'..the clerics fear most is that the West may well turn to appealing to the “tribal” interests of various Iranian populations, who persist in seeing the clerics as their main adversary.''There is persuasive evidence that Ayatollah Khamenei would welcome a direct US-Iranian military confrontation, given the precedent set in 1980 when .. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was facing overthrow by a discontented Iranian populace only a year or so after he seized power.
The September 22, 1980, Iraqi attack on the Iranian city of Khorramshahr, across the Shatt al-Arab river began the eight-year Iran-Iraq War which cost Iran as many as 500,000 dead and another 400,000 wounded, and a cost to the treasury of Tehran of some $561-billion in direct terms (and much more in long-term damage to the Iranian economy). But, for Khomeini, it was worth the price: his clerical leadership was saved because the Iraqi attack diverted domestic attention toward the patriotic endeavor of saving Iran from outside forces.
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What is significant is that the Khamenei clique — very much including his son, Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei, who led the Basij militia to suppress Iranian voters in the 2009 election — have built their hopes on “strategic distractions” which have not appealed to these core Persian tenets, but, rather, have opposed them.
So what was evident by late 2019 and the beginning of 2020 was pressure by the Iranian clerical leadership (and therefore also the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps: Pasdaran) to actually seek military confrontation with the US and/or Israel on terms which could be portrayed to the Iranian population as an external aggression on the Iranian motherland. Equally, US Pres. Donald Trump is at pains to deny the clerics this opportunity. And the Israeli national security community is equally at pains to avoid a strategic first strike to avert the prospect of an Iranian strategic strike.
The attack on the Baghdad US embassy compound by militia groups associated with the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) appeared to be aimed at accelerating a US withdrawal from Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and was clearly modeled on the November 4, 1979, attack by Iranian “students” on the US Embassy in Tehran. How then-US Pres. Jimmy Carter responded — or failed to decisively respond — to that event gave the Khomeini Administration its license to proceed further against its domestic opponents.
The Baghdad Embassy event was well-orchestrated but was clearly not generating the response which the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad was seeking. The Iranian Ambassador to Iraq is the former Deputy Commander of the Quds Brigade of the IRGC, Brig.-Gen. Iraj Masjedi, who continued to work closely with Quds Brigade Commander Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Maj.-Gen. Soleimani was known to be close with Ayatollah Khamene‘i, so the Baghdad Embassy operation was clearly orchestrated from the top of the clerical administration.
There is, then, little ambiguity in the Iranian ruling clerics’ position. Khamene‘i pointedly stood down Pres. Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on May 14, 2019, from any negotiations with the US, a week after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had visited Baghdad and reportedly met with “a senior Iranian official”.
The only question is whether Khamene‘i will “pull the trigger” on a major confrontation, possibly with Israel, before domestic Iranian security concerns deteriorate to the point of no return. What is significant is that, as with the Argentine gamble to invade the Falkland Islands in 1982, little thought has been given to the second- and third-tier effects of launching a major conflict against Israel.
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What this thinking ignores is that any use of strategic weapons by Iran or Iranian proxies against Israel would be countered by an Israeli second-strike capability, quite apart from Israel’s own first-strike weapons. Iran does not have a material second-strike capability and would suffer significantly if it escalated to a nuclear exchange. So the only option being considered by Iran is that an Iranian first strike against Israel would be sufficient to destroy all Israeli combat capabilities.
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..the clerics fear most is that the West may well turn to appealing to the “tribal” interests of various Iranian populations, who persist in seeing the clerics as their main adversary.'
- Gregory R. Copley and Dr Assad Homayoun, GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs,
Iran's Retaliation Could Cause A Middle East Oil Shock, January 6, 2020
Context'..can extirpate Iran..'