in Classical Antiquity.

Much has been made – rightly – of Iran’s effective decentralised command and control and its engineering prowess as exhibited by its still-intact arsenal of missiles and drones despite four weeks of US and Israeli bombardment. Rather, I want to address a much-overlooked but vital feature of Iran’s defence: the religious underpinning of its “unexpected” social cohesion and resistance.

Modern Iran’s sacred history dates back 1,300 years when its Twelver Shia identity first took shape on the battlefield of Karbala (modern-day Iraq) in a doomed war of succession against the overwhelming forces of the Sunni Caliph. The Shia champion, Imam Hossein, and a small band of followers and family went willingly to their deaths in a hopeless but righteous struggle.

Iranians know the story of Karbala by heart. It is marked in daily speech and featured in annual Ashura rituals, commemorated at poetry recitals, and reenacted in stylized passion plays, the taziyeh (from the Arabic for “offering condolences”). Iran’s subsequent history is often viewed by its people through the prism of Hossein’s martyrdom, seen by the Shia as the greatest single act of human suffering and redemption.

The result is a persistent legacy of resistance, even in the high likelihood of failure, defeat, or death, a quality that has served Iran well in the face of repeated attacks on its security and sovereignty over the course of many centuries. Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire each chipped away at its territory, while colonial England sought crushing economic concessions. Soviet and British forces occupied a slice of the country in 1941 to secure oil supplies during World War Two.

More recently, Iranians banded together in 1979 to end the monarchy and oust the US-backed Shah. The country then rallied in the war with Iraq (1980-1988), when an isolated Islamic Republic faced annihilation at the hands of its neighbour, which was backed by both the Gulf Arabs and the USA. Both times, the imagery and meaning of Karbala were invoked to meet the challenge, captured in the popular slogan, “Every Day is Ashura, Every Land is Karbala.”

This shared Shia narrative – and its 19th-century manifestation, Persian nationalism – goes a long way toward explaining how Iranian society, riven by economic hardship, popular dissent, and violent repression, can nonetheless remain more or less intact in the face of relentless attacks by the world’s most powerful military.

In the decades since the revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis, Iran has largely appeared in the American imagination as the one-dimensional plaything of medieval Muslim theocrats and the singular source of instability across the Middle East, if not the world. Its array of allied forces in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere and its impressive homegrown fleet of missiles and drones are routinely cast as terrorist weapons, when they could be seen plausibly as low-cost means of deterrence against richer and better-armed adversaries.

And at its apex, sat the unsmiling, turbaned visage of an implacable Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - depicted as an arch villain worthy of Marvel comics. The Trump administration and its Israeli accomplices clearly were unable to see past their own caricature of the Islamic Republic to glimpse its underlying strength and viability as a unified state.

Looked at it this way, it is easy to understand how Trump, uninterested in history, bored by details such as briefing papers, intel reports, military planning, and certain of his own instincts as a “deal-maker,” went to war on a hunch, confident of easy victory. And it is just as evident Why the White House, proud of its disdain for expertise in general, “miscalculated” the depth of Iranian resilience and the strength of its response.

This is the start of a series of commentaries on topical events, tempered by the recognition of the inherent tension between the drumbeat demands of social and legacy media for immediate“news” and the time, distance, and intellectual rigour required for a deeper understanding of the world around us.

In other words, I will focus not on the ambient noise enveloping the latest events and trends but on their underlying signal. As such, the Signal to Noise Substack will appear only episodically.

Topics will range from the immediate (beginning with the war in Iran, a country I know well) to the longer term, such as the battle over the meaning and value of science and the poisonous legacy of the so-called War on Terrorism.

In closing, a few words about me and my journey to Signal to Noise.

I have spent much of my professional and personal life exploring the shifting boundaries between East and West, first on both sides of the Cold War divide and then on the cusp between the Islamic and Western worlds. Over time, I have come to see the relationships between these seemingly polar fields as a problem not of geography or politics (or even geo-politics) but of thought, ideas, and knowledge – that is, as essential problems of epistemology.

My growing engagement with the social bases of knowledge prompted me to leave behind more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent and editor, much of it in the Islamic world, and to complete a doctorate in sociology at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

I am the author of four books of intellectual and social history, includingAnswering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in 21st-Century Iran; Islam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism; and The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization.

Before beginning doctoral studies, I served as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency, with posts in Moscow, during the collapse of the Soviet Union; in Turkey, during the rise of the first elected Islamist government; and in Tehran during the contentious presidency of Mohammad Khatami. I also worked as a senior editor in Reuters Washington bureau, before taking up my last foreign assignment, in Jakarta, covering radical Islamic movements across Southeast Asia.

I hope you will join me as we hunt for the elusive signals hidden among the noise.

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