Karim Sadjadpour on how the war with Israel is playing out inside Iran

I think initially the population was in awe of how quickly Israel was able to eliminate senior Iranian military commanders whom they always had identified with repression. But what's transpired in the last several days is that this has become an urban war which has profoundly disrupted life for certainly citizens of Tehran, and I think a majority of the population now is living in fear and anxiety. Fear and anxiety about what, you know, Israelis have been used to missile wars for a long time now. For Iranians, this generation of Iranians hasn't experienced anything like this since the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq war. So this is very new for Iranians. For the last decades, the Iranian regime had been prosecuting a war against Israel from Arab soil. So it was Lebanese and Iraqis and Syrians who are paying the brunt of that. This is the first time the Iran-Israel war has come to Iranian soil.

You know, while people are living under aerial bombardment, they're not thinking about waging political protest. They're thinking about survival. They're thinking about, you know, taking care of their families. So I don't think it's on the top of people's heads right now to wage political protests. But what we know from history is that sometimes when authoritarian regimes get involved in foreign entanglements and they lose those foreign wars, it can actually hasten their demise. So there are examples of that in history. There are also examples of the opposite, where authoritarian regimes are invaded from the outside and it actually serves to prolong their shelf life.

There certainly remains profound opposition to the Islamic regime. I suspect that perhaps 80% of Iranian citizens are opposed to a regime which has very few redeeming qualities. It's essentially a socially repressive police state and an economic basket case. So it's not that a lot of citizens want to live under that type of system. But at the end of the day, as far as we know, and it's difficult to tell from afar, but as far as we know from afar, it's a regime which remains united, highly armed, highly organized, and willing to kill en masse to stay in power. And it's a society, despite their profound discontent, but it's a society which is unarmed, unorganized, and not willing to die to take power. You know, it's a regime which believes in martyrdom, but a society which doesn't. The Iranian people want to separate mosque and state, not join mosque and state.

I think we're really, let me put it this way. We're really in a, in my view, this right now is less a conflict between two nations, America and Iran, but a test of will between two men, 79-year-old Donald Trump and 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei. And Khamenei is one of the longest-serving dictators in the world. So on one hand he has survival instincts. If he was a reckless gambler, he wouldn't become the longest-serving dictator in the world. So on one hand he has survival instincts, but at the same time he has long had these defiant instincts. He believes that if you compromise when you're being threatened and pressured, that doesn't alleviate the pressure. It projects weakness and will invite even more pressure. So these two key sources of identity for him right now are in great tension: his survival instincts and his defiant instincts.