Iranian Protests End without US Intervention or Support

President Trump postured on social media, even going so far as saying “help was on the way” and encouraging protestors to “take over institutions.” But the US Navy, and its crucial aircraft carrier groups to conduct offensive and defensive operations, were out of position. With a complete internet blackout and jamming of Starlink, it’s not clear how many Iranians took the President at his word and risked themselves, but it’s entirely possible the uprising was in the throes of being crushed even as Trump made those statements.

Uprisings have windows, momentum, and timing. The threshold triggering event of regime collapse – like the arrest of a fruit stand seller in Tunisia leading to the collapse of multiple regimes is hard to predict. We can know under what conditions a forest is ready for a fire: economic stressors being hot and dry seasons, corrupt repressive regimes, providing the fuel in the undergrowth and old growth. But predicting which lightning strike (or downed power lines) will light it off is much harder. Any fire lit under these conditions is going to burn hot. But absent contingency or externality, it’s going to burn fast too. A population that doesn’t have access to weaponry, let alone heavy weaponry or improvised fighting vehicles, results in a one-sided wildfire mostly heading in one direction, right through the protestors.

I even did research on this question last year, seeing if AI could be used for Strategic Warning. For example, had AI been able to forecast the risk of Iranian uprisings as severe of these even as late as early December, the US may have been able to reposition the Abraham Lincoln two weeks before it was needed rather than a week after it was needed. But, TLDRUpFront: AI is not capable of strategic warning in complex systems (sources in first comment). It’s not even very good at understanding complex phenomena, and it’s likely on the middle-right of a Dunning-Kruger scale for your average white Westerner. In preparing this post, I wanted to check the Shia mourning rituals which occur ata fixed number of days after the death of a martyr. I can never remember what they’re called – but I do remember that this rite (the “arba’in” or “chehellom” depending on where you look) was used to great effect in the Iranian Revolution. Before everyone had cellphones and the Shah controlled mass media radio and television, the movement led by Ayatollah Khomenia used 40-day timing periods after protestor massacres to stage the next major protest. You didn’t need to send out calendar reminders or post it on Xitter; everyone knew that the 40th day would be well attended in remembrance, and that would be the day the uprisings, lying dormant like smoldering coals in the dry tinder-filled forest, would ignite again.

So naturally, when I tried to fact-check and source this for this post, Google’s AI gave me the worst kind of slop. It was so bad I even had to color-code between “close enough”, “arguably wrong” and “totally wrong.” One of the challenges is that there is a festival of mourning for a historically important religious figure that occurs every Islamic year, on the 40th day after his death; but there is also the separate mourning ritual for someone who has died that marks 40 days for their soul to reach heaven. So right off the bat LLM’s are going to struggle with that kind of nunace. But if the Google AI cannot tell that 40 days after 1-2 January is no longer in ‘early January’; I’m just not interested in giving partial credit for that kind of mistake.

So I think, and this is one of those things where I hope I’m wrong, that the window of uprising has been lost. And even if the Abraham Lincoln gets on station in a few days, there are no good targets to strike sufficient to counteract the crackdown. The US could institute a general or regional no-fly zone over the country or specific ethnic conflict hotspots: Baluchi in the southeast, Kurdish in the northwest. Trump saved face by saying he had won a concession of ‘no executions’ of political prisoners, a stand the Iranian foreign minister has neither endorsed nor confirmed. Even if it’s true, execution is just the tip of the iceberg of suffering a nation-state authoritarian regime can inflict. There are unlawful mass detentions, imprisonment under inhuman conditions, beatings, systemic sexual assault, and illegal renditions to torture center black sites. And I’m not even talking about ICE right now. The tools of the Iranian regime to oppress its people and suppress uprisings have been well developed over 40 years of effort.

Now, maybe 40 days from the 8th of January, February 17th-20th will be another window for uprising as a timing mechanism of the mourners of those killed in the crackdown since last week. Given the new sanctions regime implemented in October under the snapback provisions, I don’t see economic conditions improving. But is President Trump willing to hold the Abraham Lincoln off the coast of Iran or in the Persian Gulf for a month and a half on the hope lightning strikes twice?

Or will he want it instead for Venezuela, Greenland, or Minnesota?

Time and timing will tell.

*I hope and doubt the death totals are this high. Most of the sources for this come from internal Iranian regime sources leaked through press outlets. Counter-intuitively, death totals from sources like these can sometimes be overinflated, vs. underreported as apparatchiks try to outdo one another in the fervor of their defense of the regime. Most of the internal reports claim these were the deaths reported at the height of the crack down 11th and 12th. There’s a kind of immoral mathematics on logistics of gearing up to kill a lot of people, and from the 8th to the 11th is likely not enough time for Iran to put that kind of machinery into place. This isn’t to discount the total death toll, or that, all told across the entire uprisings, it may not head that way.