Aircraft attached sit on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in support of Operation Epic Fury, February 28, 2026. Photo courtesy the United States Department of Defense/Wikimedia Commons.

“Don’t invade a revolution,” the Times newspaper warned in autumn 1980. This followed the attack on Iran by Iraq under Saddam Hussein with the encouragement of the United States.

In fact, the Islamic Republic’s regime in Iran had already buried the popular, worker-driven revolution that had overthrown the Shah’s tyranny in 1979.

But under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini the Iranian state wrapped itself in the revolution’s banner. The eight-year war with Iraq permitted the regime to consolidate itself on the basis of Iranian nationalism. This founding experience of war and revolution helps explain why the assault on Iran and the assassination of Khomeini’s successor Ali Khamenei has not toppled the Islamic Republic.

It is not, says historian Mohsen Milani, “a one-man show, it’s been institutionalised, there are multiple centres of power, with multiple layers of security and intelligence institutions.” The Islamic Republic “was deliberately designed from the get-go to survive external attack.”

The most important of these institutions is probably the Islamic Revolutionary Guards........

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