Like a secret password and hidden signal, the communications of the Iranian regime's leaders, the number "110" refers to the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the response, at whose heart of which lay the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and aggression against the neighboring states.
We know this from Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s long interview with the Iranian documentary filmmaker Javad Moghayi.
Araghchi acknowledged the deep infiltration of the Iranian regime - on the strike on the Supreme Leader's compound, the "Beyt," he said the attack was carried out through a "security gap," and that this gap "still exists."
This penetration, according to Araghchi, was not confined to the leaking of information. It was also allowed for influencing decisions and shaping the psychological climate in the regimes’ institutions.
Araghchi claims the decision to enter a conflict with the Iranian regime was an American miscalculation. The US attacked thinking that Iran had been weakened by what he called the "developments" in Lebanon, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, and the fall of the Syrian regime - that Iran, as a result of that, had "lost its capacity for regional deterrence."
Araghchi, the regime's diplomatic face, is part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. His distinction is that he commands English well and keeps a cold head. Even as he promoted the regime's narrative of the war, he showed how the regime thinks: how its decisions are made and cooked up, and what its hard core is.
Iran's Khomeinist regime is not a personalist order built on the charisma of an individual leader, with whose passing the whole edifice collapses. It is an ideological-military regime, underpinned by a combination of fundamentalist revolutionary beliefs blended with a strain of nationalist chauvinism, and it is through this gate that one must enter the city of the Khomeinist mind and its ruling network.
This means the regime is impervious to flexibility and change. It is determined to reach its ultimate objective: the well-known objective made explicit in the literature of its leaders.
Araghchi admitted as much when he mentioned telling the American envoy Steve Witkoff during the negotiations: You cannot threaten the Iranians, and you cannot entice them.
That is where things stand, whether we like it or not. It does not follow that this closed regime must be fought in this war at once. Truces are reached; the heat can be "cooled" by some degrees; and the time these moments afford can be seized to strengthen oneself, in every sense and form of strength, unless, that is, change should spring from the Iranian people and their mobilization.
This nation changed its system of rule more than once in the twentieth century, and has tried, with this fundamentalist regime in particular, more than once. That would be preferable, but history does not always follow our preferences.
