Why doesn’t the Iranian regime just fall? – by Neda Amin

While most Iranians and sympathetic individuals from across the globe are awaiting the fall of the mullah’s regime, we do not see it happening so quickly. The protests are taking place but they are not working.  The Iranian people are getting slaughtered, imprisoned and tortured by the Iranian regime, with no end in sight.

The US-led sanctions against the Iranian regime are increasing. As a result, the mullah’s regime activities outside of Iran are diminishing and their communication has been disrupted.  As a result, they are less likely to wage terror attacks outside their borders or to support terror groups.  They cannot supply weapons and money to their proxies anymore.  In fact, they can barely meet their basic needs for political and economic survival.

Nevertheless, the mullah’s regime is still in power.  This poses a major problem for everyone who cares about peace and security throughout the world. After all, the mullah’s regime will never stop posing a threat to Israel, America and the free world until it is on its death bed.

This is best demonstrated by how the Iranian regime mistreats its own people.  After China, Iran has the most executions in the world per capita.  In fact, Iranian law even permits the execution of girls as young as nine-years-old.  In the Islamic Republic of Iran, leaving Islam and being gay is punishable by death.  Drinking alcohol is also illegal.  In fact, an Iranian man was flogged 80 times for drinking alcohol as a child. This does not even include the overt persecution of political dissidents and critical journalists, who are systematically executed, raped, imprisoned and tortured for daring to expose the mullah’s regime for what it is.

To add insult to injury, Iran does not care about the health of its own citizens.  This was best demonstrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards shooting down Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752, thus killing all 176 passengers and crew on board.  It should be noted that most of the passengers were Iranian citizens, whose only crime was to seek to visit an area of the world not dominated by the mullah’s regime.

Given that, it should surprise no one that they are poorly handling the coronavirus crisis, leading to over 100,000 infections and over 6200 deaths, merely because the mullah’s regime did not have the sense to quarantine people coming out of the Shia Holy City of Qom.  As a result, average Iranian people are living in fear and are afraid to leave their homes. This has an adverse effect upon the Iran protest movement.  Indeed, as Iran tortures more and more people, now via this virus the regime has put more pressure on the Iranian people than ever before.

However, the question remains, how can it be that despite the international sanctions and domestic protests, this regime is still in power and is not falling?  How can the mullah’s still rule a country with eighty million souls after losing so much money, credibility and public support?

Prior to 2009, the Obama administration and other prominent members of the international community were opposed to toppling the Iranian regime, even though is was precisely what the Iranian people wanted.  As a result, the Green Movement was brutally repressed.  Now, the Iranian people are hoping that the world has changed since then. As a result, the Iranian people have become more and more frustrated. They have lost complete confidence in the system, which led to the Reformists failing in the last parliamentary elections, Iranian people have woken up and realized that the reformist movement in Iran is merely another deception by the mullah’s regime in order to stay in power.

As a result, more and more people began to protest.  This time around, they got some support from the American and Israeli governments. But nevertheless, the Iranian regime is still in power for all the military and financial power obtained by the mullah’s over the past forty years is not easily undone.   And of course, the Iranian regime is destroying people in order to stay in power, utilizing Iran’s vast financial and natural resources.

Unfortunately, European governments are not cutting ties with the mullah’s regime. Despite US sanctions, they are still trying to maintain their economic ties with Iran because Iran is a great source of income for them and Europe will never abandon it.  Another thing to keep in mind is that despite all the talk of war with Iran, no country is acting. The United States could easily get rid of this regime. And of course, this is what the Iranian people want too.  But the United States is not trying to fight Iran.

And if you look at George W. Bush’s presidency, he predicted the current situation and referred to Iran as part of an Axis of Evil.  Indeed, he wanted to go after Iran after going into Iraq sixteen years ago. But in the end, he did not do so. Likewise, Israel, led by Netanyahu, who has shown the world that the mullah’s regime is acquiring nuclear weapons, has not yet launched a direct attack.  In fact, we see that all the talk about a war with Iran is just a figure of speech and is not meant to be a policy option. Indeed, it does not happen in reality. It is as if there is a hidden force in the world that supports the regime and spares it from being attacked.

Of course, this hidden force is nothing but the power of Russia, an issue that the world has either forgotten or neglected to mention.  So long as Russia wants the mullah’s regime to stay in power, nobody acts on the matter.

If we look at the history of Iran, we see that Russia was among the countries that have always sought to control Iran because Iran is a rich country and politically such a country should always be a colony. To earn its money and strategic interests, many countries feel that they must control the region via obtaining control of Iran.

In the past, Iran was under British and American control. And Iran’s interests were dictated by Britain and America.  But when Dr. Mohammed Mossedeq took power, Britain and America could no longer control Iran. Power was in the hands of an Iranian government. And that was an economic threat to the West, especially because of the oil.  So, in 1953, Dr. Mohammed Mossedeq was overthrown in a coup, enabling Britain and America to control Iran once again until after the revolution, when both America and Britain once again lost their influence.

After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, another foreign government seized control of Iran and that was Russia!  And indeed, it is Russia who stands behind all the activities of the mullah’s regime, the failure of the Iran protests, the blockade of Iran, European support for the regime, etc. It is Russia who destroys all efforts to overthrow the Iranian regime. Without the backing of Russia, it would be hard for the mullah’s regime to survive in the present atmosphere.