Iyad El-Baghdadi

Another magisterial, must read thread from @iyadelbaghdadi.bsky.social, a man whose analytical precision and clarity of expression mark him out as something special. Big questions for all European leaders right now- if they give a heroes welcome to Trump respect will be very hard to recover.

I haven't been online in a while, it's been a long period of personal hardship.

The big news: I'm working with my team at Kawaakibi on a massive launch later this year: An independent media platform to shift the conversation on liberation and systems change

More soon

(And for those who get triggered by the word "decolonize", another old thread here)

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Free Iran
Free Palestine
Decolonize Israel

We're not free until we're all free
We're not safe until we're all safe
This is geopolitics for liberation.

So the war ends, but the struggle continues. No goals were decisively met. No one is safer. But a precedent has been set: louder, faster, riskier.

Liberation won't be delivered through foreign-imposed regime change - but through global grassroots systems change.

I want an Iran that is democratic, decolonial, strong, and free. But I fear Western pressure has delayed reform more than helped it.

Ahmed says it well: external pressure often hardens regimes. We wrote a book about this years ago, Iran was a case study.

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At
@kawaakibi.org
we're unapologetic about our values. I’m not neutral about dictatorship or about settler-colonialism & ethnonationalism.

Iran's regime is brutal, authoritarian, and has inflicted trauma across the region.

Israel is an apartheid state that is committing genocide.

But then there's Netanyahu's grip on power - and avoiding going to prison on his corruption charges.

Well, this war was very popular in Israel, also supported by Netanyahu's political rivals. I haven't seen polls, but I'm sure Netanyahu feels more politically secure.

What about Israel? Well, for Israel, this isn't the end of the war. I've written earlier why Israel cannot, and will not, stop going to war, and why the region will *not* see peace anytime soon:

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Has the war made the Iranian opposition more coherent, appealing or powerful? Doubt it - it's now easier for the regime to paint key opposition figures as supporting aggression against the homeland.

But my opinion matters very little, the only opinions that matter are Iranians'.

In fact, almost immediately after the ceasefire, the spokesperson of the Iranian judiciary announced legal changes to make it easier to go after people on espionage charges.

And yes, expect this to not only be used against spies, but also dissidents.

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During the war, the regime openly broadcast how successful Mossad’s covert ops were - why admit that? Simple: it gives them justification for mass arrests. Now they can say: “We were infiltrated.”

Expect repression & purges to intensify, not fade.

Israel's war on Iran may lead to the defeat of the reformist faction - they bet on diplomacy and were humiliated, and the hardline faction can claim vindication. And if Khamenei dies, his successor is far more likely to come from their ranks.

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What’s more probable than regime collapse is that the regime becomes even more hardline. Its system includes competing factions: There’s a reformist wing that pushed for normalization with the West; vs security hardliners who distrust the West and see diplomacy as weakness.

o, is the regime secure? No it's not. It’s still deeply unpopular with Iranians.

But it’s still in control of both the security apparatus and the narrative. Could it collapse? Possibly, but that depends on mistakes we haven’t seen yet. For now, it's standing.

Nearly 900 Iranians have died, ~200 of them military personnel, including high ranking officers. Some 500+ of the dead were civilians. This is very painful.

Remember, however, that this regime has a martyrdom culture.

So what of Iran's military performance? It has suffered painful losses, but short of the regime falling, these losses can be recovered in a few months. Israel's strategy (as per Netanyahu) was to target missile launchers, not stockpiles - these can be replaced.

Could humiliation over failing to “protect Iran” spark a mass popular uprising? This depends on whether the regime can keep a coherent narrative. Their narrative was initially clean, but this was before things got more messy.

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Iran’s regime is *not* a hyper-centralized personality cult like Saddam’s or North Korea’s. It’s deeply ideological, institutional, and built to survive disruption. More on that in this thread.

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NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Regime change wasn’t the goal, but Milosevic was weakened enough that he was ousted the next year. But big caveat: The Milosevic government was nothing like Iran's regime.

What about regime change in Iran? I’ve said earlier there’s no precedent for airstrikes alone achieving regime change or collapse (Israeli military officials now admit this too).

But there's an *almost* precedent: Serbia, 1999.

If that was the bet (and I may be too generous here), then the cost was immense: loss of credibility, international norms, global standing, and possibly the Iran deal and a future of tolerating a clandestine program. Plus a precedent Israel can now repeat whenever it wants.

In fact, this *could* be why key European leaders backed the US strikes so unanimously - maybe they didn't want to spend diplomatic capital trying to stop the inevitable, and they'd rather spend that capital elsewhere, on things they consider foundational.

Meanwhile: Following a review of the EU-Israel trade deal, Spain is pushing for the agreement (worth $1 billion for Israel) to be suspended. And France is still pushing for 2SS progress. This is despite both having supported the strikes on Iran.

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Has Israel distracted from Gaza or stopped 2SS momentum? Maybe for 12 days. But the pressure is back, and everything is worse.

New reporting that accounts for missing persons puts the death toll in Gaza as nearly 400,000.

For more on why we're not about to see an Abraham Accords 2.0, there's this thread, written several months ago:

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So was the US dragged in? Yes, but more performatively than doctrinally. Still, that *may* have killed one of Trump’s actual goals: a new Iran deal (better than Obama’s!). So are any new/further Abraham Accords, but that was already gone even before this war.

In fact, as we've seen today, Trump has no appetite for more escalation and is clearly willing to restrain Israel after the US strikes.

Frankly, Biden wouldn't have done this. Reminder: Biden is/was a Zionist. Trump isn't, he has no ideology, only ego.

But that’s not what happened. US escalation was real but limited and telegraphed.

The US didn’t want this war. It wasn’t ready. It wasn’t part of Trump’s plan, and it ran against his agenda. Escalation risk was too high. So, both sides got to walk away claiming "we won".

What about Israel's goal to drag the US in? You might think Israel succeeded - but even here, success is limited.

Israel's "total win" here would be for US *doctrine* to shift such that Israel can "mow the Iranian lawn" whenever it wants, with US firepower.