Iran: the collapse

You mean a lame attempt at a joke

 

The regime is reeling and is out of options. Even if they can put this wave of protest down, the economic and water crises (which will worsen the economic problems) all but guarantee their re-emergence in the near future.

Maybe he should let things play out but a heavy military blow could be final straw

 

The Kurds are also the best armed. Not that they are well armed - a few assault rifles, nothing else. But enough that police are outmatched.

Google says that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as about 125,000 people, and that includes administration and other tasks and not all troops. That's not enough for the whole country.

EDIT and apparently the Iranian government agrees because there seems to be Hezbollah forces fighting protesters in Tehran.

Among the buildings burning in Tehran are the Iranian Tax Authority, the offices of the Meli bank, and many mosques. Proponents of theocracy want to attach their religion to the people's love of their country. But it goes both ways. When people turn on the state, they also turn on the religion.

 

Correction: there was a time when Lindsey Graham’s political daddy was a credible person.

Graham seems to be 190 proof beta. Like, beta-ness distilled to its purest form,.

 

The best case scenario would be a secular state built on Islamic tradition.

F******** I am so disappointed that Trump is at the helm during this time!

 

Or it could rally the people against the meddling Great Satan. When a criminal regime has its back to the wall, I say let it play out and/or finance the revolution.

 

An assassination has occurred in Iran. The commander of the Iranian missile unit in Kashan, Reza Kasab, was killed moments ago by a suicide drone that targeted his vehicle.

The operation originated from within Iran, and it is currently impossible to determine who carried it out pic.twitter.com/TsLOh8OzfO

— Ph.Gritti (@Philipp27960841) January 10, 2026

Maybe, but Irish Rover seems to be following the news pretty deeply. I trust his opinion.

 

Hard to get a sense of whats going on at the moment. Internet access has been blocked. The regime is reportedly also jamming Starlink signals with a level of success.
My father, a Shah-supporter, is glued at the internet for news. He think this will be the end of IRI.

I think for that to realistically happen, there needs to be a good segment of the Iranian army and/or IRGC splitting from the base. So far, we havent seen that, but again access is largely blocked..

 

Nothing more effective in getting a country to rally together than being attacked by an external force.

 

Woah there nelly, I think it's a good time to point out that a good amount of the pain in Iran is caused by direct US sanctions. These sanctions are heavily influenced by a state that has just committed genocide against the Palestinian people. So when we want to talk about big bad regimes, the US has culpability in the situation in Iran.

Two things can be true at once. The Ayatollah's can have a regime that is oppressive, bad, and ugly; and the current pain can be caused by the world's predominant imperial power in order to make sure that life is as hard as it can be for the Iranians. What they are going through does not exist in a vacuum.

 

The Iranian regime is in trouble. Bringing in mercenaries is its last best hope.

Riots in dozens of cities and the Basij under siege — Mashed, Tehran, Zahedan. Next stop: Baluchistan.

47 years of this regime; POTUS 47. Coincidence?

Happy New Year to every Iranian in the…

— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) January 2, 2026

Before someone calls me anti-semitic... It's not exactly a secret what I'm saying.....


For some reason the end of the tweet isn't embding but it ends with

"Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them..

@realDonaldTrump @SecRubio @CIADirector"

 

You mean he gave Graham a spine

 

Is the relatively small city of Rasht, the BBC reported 70 bodies in one hospital 36 hours ago, with France 24 reporting 68 dead in two hospitals in an "small northern city" left unnamed for safety reasons. Nearly all were dead from rifle shots to the head or chest.

The internet, of course, has been all but cut off across the country - international traffic is at 1% of the average - and the mobile phone networks go off for 10-12 hours at a stretch. Now, the landlines are cut off too. In previous uprisings the regime shut the internet and mobile networks down to stop videos circulating in real time and enraging the population but reports and rumours circulated to intimidate the people. Now, they don't want any information to circulate at all.

The regime has always been deadly serious about situations of unrest. This time it looks like the situation itself is deadly serious for the regime.

 

Don't bet on it. If you haven't met recent emigres, you have no idea how deeply the regime is hated by vast swathes of the population. It's venomous.

And that applies down to 10th-graders shunning other 10th-graders at in international school, just because their fathers worked at the embassy

Put it this way, as the 12 Day War showed, Israel has hundreds, maybe even a thousand or so commandos - not agents, commandos - on the ground willing to shoot or blow things up for it. All of them are/were Iranians and few of them have much or even any warmth for Israel. How bad do things have to be for that to happen and for the Israelis to be able to rely on them?|

 

There's video of a Tehran morgue with 250 bodies in it. Whatever numbers of dead are floating around, I'm sure they are underestimates.

The government has deployed military level equipment (armored vehicles, heavy machine guns) to start to retake some of the small towns that liberated themselves.

 

I agree, and there's a problem. The resources of a country, even one as decrepit and dying as Iran, are still immense, and as long as the forces keeping the government in power are shielded from the suffering of the masses they will support the government. Joining the opposition would mean being poor like everyone else instead of being comfortable for as long as the regime lasts.

But the problems of Iran are insurmountable in the status quo, so there will always be unrest too. And Iran is only going to get poorer. Iran has to add discounts even steeper than Russia's on their oil to sell it, and the price of oil has dropped worldwide. The only advantage they have over Russia is Russia's easy-to-extract oil is going away, and only have the expensive stuff left.

 

I hope you’re right. I just don’t see anything positive coming from the United States dropping bombs just so Trump can take credit for something.

 

Maybe the goal is to get Marco Rubio a new job: shah of Iran. Besides "viceroy of Venezuela" and "governor of Cuba", of course.

 

You don't. Very many Iranians do.

Doesn't mean they're right but the regime has been in place for 48 years, with Khamanei either Supreme Leader or president for 45 of them and the country is politically and even culturally isolated (sanctions), militarily humiliated (Israel), oppressed (1,500 political executions last year), economically stagnant (oil and nothing else) and on the brink of civilizational collapse (water).

In those circumstances "maybe America bombing us will change things for the worse, but at least they'll change." attitudes gain a lot of traction.

 

From the Carnegie's Farzan Sabet

Surviving these protests will be its own curse on the Islamic Republic: It appears to be committing a Tiananmen Square massacre-level of atrocities, without the robust leadership, state, and economy of China.
Survival only provides a reprieve until the next crisis.
https://x. com/IranWonk/status/2010452887466656255​

 

More from Sabet

As long as political elites in an authoritarian system remain unified, and security forces maintain their cohesion, the state can usually kill, maim, arrest, torture, and exile their way out of such crises, as the Islamic Republic has repeatedly and skillfully done before.
Beyond a certain level, what is needed to allow protests to ratchet up to the next level are external and internal pressures that undermine the ruling system's material capabilities and destroy its resolve: foreign intervention and elite and security defections.
Neither factor has come into play in Iran-yet. There are some possible signs that the resolve of elites and security forces are fracturing at lower to mid-ranks, but not near the levels needed. Maybe opposition-called strikes will help at the margins but probably not enough.
Foreign kinetic military intervention is needed, mainly targeting symbolically and materially significant political and security leadership linked to the apparatus of repression, and their main nodes and infrastructure. Absent this, protests will likely run out of steam.
If strikes take place at a sufficient level, intensity, and right time, it can degrade the system's ability to conduct repression such that it creates greater incentive for defections, and gives the protests the opportunity and motivation to ratchet up to the next level.
​

 

It doesn't seem like Trump will act unless he is certain of success, and I don't trying to decapitate a nation only through airstrike is certain of that.