February 12, 2026:
Since the Israeli and American airstrikes on Iran last June, the country has slid into chaos and endless protests. The unrest was slow to escalate into nationwide protests but that finally happened on December 28. Soon it was clear that these protests were the largest since the 1979 ones that overthrew the monarchy and led to the current religious dictatorship. While at least 80 percent of Iranians want a new government and are willing to use violence to get it, the other 20 percent have the guns and understand if the revolution wins, they will be dead, imprisoned or exiled. There is also a religious factor. Many, if not most Iranians want to eliminate Islam, which is seen as a source of repression and corruption. The 20 percent embrace Islam because it justifies any atrocities committed to suppress the rebellion. There are many other incentives for the 20 percent. They have access to food, a regular income and relative safety for their families.
The cost of these benefits is one reason while the rest of the population suffers from poverty, unemployment, rising inflation and the negative impact of the growing water shortage. Despite these incentives, the government had to import several thousand mercenaries to kill Iranians. Government forces, even the IRGC/Islamic Republican Guard Corps were increasingly hesitant about killing enough Iranians to stop the protests. The foreigners, most of them from government supported groups like Hezbollah and similar groups throughout the region, had no problems with killing Iranian civilians. Besides, this job paid well.
The government made a substantial effort to disrupt the ability of irate Iranians from communicating with each other. On January 8th internet and cellphone access was shut down, except for some government agencies. As internet savvy protestors found ways around this shut down, the government managed to counter these efforts. The government also went after the many Iranian uses of Starlink. China helped with this, as they want to restrict Chinese access to Starlink. Some Iranians had shortwave radios, but they were hunted down and, unless they moved their equipment frequently, were eventually found, their equipment seized or destroyed and the users imprisoned.
As of early February, nearly 35,000 demonstrators have been killed and nearly as many arrested or classified by their families as missing. So far, no more than six million Iranians have participated in the protests and in about a third of Iran there have been few, if any protests. For both sides, victory is a matter of life or death. The 20 percenters number about 12 million Iranians, while the protesters have about 40 million, of a total population of about 90 million. The government forces are well organized, equipped and ruthless. The protestors are disorganized, largely unarmed and desperate. If the uprising is suppressed, Iran will still be in bad shape economically, diplomatically and facing an uncertain future. This means the protests or an armed uprising will eventually take place, and continue to happen as long as Iran is mismanaged by religious rulers who are willing to persecute and kill as many Iranians as it takes to keep the religious dictatorship in power. The religious leaders realize that their own 1979 revolution against the monarchy could have failed. To remain in power they must constantly develop new methods to ensure that future rebellions fail.
And then there are some older problems. Last year’s June 13th Israeli airstrikes on Iranian military commanders, nuclear weapon scientists, uranium processing facilities and ballistic missile operations were essential to prevent Iran from completing its preparations to attack Israel. The Israeli attack force consisted of 200 aircraft. The Americans followed up with seven B2 stealth bombers using fourteen 13 ton ground penetrating bombs to destroy well protected Iranian nuclear weapons facilities at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. In response Iran launched nearly 1,500 drones and missiles at Israel. This attack left 24 Israelis dead and thousands wounded. Iran later executed several Iranians who were believed to be working for Israel. There were also several violent incidents involving Kurds and Iranians angry at their government.
In 2024 Iran launched over 300 hundred UAVs and ballistic missiles at Israel on April 13th. This was in retaliation for an April 1 Israeli air strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed two senior IRGC/Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders. Iran retaliated with an unprecedented direct attack on Israel using missiles and UAVs launched from Iran rather than just using the usual Iran-backed proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shia Houthi movement in Yemen.
Israeli air defenses, American aircraft and warships, British aircraft and Jordanian aircraft and air defenses offshore destroyed all of the Iranian UAVs and missiles headed for inhabited areas in Israel. The Jordanians took down Iranian drones violating Jordanian airspace. British jet fighters operated from a base Britain has long maintained on the island of Cyprus. It only takes 40 minutes for an aircraft to fly from the Cyprus base to Israel. Despite the hundreds of UAVs and missiles launched at Israel, the only damage done occurred at an Israeli air force base in southern Israel. The damage was described as minor and there were a few civilian casualties, mainly from the debris of intercepted UAVs and missiles falling to the ground.
After their attack was concluded, Iran said that their retaliation was over. The implication was that if Israel retaliated it would be an unjustified act of war. Iran might just appeal to the UN and world opinion to declare Israel the aggressor. Israel retaliated and destroyed most of Iranian air defense systems as well as the factories that produced key components for rockets and missiles. Iran was unable to detect or resist this attack, which was humiliating.
Meanwhile Iran-supported groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and various other terror groups like ISIL/Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant were ordered to attack Israel. Iran was so desperate to destroy or weaken Israel that it cooperated with extremist Arab Sunni Moslems, who rarely cooperate with each other and often attack members of the minority Shia Islam factions like Iran.
Iran is unique in that it is a nation of Indo-European people living in a region dominated by Arabs and a relatively small number of Israeli Indo-European and Semitic Jews. Hatred of Jews and Christians is an old custom in the region. This is changing as more affluent Gulf Arabs seek to do business with the even more affluent Jews of Israel and Christians of Lebanon. These new attempts to establish cooperation were disrupted by Hamas, a Sunni Palestinian group that has been around since the 1980s and recently sought to drive Israelis out of Gaza, an area that Hamas ruled for nearly two decades and, until October 2023, only occasionally attacked Israel. Hamas radicals convinced many Hamas Gaza Palestinians to attack Israel and seek to replace Israel with a Palestinian State.
Since late 2017 there have been continuing nationwide outbursts against the religious dictatorship running Iran. There was similar activity in 2009 to protest the lack of fair elections. The 2009 protests were put down with force as were the recent ones, with over a thousand dead in 2019 and several hundred since then.
What started in late 2017 was different, with the protestors calling for the corrupt religious rulers to be removed. Some called for a return of the constitutional monarchy the religious leaders replaced in the 1980s after first promising true democracy. Even more disturbing were protests calling for Islam to be banned and replaced with something else, like Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion that Islam replaced violently and sometimes incompletely in the 7th and 8th centuries. Right before the 2017 unrest the religious rulers saw Iran on the way to some major victories in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. The optimism turned out to be premature. The good times were supposed to begin in the wake of a July 2015 treaty that lifted the many sanctions Iran had collected for bad behavior since the 1990s. That did not, as many financial experts pointed out, solve the immediate cash crises because oil prices were still low. This was because of continued use of fracking in North America which triggered a massive, more than 70 percent, drop in the price of oil in 2013.
Iran made their situation worse by trying to avoid complying with the 2015 treaty while still getting most of the sanctions lifted and for a while that seemed to be working. That strategy backfired when the U.S. accused Iran of violating the 2015 deal and, by the terms of that agreement, the Americans could and did withdraw. That meant many of the sanctions returned in 2018. Even before this American action, foreign economists believed the Iranian economy wouldn’t get moving again until the 2020s. Now it is going to take even longer and might not happen at all, so most Iranians are angry about that. The senior clerics are worried and openly seeking a solution that does not include them losing power. Few Iranians are willing to accept that kind of compromise. The religious dictatorship is not only hated, but also seen as corrupt, incompetent, and untrustworthy.
This has led to some odd acts of resistance. For example, in late 2022 a young Kurdish woman was arrested by the lifestyle police and accused of not covering her hair properly with her hijab. While in custody the girl died, apparently from beatings. This led to months of protests. The government refused to change its hijab policy and the protests faded away in early 2023.
There are some more complications. Half the population consists of ethnic minorities, mainly Azeris, Kurds, and Arabs, and some of these groups, including Arabs, Kurds and Baluchis are getting more restive and violent, for different reasons. Yet the Islamic conservatives are determined to support terrorism overseas and build nuclear weapons at home, rather than concentrating on improving the economy and living standards and addressing the corruption within their ranks. The corruption has gotten so bad that the government has warned that its entire capital of Tehran (nine million people with 15 million in its metropolitan area) may have to be moved someplace else due to drought. There is a drought but the real cause is the incompetence and corruption of the ruling religious elite.
Expensive efforts to aid pro-Iran groups in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon made some progress and were presented as examples of the ancient Iranian empire being reborn. The government saw these foreign adventures as a way to distract an unhappy population. This ultimately had the opposite effect as Iranians did the math and realized their poverty was the result of all the billions spent on these overseas adventures. Worse, the destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the pro-Iranian Assad regime in Syria in November and December 2024 made the Iranian money spent there complete losses.
At home the nukes are still important because Iranian religious leaders have been increasingly vocal about how Iran should be the leader of the Islamic world and the guardian of the major Islamic shrines of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Iranians believe having nuclear weapons would motivate the Arabs, and many others, to bend the knee. The potential victims are not cooperating and can retaliate. The Arabs have been kicked around by the Iranians for thousands of years and take this latest threat very seriously. That has led to a major reform effort in Saudi Arabia with a new generation of leaders willing to take on corruption and go with alliances that benefit the Saudis. This includes openly working with Israel to deal with the Iranian threat. This was demonstrated when Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones in 2023. The attack failed and Israel retaliated by destroying Iranian air defenses and radars as well as the Iranian ability to manufacture missiles or nuclear weapons. Iran was left blind, defenseless and still able to sell its oil and improve their lives, if that’s what the religious dictatorship wanted. It’s what the Iranian people wanted.