After Khamenei’s killing, the true nature of the power structure in Iran became unmistakably clear. For many years, the regime had presented itself as a state of institutions, with a constitution, agencies, and a hierarchical chain of authority. But at the first existential test of this scale, it revealed something else: these institutions were, at their core, instruments of rule, control, and the enforcement of power, not the institutions of a modern state capable of carrying the burden of running a country in an hour of danger.
The moment the head of the pyramid disappeared, what emerged was not the image of a state acting with cold nerves through its natural institutions. We did not see an army stepping forward as a national institution managing the war. We did not see a general staff becoming the operational center of the public scene. What appeared quickly was something simpler and far more dangerous:
• a renewed traditional pledge of allegiance
• a reordering of loyalty around a person
• and the placing of the entire country under the command of a narrow ideological circle that holds the weapons, the decision, and the street
This is where the real meaning of what is happening begins. Iran is fighting this war as a system guarded by a highly organized militia known as the Revolutionary Guard. It is the living heart of decision-making. It is the force that fights, the force that decides, the force that controls the الداخل, and the force that owns the political language of the gun.
As for the regular army, its presence in the picture is so faint that it is almost embarrassing. No one follows its operations rooms. No one waits for its statements. No one treats its general staff as the operational center for managing the battle. The most important thing it produced at the pivotal moment was a formal pledge of allegiance to the new supreme leader.
And when an army pledges itself to a person rather than to a state, and its loyalty is tied to the neck of a man rather than to the constitution of that state, then what stands before us is a force attached to a structure of loyalty. More brutally still, that same army does not know with certainty the fate of the man it pledged allegiance to, while it is still being asked to continue fighting in his name. At that point, the last distance collapses between the meaning of an institution and the conditions of subordination.
As the bombing expanded across Tehran and other cities, infrastructure was struck with unprecedented violence, public space was suffocated, and people were left suspended between fear, silence, and doubt. But the ruling authority, instead of behaving like a state trying to organize the means of survival, behaves like a group hijacking a passenger plane while knowing that the passengers hate it. It has no money to buy time. No stable network of relationships around it to soften its isolation. No economic prosperity capable of binding people to it again. Not even a convincing narrative that could repair the rupture between it and the street. It has almost only one thing left: rule by force of arms.
That is why the Iranian scene now looks closer to a hijacked aircraft. The hijackers occupy the cockpit. The passengers in the back know who brought them to this moment. And the world watches a plane shaking in the air while those controlling it have no real landing plan. They have only two possibilities: a temporary emergency landing that saves them for a while, or a suicidal crash that scatters the wreckage over everyone.
