My friend Mishary al-Dhayidi wrote in this newspaper a few days ago that anyone seeking to understand the Iranian regime's behavior cannot rest on judging it by his own logic; he must also try to see the world through the regime's eyes.
The idea struck me as a key to an important dimension of current Iranian policy, but it led me to another question. What happens when this mind travels beyond Iran's borders and is reproduced in the organizations orbiting it - Lebanon's Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, the loyalist factions in Iraq? This is where the real, thorny story begins.
Looking at those groups, known as the "arms," one might assume they are distinct experiments shaped by divergent local conditions. Closer scrutiny reveals the opposite: the intellectual structure is virtually identical, and so is the method of operation - down to the political language used to justify keeping weapons outside the authority of the state and preventing the national state from performing its natural functions, so that it appears incapacitated and deformed.
In Lebanon, we are told the weapons will not be surrendered before a full Israeli withdrawal from the south. In Yemen, the Houthis tie the future of their weapons to bringing the whole country under their authority. In Iraq, we hear again and again that the armed groups will not give up their weapons before foreign forces leave. These look like different slogans, but they serve one function: postponing the emergence of the state indefinitely. Even if the conditions were met, these groups would not submit to the national state, because they were created in the first place to bind the state to the Iranian project. The purpose of their existence is to hollow out the modern substance of the Arab state and mortgage it to a regional power that deploys it for its own ends of domination.
The conditions are less final objectives than instruments for perpetuating the status quo. Meet one, and another appears; remove one adversary, and a new one emerges. Anyone who imagines the problem is tied to a temporary political cause is reading the phenomenon from the outside rather than the inside. Within this structure, weapons are not a means but the very source of legitimacy - the thing that lets a minority within society control them at a remove from the state. Whoever criticizes this is demonized, charged with the ugliest accusations, and may be eliminated, even if he comes from within the same group.
This is why these organizations treat negotiations conducted by the national state not as a path to ending the conflict, but as a way to manage it. They may enter a truce, negotiate for a time, or accept a partial settlement, but they steer clear of the moment when the state recovers its monopoly on the use of force. At that point a settlement becomes a danger to them, because it means the end of the role for which they were created. And they have no objection to waging a civil war to entrench permanent division within a single society.
For a long time, the prevailing belief was that Iran's own military was different from these models, since the Revolutionary Guard is part of the state rather than an organization operating outside it. Recent developments, however, invite a second look. The controversy stirred by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's statements - what he disclosed about the backstage of managing negotiations and making decisions, and the subsequent blocking of the interview and the curbs on its circulation in the Iranian media - has revived a question rarely posed with such force: who holds final decision-making power inside Iran?
The truth is that the military - the Revolutionary Guard - has become an independent component. It was created to be the "protector of the revolution," but it has developed interests that conflict with the state's, and statements by the Iranian president and others bear that out. This is why the world hears one thing and its opposite out of Iran from one period to the next, with noone certain what lies behind the words.
The question is no less important than any negotiating file. If the state is negotiating while other centers of power can alter or obstruct the course, then we are looking at a picture familiar from Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen, except that this time it is appearing inside Iran itself. Herein lies the paradox: the model Tehran helped entrench beyond its borders has begun to impose its questions on Tehran.
The issue here is not the nuclear file, nor sanctions, nor the details of the relationship with Washington. These are all important files, but they remain the reflection of a deeper problem. The root of the crisis is the rise of an ideological structure that holds itself superior to the institutions of the state, and commands enough weaponry and economic resources to impose its will even when the state is pursuing a different course.
This structure has managed to establish, in more than one country, what might be called the "parallel state." But history tells us the parallel state does not always stay outside the borders where it was created. It carries its logic with it wherever it goes, including into the state where it was born.
Perhaps the gravest feature of the Iranian experiment is that it exported the model of dual decision-making to its surroundings, only to find itself facing the same question at home. States can endure sanctions, weather economic crises, and even hold out through wars. They rarely survive when decision-making is split between two heads, each with its own legitimacy, its own weapons, and its own calculations. At that point the real danger lies not in one's adversaries, but in the division growing inside the state itself.
A final word: once the guns fall silent, one of the likeliest outcomes is that the world will see the end of the project.
