War with Iran: Middle East in flames

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0:35Gareth Browne:The Economist

0:44Rosie Blau:Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. And today on the show, and in the world, there is only one story.

1:05Rosie Blau:Over the weekend, America launched its long-anticipated assault on Iran.

1:11Shashank Joshi:Stay sheltered. Don't leave your home. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.

1:28Rosie Blau:In collaboration with Israel, it struck targets across the country. Chief among them, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. An Iranian TV anchor cried as he announced the news.

1:45Rosie Blau:Thousands of people gathered in Tehran to protest about the destruction raining down on the country. But some Iranians danced in the streets and shouted from balconies at the death of their oppressor. Despite the threats from President Donald Trump, this was a gamble many thought he'd never take. Now he has. Our correspondents Nick Pelham and Greg Karlstrom have been following the events over the weekend.

2:14Nicolas Pelham:It's been a shock, even though we all, I think, knew that this war was coming at some point. I think the speed with which this went from being an American-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran to now a full regional war with attacks on all of the Gulf states, with Lebanon being drawn in overnight. It's shocking how quickly this has escalated, I think.

2:36Gareth Browne:There was always a fear that this was going to become a regional war quickly. It was a fear, it was a premonition, and now it's a reality. And I think the whole region is in a state of shock.

2:48Rosie Blau:Nick, Ayatollah Khamenei has been killed. It's a huge blow. Just remind us who he is and how he got there.

2:56Gareth Browne:This is a man who's been at the helm of state since 1989. He's been running every aspect of Iran since then. He's been in power for 37 years. He's steeped in the ideology of the Islamic Republic. It was an article of faith for him that he would not surrender to the United States. And I think he's shown in his death by his refusal to leave office. He knew what was coming. He has set an example for his millions of followers that they will stand and face the wrath of America rather than surrender.

3:27Rosie Blau:And he's not the only regime figure to have been killed, right?

3:32Gareth Browne:No. Since the summer war, the upper echelons of the military have been taken in the first minutes of this attack, along with Khamenei, went his chief military advisor, Ali Shemkhani, along with him, the minister of defense, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is the regime's praetorian guard, and many senior commanders. So there is a sense now in which power in Iran is much more diffuse, much more decentralized. It looks as if individual commanders are now operating on their own without coordination with the center. Those may have been the orders that came in advance of an attack, but it's a much more sporadic, less coordinated Iran that's operating now than I think we've seen in the past.

4:13Rosie Blau:So Nick, who's in charge now and how will a succession happen?

4:17Gareth Browne:The Islamic Republic, what remains of it, has made a great show of sticking to the constitution. The process for the succession is that you have a leadership council headed by the president who remains alive, along with the chief justice and a cleric. So that leadership council is now officially in charge. It's their task to be the interregnum until a new supreme leader is appointed. It might be that the cleric that's been appointed to the leadership council is a front-runner to succeed Ali Khamenei. He is another ayatollah, Arafi, who was already considered to be a contender. But that formulaic process, I think it is questionable the degree to which you're going to see a continuation of a theocracy in the way that we saw it before.

5:01Gareth Browne:There are many other powerbrokers in the country who have close connections with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mohamed Baruch Ali Ba 'af, the Speaker of Parliament, may be one contender. His predecessor, Ali Larajani, appears already to have been shoehorned into a sort of position as the deputy of Khamenei. He very much remains at the centre of decision-making, and his position at the moment is to not negotiate with America. A successor has been appointed to head the IRGC, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Vahidi is a former defense minister and interior minister. He's been at the center of Iran's military command since the Iran-Iraq war.

5:39Gareth Browne:He's very much a stalwart of the regime. In many ways, he's a more powerful figure than his predecessor. So it looks at the moment as if the regime has done quite a lot of pre-planning to put in place successors to people in the top job and perhaps successors to their successors. So for the time being, at least, The ship of state remains afloat, although it is struggling, I think, in a way that it hadn't reckoned with.

6:02Rosie Blau:And we've seen an extraordinary array of attacks from Iran. What's the strategy behind them?

6:08Gareth Browne:It was always clear that if the regime felt cornered, it was going to lash out in every way that it had at its disposal. And that's what we're seeing. We're seeing attacks all along Iran's western borders into the Gulf, hitting American bases that were in Gulf states and in Iraq, as well as Israel. Their target base has gone far beyond that. It includes hotels, it includes oil installations. And this is now a region which is aflame. It's, I think, sending the message that if the regime is going down, it's going to bring the region down with it.

6:39Rosie Blau:How much do we know about how the Iranian population has responded to all of this?

6:45Gareth Browne:The Iranian population is not a homogenous blog. The regime does have millions of followers. There were millions who would vote for hardliners in its election. So far, they have come out onto the street when they've been called to mourn for the loss of their supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. That picture of mourning has kind of spread over much of the Shia world as far afield as Kashmir, from Kashmir to Kabbalah in Iraq. That said, I think it's fair to say that the bulk of Iranians are just exhausted and desperate to get out of this vortex into the abbess. They've seen their country hobbled, they've seen their economy hobbled, people for the first time are hungry and famished and desperate.

7:23Gareth Browne:And so when the news broke that Ali Khamenei had been killed, there were cries of jubilation coming from balconies in the high rises of Tehran. There were some scenes of dancing and celebration in the streets. There is ecstasy in exile. So this is a population which is deeply polarized. And I think that poses many causes of concern, particularly if people feel that their only way out is through arms. There are no arms that are being sold, being bootlegged in Tehran and other places. It has become easier to get hold of weapons. And if this polarization turns from a verbal spat to an armed one, I think there are many in Iran that feel that they are on the brink of a civil war.

8:01Gareth Browne:I'm now in Kurdistan. There have been meetings organized by the American consulate here with Iranian opposition groups. It looks as if these calls from Donald Trump for Iran to take matters into their own hands and for the people to rise up could gain some traction with Kurdish opposition groups, with other ethnic groups in Iran, particularly on the peripheries of Iran. And I think there's also a great fear of fragmentation and a collapse of essentially what was a centralised state under Khamenei's helm and that without him, the country may fall apart.

8:33Rosie Blau:Our colleague Gareth Brown has been reporting this weekend from Dubai, which, in a troubled region, people normally regard as a haven. He sent us this dispatch.

8:57Shashank Joshi:So I'm walking through Dubai Marina, which is really the heart of Dubai's tourist industry. And there are people going out on chartered yachts for the evening. You can see the flashing lights of the restaurants along the water. And over the last hour or so, in the air, we've been watching interceptors shoot down iranian missiles i mean i cannot emphasize how unprecedented this is for dubai hundreds of thousands of tourists watching this war between iran and the us and israel unfold

9:50Shashank Joshi:Something happened last year.

10:20Shashank Joshi:as an island of stability has been attacked by more than 150 Iranian missiles.

10:32Shashank Joshi:Dubai airport is closed. Some 250 ,000 people pass through it every day. It's been shut for more than 24 hours. Here and across the Gulf, in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman, countries with economies that cannot sustain this volatility belong without serious damage to their carefully cultivated images of stability and security. Three people have been killed in the strikes on Dubai and Abu Dhabi, dozens injured. But the security paradigm these states once relied upon also appears to have been completely upset.

11:11Rosie Blau:So we heard from Gareth there about what he's seen in Dubai over the weekend. And Greg, just fill in for us the bigger picture about what Iran has been doing across the region.

11:22Nicolas Pelham:As Nick said, Iran has been lashing out at many of its neighbours. It immediately started attacking Israel at the outset of the war, which you would expect. It's been firing ballistic missiles at Israel for several days. A few of them have made it through Israel's air defences. They have killed a number of civilians, destroyed some residential buildings. But I would say notably, the volleys of missiles are smaller than what we saw during the war between Iran and Israel last summer. It doesn't seem as if Iran is able to muster the same volume of fire. Now, maybe that's because they're rationing missiles in anticipation of a long conflict, or maybe it's because they don't have enough launchers that are still intact to fire large volleys.

12:05Nicolas Pelham:We don't know the answer to that, but they have been much smaller. So instead, it has focused the bulk of its fire on Gulf states, on the Arab countries, just on the other side of the Persian Gulf. On the first day alone, on Saturday, it fired more than 130 missiles at the United Arab Emirates, along with scores of drones. There were dozens of missiles aimed at Bahrain and Qatar, a much smaller number aimed at Saudi Arabia. And I think at this point, almost certainly Gulf states have been shot at more than Israel has in the course of this war. Civilians have been killed by both drone impacts and by falling shrapnel from interceptions.

12:43Nicolas Pelham:There's been damage to airports across the region, to oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. Just shortly before we started recording this, there was a drone strike on a major oil facility in eastern Saudi Arabia. So the damage is widespread so far, and Iran seems to be escalating, I think, for two reasons. The logic on their part, first, is that there are American troops in these countries. The American Central Command has its regional headquarters in Qatar. The Navy's Fifth Fleet has a base in Bahrain. And so those have been, at least at the beginning of Iran's campaign, those were targets of its attacks.

13:20Nicolas Pelham:But again, we're seeing it now shift more towards just targeting civilian infrastructure. in those countries. And the idea for Iran is, if it causes enough damage, it thinks that the Gulf countries, which are American allies, will start to pressure Donald Trump and tell him he needs to wrap up the war, he needs to end things, because they simply can't go on living under this level of fire. And so that is why Iran is striking out with these sorts of very brazen attacks against airports, hotels, high-rise residential buildings, regular bits of civilian infrastructure in Gulf countries.

13:54Rosie Blau:And has that happened? How are these Gulf states responding?

13:58Nicolas Pelham:They're not responding in quite the way that Iran hoped they would. And I think they're surprising many observers across the Middle East with the way that they have responded. I think if these attacks had been limited to American bases in those countries, this might have been a different situation. But there's a lot of anger in the region that they are being targeted directly. Again, their hotels, their airports, their energy infrastructure, which is the lifeblood of their economy. And I think it's particularly grating because Gulf states have spent the previous two months working very hard to dissuade Donald Trump from starting this war in the first place.

14:36Nicolas Pelham:Countries in the region urged him in public and in private to strike a deal with Iran. Orman, which is one of the six Gulf countries, played mediator in several rounds of nuclear talks between the Americans and the Iranians. And Iran has thanked them for their efforts by targeting them over the past few days, including Arman, where it struck a port on Sunday. So there's a lot of anger, there's a lot of frustration in the region, and officials are beginning to talk about how do we proceed? Do we try to convince Trump to end the war? Some people are arguing that, but others are beginning to say, you know, we've been targeted already, we've been drawn into this conflict, we need to choose sides here.

15:13Rosie Blau:And do you think they will choose sides? I mean, this has been the sort of defining feature of the Gulf of treading this fine line between the two.

15:21Nicolas Pelham:There's no consensus yet. I mean, speaking to a couple of military officials in the Gulf yesterday, they said, you know, we're waiting on a political decision and there's been no political decision about what to do next. There are these voices, again, urging Gulf governments to get involved. What might that look like? I think a first step would be perhaps allowing American warplanes to use military bases in the Gulf to carry out attacks on Iran. That's something that has not been allowed until now. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE made it clear in the run-up to the war that they were not going to let bases in their countries be used for offensive strikes against the Iranians.

15:58Nicolas Pelham:So as a first step, perhaps they could lift that prohibition and allow the US to use those facilities. Then there's a big jump from there to getting involved yourselves, using your own warplanes to carry out attacks on Iran. Gulf countries have spent tens of billions of dollars over the years buying fighter jets and other modern kit from the US, from European countries. So they have the equipment to do it. But many of these are not battle-tested armies. They don't have much combat experience, certainly against a state enemy like Iran. And so I think there may be some reluctance, both on their part and on the part of the Americans, to see them get involved in the war in a more direct fashion.

16:38Nicolas Pelham:I think there might be a middle ground where they can play a supporting role behind the scenes without carrying out strikes themselves. But some of that will depend on how far this goes. And things like the Iranians attacking oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, that's going to be very escalatory for governments in the region. They're going to see that as a real threat to their economies and to their livelihoods.