Iran has since the 1980s survived American sanctions and the 20th century’s longest war to create the Middle East’s most extensive industrial base that has produced Shahed-136 drones, the mainstay of Iran’s first direct attack on Israel in April 2024, and helped Russians overwhelm Ukrainians
A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian crashed in mountainous terrain on May 19, 2024. Search teams fought blizzards and difficult terrain overnight to locate the completely burnt wreckage of the helicopter over 20 hours later in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province. All passengers, including Ebrahim Raisi, were found dead.
The death of Raisi, 63, seen as a potential successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the 87-year-old Iranian Supreme Leader, sparked fresh speculation about regime change in Iran. Tehran has long accused the West of trying to destabilize the country to achieve its ultimate goal of regime change, particularly since Iran is the only power in the region with the potential to challenge Israel.
Regime change has been a recurring theme in Iranian discourse. It has had resonance since 1953 when the West removed democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh (1880-1967) from power for keeping his poll promise to nationalize oil to invest its profits for the welfare of the poor. Mossadegh, educated at Institut d’études politiques de Paris and received his doctorate in law from the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, was a liberal, rationalist who believed in pluralism and secularism and opposed obscurantism. Mossadegh built a political base largely by calling for oil nationalisation. Mossadegh’s ideals counted for little when he ended the London-based Anglo-Iranian Petroleum Company’s monopoly over Iran’s oil and aroused the British ire.
Britain imposed economic sanctions and a naval embargo in retaliation for the end of almost five decades of its monopoly over Iran’s petroleum extraction, marketing, and sales. It forced British technicians to leave Iran and blocked Iran’s exports to cripple its lifeline petroleum industry. Britain laid claim to Iranian oil and planned to overthrow Mosaddegh. But the British embassy in Iran was soon shut while the undercover agents, who were plotting a coup posing as diplomats, were deported.
Mossadegh’s defiance prompted President Dwight Eisenhower to abandon the American non-interventionist policy in 1952 and sealed the Iranian leader’s fate. Eisenhower saw Mossadegh’s nationalization as a threat to multinational enterprises. He rushed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent Kermit Roosevelt to Tehran, where he oversaw Mossadegh’s overthrow in just three weeks as part of the covert Operation Ajax.
British and American intelligence agents operating from the American embassy in Tehran successfully plotted it by buying off the Iranian press to circulate propaganda against Mossadegh, roping in members of the Islamic clergy, and rogue Iranian military elements. In August 1953, Mossadegh was banished to spend the rest of his life under house arrest in his native village. Iran split 50–50 oil revenues a year later with an international consortium controlling its marketing and production.
The West’s backing of the Shah’s brutal rule would eventually prepare the ground for the 1979 revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini. Mossadegh’s removal was among the reasons cited for the Shah’s overthrow. Khomeini’s system of governance, which has since endured thanks to constant fears of regime change and repeated but failed attempts to achieve it, is a far cry from Mossadegh’s ideals.
The 444-day embassy seizure and captivity of American diplomats in Tehran following Khomeini’s revolution, too, was more of an attempt to prevent the 1953-style regime change. The US sanctioned Iran in retaliation and backed Iraqi dictator Saddam’s invasion of Iran to counter Khomeini’s revolution.
Resilience And Self-reliance
The existential threat over the decades has ended up making Iran more resilient and self-reliant to fend off regime change attempts. Saddam’s eight-year invasion, too, was part of the efforts to change the Iranian regime. Iran was forced to agree to an UN-brokered ceasefire with Saddam in September 1988 after he resorted to chemical weapons and Americans brought down an Iranian civilian aircraft, signalling an open siding with Iraq. It ended the 20th century’s longest war, which left an estimated million dead.
The US would later invade Iraq to remove Saddam from power in 2003 on the pretext of non-existent weapons of mass destruction and to export democracy that it throttled in Iran in the 1950s. The 2003 Iraq war and the occupation that followed, directly and indirectly, claimed about half a million lives until 2011 and also ended up benefitting Iran. Tehran filled the vacuum the US left by withdrawing from Iraq in 2011, creating a corridor of influence up to the Mediterranean.
Survival with Innovation
Iran has also since the 1980s survived American sanctions, which have, among other things, led to over 200 accidents because of Tehran’s inability to buy aircraft parts. The helicopter carrying Raisi was also part of Iran’s aging fleet, which it has been unable to replace because of the sanctions. The helicopter’s age is believed to have been among the reasons for the crash.
Despite odds, Iran created the region’s most extensive industrial base and emerged as one of the world’s top automobile, cement, and steel manufacturers. Russia, which has a formidable military-industry complex, relied on Iranian weapons and delta-winged Shahed-136 drones when it fell short of ballistic and cruise missiles amid the Ukraine war.
Shahed-136 drones can be aimed at fixed sites via mechanical guidance and commercial satellite navigation. They are smaller and fly low, making them hard to spot. Shahed-136s can overwhelm air defences by sending volleys from multiple directions besides being cheaper than an air defence missile.
Self-detonating Shahed-136’s larger tactile missiles overwhelmed Ukrainian defense forces when Iran transferred designs and key components of the drone to Russia in November 2022. They were the mainstay of Iran’s first direct attack on Israel on April 1, 2024. Iran’s capabilities came under a fresh spotlight in the aftermath of Israel’s assassination of Palestinian group Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran while he was there to attend Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s inauguration in July 2024.
Setting Apart
Eleven feet long, the Shahed-136 can target areas up to 1,500 miles away. Fabian Hinz, an analyst at Berlin’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the Washington Post that the ‘size, range, warhead weight, and engine’ set the Shahed-136 apart in drone warfare. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has improved its design and scaled up the Shahed drones since they were first exhibited in 2014.
The Post cited analysts and said Shahed-136 is relatively accurate, long-ranged, and inexpensive compared to missiles used to shoot them down. The drone’s satellite guidance system and spoofing-resistant antennae allow it to maintain an accurate path beyond the range of drones controlled using radio signals. It can hit the target accurately and does not need a large warhead.
Iran produces Shahed-136 cheaply by combining lightweight explosives with a commercial satellite guidance system. A Shahed-136 costs $50,000 while a cruise missile with a similar range costs over $1 million.
Human Resource
Iran has been among the countries topping nanotechnology and stem-cell research. Iran, which has successfully improved its military strength, ranked as the world’s 17th largest producer of scientific papers ahead of even Israel and Turkey in 2012. In 2015, 70% of Iran’s science and engineering students were women, despite the myths about their exclusion from entrepreneurship and positions of power. Iranian women have owned and managed businesses, including in industries such as oil and gas, construction, and mining.
Ghonche Tavoosi founded the startup Lendem, a platform for lending items such as phone charging cables, tracking who has got what, reminding people to return, and guaranteeing their return. Sisters Reyaneh and Bahareh Vahidian organized the Startup Weekend for Women in Tehran to encourage women entrepreneurs to share ideas and network. In 2000, Behnaz Aria and her partners opened Iran’s first IT training school, Kahkeshan Institute of Technology. It marked the beginning of Iranian IT services. In 2015, women accounted for 40% of its staff and 37% of its students.
Women’s educational and professional participation rose in Iran post-1979 revolution, as the government sought to compete with the West. A free education system, new universities, including in rural areas, were set up for this, making education more accessible to girls. Khomeini spelled out his vision, saying: ‘We are proud that our women, young and old, are active in the educational and economic field…any nation that has women like the women of Iran will surely be victorious.’
The mandatory hijab, or headscarves, which Western media and policy elites cite for the trope of Iranian women as silenced victims awaiting rescue, ironically, encouraged conservative women to leave their homes to study and work. Women entered the workforce in large numbers during the 1980s Iraq-Iran war, which is estimated to have left around 200,000 Iranians, mostly men, dead. Textbooks portrayed women in roles outside the home.
The only woman to be awarded the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the Fields Medal, until 2022, was an Iranian, the late Maryam Mirzakhani (2014). The Tehrān born Mirzakhani (1977- 2017) was awarded the prize for her contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces. Mirzakhani, who won gold medals in the 1994 and 1995 International Mathematical Olympiads for high-school students, received her BSc in mathematics from Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology in 1999 and a PhD from Harvard University
UNESCO’s 2012 data showed women constituted over half of postsecondary students in Iran. In engineering, Iranian female enrollment ranked first in the world and second in science fields, after the US. Iran has both co-educational and all-women colleges and universities.
Maria Charles and Karen Bradley, professors at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Western Washington University, found that the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) gender gap was smaller in countries like Iran, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Oman than in the US. Men still made up the majority of STEM graduates overall, but there were more women by comparison. Charles and Bradley found a reverse gender gap in those same nations in certain STEM measurements. For instance, women in Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan earned over 50% of the science degrees. The Netherlands was the weakest country for women’s representation in science.
In eighth-grade science, girls outperformed boys in only 15 countries—eight of them were Arab, and the list also included Turkey and Iran—in the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study test administered in 68 countries. In math, girls outperformed boys in seven countries, five of them Arab, with Iran included again.
Women have continued to outnumber men in Iranian universities over the last decade. This is another marker of Iran’s resilience despite all odds since 1979. And with a little more breathing space, which it has not had for over four decades, more changes, such as easing of dress code norms for women, are inevitable as long as they are organic and not intended to be just an excuse for engineering another regime change. Such interventions have been disastrous for both the region and the West.
