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Iranian Leaders' Claim to Legitimacy Shattered in the War with Israel
(Wall Street Journal) Yaroslav Trofimov - Iran's 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. last June broke the regime's carefully nurtured image of invincibility, many ordinary Iranians say. Now the aftermath is helping to fuel a wave of protests. The social compact that endured since the bloody eight-year war that Saddam Hussein's Iraq launched in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution was that Iranians would acquiesce to hardship and restrictions in return for a strong state that protects them from foreign attack. That assumption came crashing down when Iranian-backed Hamas and Hizbullah attacked Israel in 2023, triggering a regional war that brought death and destruction into the heart of Tehran in the summer of 2025. Israeli strikes across Iran destroyed much of its military leadership, and the follow-on U.S. bombing campaign struck a heavy blow against Iran's nuclear program. It was a humiliation for a regime that had invested so much of the country's national wealth into a proxy network that was designed to deter exactly this sort of assault on the homeland. "This was the last straw. The regime over the years had argued that although it has not been able to bring about prosperity or pluralism for the Iranians, at least it had brought them safety and security. Turns out, it didn't," said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. History is replete with examples of repressive regimes falling to domestic unrest after military setbacks against foreign adversaries.