The strikes on Iran were designed to do what years of sanctions, isolation, and internal unrest had not: bring the Islamic Republic to the point of collapse. The architects of the campaign, whether in Washington or Tel Aviv, appeared to share a common strategic calculation: that a direct blow to the upper layers of the Iranian state, from the assassination of military commanders and political leaders to attacks on military and security infrastructure, would trigger mass anti-government mobilisation, encourage defections within the regime, and ultimately bring the Islamic Republic down from within. The calculation was not absurd. In recent years, Iran had moved through one wave of unrest after another: the protests of 2017 and 2019, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement following the death of Mahsa Amini, and most recently the nationwide uprising of January 2026, sparked by a collapse of the rial and suppressed in a crackdown that the Iranian government itself acknowledged had killed more than 3,000 people, the deadliest episode of domestic repression since the founding of the Islamic Republic. The gap between state and society, especially in the major cities, had become impossible to disguise. Economic crisis, declining legitimacy and deep social pessimism all reinforced the perception that the Islamic Republic had entered one of the most fragile moments in its history.

What followed, however, was the opposite of what was expected. The streets did not become the scene of mass uprising against the state. In many cities, in contrast, they became sites of mobilisation by forces loyal to the ruling clergy, a mobilisation that went well beyond officially organised gatherings and continued night after night for weeks.  State organisation and propaganda cannot fully explain it. Something deeper was activated: a religious-heroic discourse that had played a foundational role in consolidating the Islamic Republic during the first decade after the 1979 revolution. That discourse, whose formative moment was the Iran-Iraq War, had regained political energy after years of gradual erosion.The central issue is not simply that the war increased support for the government among parts of its loyal base. More importantly, for sections of that base, the war once again produced meaning.The Islamic Republic is not merely a political structure with a constituency. For many loyalists, it constitutes what Clifford Geertz once called a “system of meaning”, not merely an ideology, but a moral and symbolic world through which political reality is rendered intelligible. Concepts such as resistance, martyrdom, siege, sacrifice, steadfastness, and defence are not experienced merely as political slogans, but as elements of an ethical and existential worldview. External war, particularly in the form this war took, reactivated that universe.

To understand the significance of this development, one must return to the role of the Iran-Iraq War in the consolidation of the Islamic Republic. The regime was not consolidated only through elections or bureaucratic institutions but through war. The eight-year conflict with Iraq was far more than a military confrontation. It was one of the Islamic Republic’s most important engines for producing legitimacy, loyalty, collective identity, and political myth. During a period in which the post-revolutionary order was still unstable and multiple political forces, liberals, leftists, nationalists, and armed opposition groups, competed........

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