The scenes of war and truce between Iran and America suggest that Iran is trying to establish that it held firm in the confrontation. It played its cards in defense of its own existence and the interests of its system, even at the expense of the region's states.
Under external attack, Iran has so far managed to close the chapter of the demonstrations against the regime. The opposite has happened in the countries Tehran penetrated with its "arms" and militias- in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen.
We have seen an unprecedented social and political rupture between Hezbollah, which entered a "war in support of Iran" on behalf of another state, and the rest of Lebanon's components. In Iraq, the split has gone so far that militias loyal to Iran have struck Saudi Arabia, in the same militia fashion that respects neither their own state nor its neighbors.
This is a scene of division par excellence: A government trying to extend its sovereignty over the whole country, and armed organizations entrenching division and refusing to hand their weapons to the state.
The paradox- that Iran unified its home front in the face of external attack while its "arms" did the opposite, deepening internal fissures and social divisions in every country where they operate- is worth reflecting on. It may hold a lesson for Iran: to undertake a surgical review of its system's policies toward the region's states.
The question that arises is this: Why did the Iranian home front hold together after a fashion- a front where protests rejecting the regime had stopped only weeks before the war- with people rejecting the American-Israeli attacks on their country? And why did Gulf leaders seek to halt the war, back mediation efforts, and deal with extreme wisdom and patience with the Iranian assaults on their states, while the response to the militias' aggression was immediate?
The difference is clear on both counts: In the cohesion of the Iranian home front, and in how other states deal with a state that endures- whatever problems and crises it has caused- as against how they deal with militias that are transient, or that ought to be.
For any system, whatever its nature and however much one agrees or disagrees with it, its fall by armed foreign invasion produces catastrophic results. What helped Iran hold together internally was that it played the card of foreign aggression against the homeland rather than against the regime. It is a state with institutions that monopolize force; and even in the duality of the army and the Revolutionary Guard, each is led by a single point of reference, the Supreme Leader. No militia inside Iran can take a step, in peace or in war, apart from the direction of the Supreme Leader and the ruling apparatus.
What is striking is that the Iranian regime's support for the Palestinian cause was not only the product of doctrinal conviction. It was also a card in defense of ambitions embodied in the nuclear project, in a regional presence, and in attempts at hegemony and interference in the affairs of other states. Nor was Iranian ideological discourse ever separable from Iran's own supreme interests; it was never purely for the sake of God and of Palestine.
Beyond that, Iranian society has remained for decades a living society, a broad segment of which rejects the regime's choices and demands that it defend only the country's national interests, refrain from interfering in the affairs of other states, and abandon the policy of "arms" and of exporting its model by force. This current has receded, for now, with the war.
Iran's "arms," by contrast, did not fight for a national cause but on behalf of a doctrinal alliance, in political subordination to another state. Their land was not occupied and they have no national project; they have merely entrenched social and political divisions in every country where they operate. This stands in contrast to Iran, which monopolized the state, force, and weapons, and adopted a national political narrative in the face of external attack, with the aim of securing its own social cohesion.
The difference between Iran and its "arms" is owed neither to Iranian genius and the purity of its model, nor to the vices and sins of the "arms." It is that the system in Tehran entered its war from a position of defending national self-evident truths against attack from abroad, which strengthened its national cohesion- regardless of whether its narrative is sound, and regardless of the scale of its errors. Hezbollah, by contrast, fought a war on Iran's account that entrenched division among the Lebanese. And in divided Yemen, the Houthis have deepened both the division and the suffering.
The contradiction in Iranian discourse is this: A state that raises the banner of defending national soil against attack from abroad, and of rejecting any foreign interference in the region's affairs, while at the same time turning into another "abroad" itself- imposing hegemony and sowing division inside other countries. A jolting paradox.
