How Many Iranians Reject the Regime: the Evidence

Despite the extreme repression in Iran, we have three reasons for confidence – limited but serious confidence — that the Iranian regime is rejected by a large majority of the people:

1. Demonstrations. The anti-regime demonstrations, on the intermittent occasions when some people find the courage to get out there saying these things out loud – enough people that everyone else suddenly feels some hope and safety in numbers – have been huge and enduring, so much so that the regime visibly falters. They are always severely punished after they end — after the regime has regained dominance of “the street” by various maneuvers, selective arrests, mobilization of regime street mobs and counterprotests, and compromises or, in many cases, tricks and deception; with mass surveillance used all the while with the help of Chinese technologies. Then another wave of mass repressions sets in. For several years, the people are even more scared than before.

2. Election results. The regime’s pre-selection filter on candidates sometimes does allow voters a real choice between moderate and hardline factiions of the regime. When this is allowed, the voters choose, usually overwhelmingly, the most moderate candidate who seems viable. That candidate is sometimes reformist, but mildly enough that the regime’s real power structures can survive him, and meanwhile use him for international image and negotiations – and for making some changes it wanted to make anyway.

• • The moderate option, when available, has won the election every time except one. The exception came when the regime put up Rafsanjani, the well-recognized godfather of regime corruption at the time, as the moderate candidate. He was a reform candidate and the establishment-regime candidate at one and the same time; he was the pragmatist wing of the regime. He lost to Akhmadinejad, an extreme Islamist who ran on a populist anti-corruption and anti-elite campaign. Akhmadinejad emphasized that rather than his ideological platform, which, when he expressed it, came couched — like so many post-modern fundamentalist ideologues — in pseudo-scientific language, taking about “scenarios” and how “the only scenario that can be taken seriously” was the religious text about the end times and apocalypse against the Jews and unbelievers. The populist hardline anti-regime candidate won out over the too-corrupt semi-moderate regime candidate.
  • The moderates win with such great predictability that it came to be understood that the regime often counts on this and allows it when it wants to. This way it can correct some damage from its prior excesses of religious-ideological zeal, mollify some of its opponents, and deflect international powers – as at present – with the ever-ready hope of change through negotiations.
  • However, even when a moderate President seems sincere about wanting liberalizing reforms, as with Ayatollah Khatami, his power is lacking; the real power is with the supreme leader-Ayatollah and his substructures – ‘technical’ overseer councils and the army-IRGC security agencies. These easily rein the President in. The reform president is reduced to serving mainly to provide a breathing space for consolidating the regime.

3. Survey results. The one attempt I’ve seen at a serious survey shows over 80% anti-regime, and almost all of them preferring a moderate liberal replacement – either constitutional monarchy, or parliamentary or presidential democracy. But how to make a reliable survey in conditions of the updated, streamlined totalitarian repression that is used nowadays in Iran as in China? Seemingly impossible. My instinct was to suppose that these people were conveniently finding what they wanted. However, I went through their methodology as best I could, and ended up quite impressed by it. But it was long ago that I took my college courses on probability theory. Survey experts should review the survey, and evaluate it professionally for its reliability as a basis for policy.

As I said, it’s hard to be sure of anything about Iranian public opinion in the conditions of extreme repression. Conclusions are necessarily uncertain. Nevertheless, the evidence is strong enough to show that our usual lazy assumptions, like “the regime’s the only reality, that’s realism”, are wrong.

It’s supremely Important to know this

The evidence is also clear from past experience that both the nuclear weapons program and the Iranian regime need to be thoroughly uprooted. They have to be uprooted, in order to prevent genocidal outcomes. It evidence is multiple, redundant, on two critical points:

(1) For years the regime has shown that, if it is allowed to endure, it will eventually get its nuclear weapons. And that they will be used for more than deterrence. Its entrenched regime ideology would inexorably lead them to be used.

Some of its nuclear weapons would be placed almost immediately into the hands of the militant autonomous wings of the state security apparatus. Soon some would get transferred to Iranian proxies. They would sooner or later get used to “liberate” all of “Palestine” – everything between the river and the sea.

No one who has enabled this, including peace negotiators, will be innocent of these mass deaths. It will be an actual genocide, not the rhetorical genocide we hear about every day. The present fashion of calling Israel and the West genocidal is what is technically called “genocide inversion”. Genocide inversion, like genocide denial, is in reality almost always a matter of genocide advocacy and genocide preparation.

There is in fact another genocide in preparation. Hamas already showed its hand in doing all the genocide it could on October 7. We have limited time to stop Iran from the full-scale genocide.

(2) Destroying the nuclear program by air can get a lot done, but not the whole job in a secure and enduring way. Overthrowing the Iranian regime, and its replacement by a moderate regime, is the only way to securely and enduringly achieve the elimination of its nuclear weapons program.

A reasonable degree of support or acceptance for this in popular opinion is important for enabling it to be done smoothly. Evaluating the condition of public opinion, whether or not supportive, is vital for getting it done efficiently.

This makes it a matter of urgency for the evidence on Iranian popular opinion – the evidence from surveys, from the elections, and from the recursive waves of mass demonstrations – to get professional, speedy evaluation. The evaluation needs to be made both by opinion-survey experts and by U.S. and Israeli security services.

The conclusions of our experts on this really should have been ready the day before yesterday. They will need to be used, by America and by Israel, almost literally the day after tomorrow, for policy-making on Iran.