Much has been made about how Israel’s ongoing rampage in West Asia is hurting its economy —damage that is sure to multiply with its launch of an illegal war against Iran.
While that might be true, if we view Israel less as a traditional state and more as an “unsinkable US aircraft carrier”, it is performing its mission. The reality is of course multi-layered and complicated. Israel and its religious fanatics do have agency. But the US was clearly involved in the attack on Iran, just like it has been in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. And the effort to topple the government in Tehran is an attempt to further both’s interests, which may very well backfire spectacularly.
Let’s have a look at those converging interests. And for that we can turn to the case of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). On paper, IMEC is a network of railroads, ship-to-rail, road transport routes, energy pipelines and high-speed data cables connecting South Asia, the Gulf and Europe—and one that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense:
Proposed India-Middle East-Europe trade corridor explained in this video. pic.twitter.com/ndshkZOji0
— Vice Admiral Arun Kumar Singh (@subnut) September 11, 2023
Unsurprisingly, there has been little progress in the way of infrastructure. The UAE and India, have deepened their cooperation on IMEC by launching a digital trade corridor and working together on port modernization (in 2022, the UAE signed major bilateral trade deals with both Israel and India). Beyond that it’s unclear where the money will come from for IMEC’s vision with gulf investors and calls for the European Investment Bank to issue “green bonds” to help grease the wheels.
Israel and its port at Haifa are central to the entire project, but how much longer will that port be in existence? Israel’s genocide in Gaza and other conflicts were already calling the entire project into doubt. But viewing all the bloodshed as a roadblock misses the two true points of IMEC. It is less an infrastructure project than an ideological alliance devoted to what Netanyahu endearingly calls authoritarian capitalism. Israel, a long time practitioner of that ideology, is naturally at the center of this IMEC embrace of the dark side.
That’s long what the shiny towers built with fossil fuel riches and on the backs of slave laborers in the Gulf have represented. Under the Modi government, India has successfully leveraged its growing commercial and security ties with the Gulf states to push aside the Pakistan issue at the same time that New Delhi sees a mutual affinity between India and Israel as religious-nationalist states:
An emerging alliance? 🇮🇱🇮🇳🇬🇷
“We’re all ancient civilizations all facing the same problem — radicalism.” @Ypoultsidis1 speaks with @indianaftali pic.twitter.com/Zh0c0zjJoi
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) May 21, 2025
New Delhi also embraces Netanyahu’s description of an authoritarian-capitalist future, as of course does the US. And European nations are quickly moving in this direction as well as the logical destination in their decades-long neoliberal journeys.
The key second goal to the IMEC alliance is the aim to compete with and bypass Chinese trade routes and thereby sideline Beijing politically, economically, and logistically. Now, how exactly do the US, India, Europe, Israel and the Gulf states plan to out-China China on infrastructure, manufacturing, and the like? They can’t.
What they can do —or at least try to—is embrace destruction. They can attack states friendly to Beijing even if, like in the case of war with Iran, it means destruction for Israel as well. While some analysts point to the fact that the Resistance is still resisting as a win because it means IMEC has yet to come to fruition, I think this is a misreading of the landscape. Certainly Washington is less interested in building massive infrastructure projects than preventing China from doing so. In that case, the Al Qaeda takeover in Syria and the weakening of Lebanon are wins for Washington. And the ultimate prize would be the toppling of the government in Tehran.
While Israel cannot defeat Iran militarily (and even US-friendly analysts admit that US involvement can’t either), the real concern is if Mossad and the CIA have other destabilization tools up their sleeve. More targeting of civilians and attempts at Libya- and Syria-style dirty wars are a good bet. I recall Vanessa Beeley saying recently that her sources tell her there are up to 12 million takfiris in Türkiye, which along with Azerbaijan that also shares a border with Iran, might be interested in seeing the government in Tehran fall. We’ll see.
Neocons have long dreamed of using the Azeris and Kurds to destabilize the country. Eldar Mamedov has written at Responsible Statecraft about what a stupid and reckless idea this is, but one must remember that death and destruction are what the US and Israel are after here. Oddly enough, Iran’s current president Masoud Pezeshkian, who came to power after his predecessor died in a helicopter crash on a return flight from Azerbaijan, is part ethnic Azeri, as is Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
Out of a population of more than 80 million people, Persians comprise the largest ethnic group in Iran at approximately 61 per cent. Other ethnic minority groups include Azeris (16 per cent), Kurds (10 per cent), Lur (6 per cent), Baluch and Arabs (both 2 per cent), Turkmen and other Turkic tribes (2 per cent), and other nomadic peoples comprising about 1 per cent of the total population. Iran’s constitution states that “All people of Iran, whatever the ethnic group or tribe to which they belong, enjoy equal rights; color, race, language, and the like, do not bestow any privilege.” Perhaps that isn’t applied perfectly, but surely it’s no worse than in Israel or post-Assad Syria.
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Israeli and American officials point dubiously to the nuclear weapon clock as the reason for the illegal attacks on Iran:
On Thursday the IDF spokesperson claimed Iran was days away from getting nuclear weapons.
Except in March the US head of national intelligence told a senate committee hearing that Iran wasn’t developing nuclear weapons.
As always, Israel lies.pic.twitter.com/4XIInMye1p
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) June 15, 2025
Netanyahu, for his part, has been warning for three decades that Iran is about to get the bomb. It could simply be that the Trump administration is bought and paid for by Zionists. It’s also worth pointing out that Iranian economic integration with China and Central Asia just took a major step forward.
Mark Sleboda also pointed out that the new strategic partnership between Russia and Iran was likely going to lead to an integrated multi-layer air defense and electronic warfare system for Iran, which would be too much of a “defensive threat” to the US and Israel.
China gets almost half of its fossil fuels from West Asia with Iran making up a good chunk of it at discount prices. Here’s more detail from SpecialEurasia:
In an increasingly polarised global context, Western sanctions appear not only partially ineffective but also act as a catalyst for strategic alignment among historically rival actors such as Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran.
Iran’s geographically strategic location has long positioned it as a bridge between East and West, as well as a key crossroads along the ancient Silk Road. Since 2013, when Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Tehran has publicly expressed its support for the project.
Under President Raisi’s administration, Tehran has actively leveraged its position by pursuing a foreign policy aimed at integrating the country into major regional transport corridors, joining key regional organisations, and strengthening bilateral relations with leading Eurasian actors. Iran’s growing economic and logistical integration into the Eurasian network may undermine Western efforts to isolate the country and could discourage partner states from withdrawing from economic engagement with Tehran.
Viewed through this lens the US-Israel violence in West Asia can be considered a front line in the war against China.
Necessary Pain for Gain?
While IMEC infrastructure might be struggling to gain any traction, Israel (and the US) have made enormous strides spreading their tentacles through the region over the past few years, as the Iranians have noted. Here’s Mondoweiss:
In a recent public address on October 4, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei highlighted for the first time what he described as U.S. and Israeli plans to control the region’s natural resources. He stated that Israel’s current war campaign aims to position Israel as a hub for exporting energy to Europe and importing technology to ensure its survival. Khamenei called for resistance against the so-called India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), a proposed land bridge connecting India, Saudi, the UAE, Jordan, Israel, and Europe.
Days after his call, the Iranian parliament discussed introducing a bill for a defensive alliance with the countries belonging to the “Axis of Resistance.” Khamenei further elaborated on this vision on October 27, calling for the establishment of “a global political and economic alliance, and if necessary a military one” to confront Israel and stop its ongoing crimes against the peoples of the region. This signals a clash of markets might be the next phase of the war. At the heart of this clash is the conflict over dominance in regional and global supply chains.
Ahmed Alqarout, the Lead Middle East and North Africa Analyst at Sibylline risk consultancy, writes about how with US assistance Israel is already inserted into much of the energy, cybersecurity, and defense supply chain running from Morocco and Europe to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and India—a scary thought when one considers the state’s penchant for inserting exploding devices into certain products.
It was also revealed last week that multiple Israeli defense companies have signed contracts with Qatar for supply of weapons, ammunition, cyber technology, and other sophisticated weaponry.
Israel and the US of course view this larger supply chain war a zero-sum game, and there is no act considered out of bounds. The states standing in the way must be destroyed:
And they and their clients must have full control over Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen. Until recently, Israel focused on “cutting the arms” and now as Netanyahu says, they have now “struck the head.” While many have tried and failed to subdue the Houthis in Yemen, US-Israel is likely to redouble their efforts if Iran is successfully destabilized. An extended Gaza-style siege and starvation campaign of Yemen would be likely as we’ve already seen them go after civilian infrastructure like ports, hospitals, and energy infrastructure.
Success there would mean US-Israeli control over the strategic chokepoint of Bab al-Mandab, which would be a major card to be used against China.
Visions of Gold
Here’s a snippet from Trump’s widely lauded speech in Saudi Arabia:
In the United States, we’ve launched the Golden Age of America. It’s the Golden Age. We see it. We see it with all that money, trillions and trillions of dollars pouring in, hundreds of thousands of jobs coming in with it. And with the help of the people of the Middle East and the people in this room, partners throughout the region, the golden age of the Middle East can proceed right alongside of us.”
What is it really? We’ve covered Gaza 2035 in the past but it’s worth another look in light of events as it represents a wider vision. Despite Israel’s shiny renderings and Trump’s talk of making Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East,” it’s nothing more than modern colonialism.
The Zionist idea is that ‘Gaza can become a significant industrial production centre for the shores of the Mediterranean with excellent access to… energy and raw materials from the Gulf while leveraging Israeli technology’. No doubt, the Zionists will produce grand plans for Iran as well if it comes to that point.
The US just bought off (or tried to, we’ll see how it goes) the Gulf monarchies with massive technological giveaways. Here’s Zvi Mowshowitz:
There is a 5GW AUE-US AI campus planned, and is taking similar action in Saudi Arabia. The deals were negotiated by a team led by David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan.
Lennart Heim: To put the new 5GW AI campus in Abu Dhabi (UAE) into perspective. It would support up to 2.5 million NVIDIA B200s.
That’s bigger than all other major AI infrastructure announcements we’ve seen so far.
In exchange for access to our chips, we get what are claimed to be strong protections against chip diversion, and promises of what I understand to be a total of $200 billion in investments by the UAE. That dollar figure is counting things like aluminum, petroleum, airplanes, Qualcomm and so on. It is unclear how much of that is new.
The part of the deal that matters is that a majority of the UAE investment in data centers has to happen here in America.
So we’ll get slave laborers building AI centers for a technology that is helping to prolong an increase in fossil fuel usage that is cooking the planet.
And it will take place in a West Asia dominated by US and Israel oligarchs, and Gulf monarchs with a sizable population of captive labour that is meant to produce more Dubais and Dohas built on the remains of genocide and war. As Sarah Jilani writes at ArtReview:
Displacing a population and destroying their existing social, architectural and economic fabric under the guise of modernisation harks back to colonial ideas about certain races and societies being apparently unfit or incapable of extracting the maximum profit from land – an argument favoured by nineteenth-century colonisers from South Africa to North America. Three hundred years of this thinking has landed us in our grotesquely unequal present, yet former colonial powers in Europe and settler colonies like the US continue to finance the militarisation of Israel.
There is nothing visionary about the Gaza 2035 ‘vision’. Devoid of social, ecological and historical accountability, and without even the veneer of interest in Palestinian agency, it is a futuristic facade meant to distract us from the same ambition that drove every colonial power since the nineteenth century: unfettered access to cheap labour and natural resources. To see atrocious images of Gaza being razed, while presented with shiny, state-of-the-art renders of a fictitious replacement – sanitised of everything that made Gaza a home, especially its Palestinian inhabitants – produces a harrowing cognitive dissonance that visual acrobatics cannot undo. These aesthetics seek to seduce viewers with what Israel thinks ‘the true spirit of ordered civilisation’ looks like: an open-air prison where captive labour builds Israeli products at the barrel of a gun.
And one where genocide and wars of agression are normalized. For that vision to become reality, the Iranian government must be toppled for the crime of trying to achieve economic and political sovereignty.
Yet even should the IMEC crew be successful, there’s at least one major flaw in the plan. How long before all these authoritarian capitalist, ethno-supremacist states start fighting among themselves?
Thank you, Conor, for your excellent treatment of IMECs role in all this. Some new transit corridor is always being planned, and often abandoned. There’s another which Russia and Iran have been laying track for, relevant to discussions of IMEC and the path of destruction its advocates have been cutting. I think of them, these railways and pipelines, as well as international shipping lanes and ports, as kind of the veins of international capital. As you point out, they are better understood as issues of labor than of geopolitics, or perhaps we should rather say that geopolitics is labor politics.
“While many have tried and failed to subdue the Houthis in Yemen, US-Israel is likely to redouble their efforts if Iran is successfully destabilized. An extended Gaza-style siege and starvation campaign of Yemen would be likely as we’ve already seen them go after civilian infrastructure like ports, hospitals, and energy infrastructure.”
Exactly.
In essence, Israel is going to re-apply the scenario used in Lebanon to Iran, and then to Yemen.
Remember those analyses that Hezbollah, entrenched in impregnable fortifications and awash with countless drones and missiles would withstand the Israeli onslaught and could ruin Israel? Indeed, it withstood the onslaught of the Israeli air force, gave a bloody nose to Israeli ground troops, and went on systematically to destroy the network of Israeli radars, sensors, and missile launchers on the border with Lebanon. After months of that game, Israel activated the pagers to slaughter the civilian arm of Hezbollah, decapitated its organization, razed one Lebanese village after another, and turned entire blocks in Beirut to rubble. Lebanon folded.
They did the same by bombing civilian infrastructure in Yemen, but were distracted by Gaza and now Iran. And after attacking Iranian energy infrastructure, decapitating its military leadership, assassinating its scientific and engineering elite, I have just read that Israel just bombed an Iranian hospital. I do think Israel will not bother with the nuclear infrastructure of Iran any longer, but attack everything civilian until the devastation proves unbearable to the Iranians. Then it will on to Yemen.
As for IMEC: if it works, this is bound to take away quite some business away from the Suez canal — and Egypt does not need another long-term weakening of its economic prospects…
We were with three other, Jewish, couples for a three day weekend. On Friday over dinner there was total agreement that Israel was both right in attacking Iran and will win easily. That is until I spoke up. When I said that counter their opinions I viewed this as a sign of Netanyahu’s weakness. They were gobsmacked. I pointed out that he had just survived a vote of no confidence and needed to distract the populace and shore up his support.
You could have heard a pin drop when I pointed out that he is a war criminal conducting genocide. After a few deep breaths a friend said the Gazans are fully complicit with Hamas and implied they deserved to die. When I pointed out that Netanyahu financed Hamas which is how they armed and built their tunnel system, these bombing hospitals has nothing to do with Hamas — I got the that is where Hamas rules from propaganda — as well as how date you say these things, because the Holocaust.
The subject got changed after I pointed out that one evil doesn’t justify another. Within global Jewry there is a schism brewing that allows the far right purchase to conduct these wars.
The article above is critical to understanding what is happening. I won’t share it, alas.
Bravo and very brave.
That schism is present under my roof, very difficult.
Yep, lost a couple of friends early on when I mentioned (and sent them links) about Netanyahu financing Hamas. Bringing that up when you’re tired and want the guests to go home is more effective than the Seinfeld run your fingers through your hair trick.
The two rotational axes of these demonic plans are Zionist ethnosupremacy and American exceptionalism. The whole world must worship at the altars of these extremist ideologies, any nation that wants to resist must be be economically strangled and if that fails, trampled under the boot of raw military power.
If there is no economic demand for IMEC ,(and with Europe in steep decline, even if IMEC actually works, that’s dubious), can it be sustained? If there is no common agenda beyond the immediate future, coalition members will need to be paid for their troubles. Who’s going to pay whom? That’s how wars start. In a way, the Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the fight among the anti Iran coalition of 1980s: the Gulf states wanted to stiff the Iraqis who paid a steep price in blood, money, and, indirectly, regime stability. Iraq thought it could show the Gulfies who had the guns…except it didn’t quite work. In an ironic fashion, it seems that Netanyahu is the new Saddam Hussein…
A historical process has been underway for some time that these actions are part of. The people involved think they are in charge but are being swept along by events beyond their control.
Sergey Glazyev pointed the way in his 2016 book The Last World War..The US to Move and Lose. There is a PDF on the web. Zhirinovsky also showed the way. This is why people like Mr Putin seem to be standing back and letting it happen. They have a real education and understand that these things will happen anyway and their duty is to help their own and others who show willing to help themselves survive the times while the process plays out.
Interesting review.
There is also the issue of Russia and Chna.
The slave and child labor, destruction of unions…doesn’t seem to bother any country.
Take a look at Libya as an example as well. USA leads the destruction and so many others (not just the West or UAE) take advantage of the USA’s dirty work with their deals and involvement with shady figures.
I’m hard pressed to find any “good guys” when digging deep.
It now appears, as Larry Johnson, Marandi, and others have noted, that Israel’s first strike was less successful than first appeared. It succeeded in assassinating some top military and scientific figures, but damage to hard assets and missile defense systems has been limited. The real extent and effectiveness of Iran’s justified retaliatory response is uncertain at this point, but seems greater than Israel expected, hence Johnson’s most recent post: Israel is crying, “Uncle Sam”. It seems likely that Iran can win a war a war of attrition if this lasts longer than a few weeks. Which means either Israel calls a halt to its assault and sues for peace, or escalates via nuclear weapons. Unless cooler heads prevail, based on its genocidal behavior in Gaza, the latter choice seems the more likely one.
Why sue for peace? Just stop bombing Iran and see if they stop retaliating.
A quibble: DeepSeek showed that the West is doing poorly in the AI competition. If you look at the number of Chinese AI scientists (and STEM) versus the West or the number of AI patents and peer-reviewed papers, it’s not hard to forecast the future. With that context, a 5 GW AI center in West Asia is not a key metric.
Thanks. That “authoritarian capitalism” sounds somewhat familiar. If it walks like a Hitler and quacks like a Hitler? The great irony is that the TDS people may end up being right about the return of fascism and Trump as Manchurian Candidate but they made up the part about Russia being the sponsor. IMEC–doesn’t have much of a ring.
Perhaps they listened to DJT’s campaign rhetoric and thought he wasn’t onboard with the plan. We are about to find out how very much he is onboard–or isn’t.
Quibble. “Authoritarian capitalism” basically sounds like the literal definition of Fascism per Dimitrov – “dictatorship of finance capital”. Yes, technically those are two separate entries in Wikipedia, but one wonders about distinctions and differences. That, or we just don’t want to remember the 1935 Dimitrov speech on the subject, where that definition comes from, and so are reinventing the same wheel.
To be sure, I myself believe that Dimitrov’s definition ought to be expanded a bit, as the difference between a capitalist dictatorship (Aristotelian tyranny) and a capitalist republic (Aristotelian oligarchy) is, err…sometimes not very large. But whatever.
“Certainly Washington is less interested in building massive infrastructure projects than preventing China from doing so.”
Just spitballing, but the empire could still settle for containing China.
Ultimately, the USA and associates could possibly let a BRI project roll and China would be making deals that they get rents off or control on the other end.
If everywhere China turns, they have to deal with the USA and associates…that’s a form of containment.
It’s horrid.
I’d say the vision for the Middle east is just like Syria. You would have scores of mini-statelets of indeterminate borders fighting each other like Kilkenny cats and occasionally the Israelis or the US would bomb some group to either tilt the balance to one group or another or just to stir up instability. Occasionally they would drop weapons, ammo and advisors to some ISIS-like group to keep all the other groups scrambling.
This has been the vision and the objective for ever.
1) Iraq: does anybody remember the plans to break the country into Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, and Christian statelets?
2) Russia: plans have been repeatedly proposed to break Russia into 50? 70? statelets — in the name of “decolonization”!
3) Syria: the original idea was to break Syria into Sunni, Kurdish, Druze, and Alawite/Christian statelets. This has been more or less achieved (the Druze being now under Israeli tutelage, the Sunnis having taking over Alawite and Christian regions, and in the process of slaughtering their propulations).
4) Libya: at some point there were 4 regions fighting each other (in the East, the West, a Tuareg region, and a Tubu region).
5) When the “liberation” of Iraq was in full swing, I remember to have read that once the work is finished, Iran would have to be tackled — and split into Kurdish, Persian, Arabic, Azeri, and Baluch statelets.
6) The big success which has informed all those speculations is of course Yugoslavia: broken into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bosnia-Herzegovina — itself split into 2.5 or 3 parts. All countries weak and powerless to resist the exploitation by European powers.
7) Should we mention Somalia? Broken in three states (Somalia, Puntland, Somaliland). And Sudan? Broken in two — and both resulting countries mired in unending civil wars.
By the way: breaking large entities into a multitude of statelets and “tribes” has been a colonial policy for ages. Thus, the Raj was a mosaic of “British overseas provinces” and “princely states” (ruled by a multitude of maharajahs) — after the destruction of the large Moghul, Sikh, and Maratha polities.
If Russia and China don’t step up to the plate and defend Iran, or at least heavily subsidize proxies to defend Iran, they are next on the imperial menu. We’ve already seen what the preferred tactics are, as Israel is the exemplar for their development: assassinations, terrorist bombings, divisions by ethnicity and religion in the “enemy” country, the whole color revolution playbook, etc. If Iran falls there will be car bombings in Moscow and the assassinations of Putin and other leaders there. And in terms of impact on the US, we’ve already seen how our police departments have been militarized and given the Israeli training program on how to treat the citizenry as internal enemies. That will increase exponentially unless somebody gives the US/UK/Israel war machine a short, sharp punch in the kisser. We are going to lose all our liberties if we destroy Iran for Israel.
I always remind people that “winning” is not something you can do according to an objective scale. No celestial judge is going to ring a bell and say “OK, Iran” or “OK Israel- you have won.” Winning means achieving the victory conditions you set yourself, or at the very least preventing the other side from achieving theirs. So you can’t analyse situation like this without first understanding what the players are trying to achieve.
For the West, it’s easy. They don’t really know, and they have now come (as with Ukraine) so far from where they started that its hard to remember that the original idea was to stop Iran going nuclear because that was thought to be a threat to the stability of the region. The desperate attempts to find a logical rationale for western behaviour often degenerate into assertions that “Israel is the US’s unsinkable aircraft carrier” or alternatively “the US is a puppet of Israel”, often on the same site (as here) frequently in the same article and sometimes even in the same paragraph. It’s obvious that both cannot be true: in reality neither is. The nearest thing to an actual rationale is the hope that support for Israel will somehow, don’t ask them how, lead to the emergence in Iran of the famous “pro-western” government they have dreamt of since 1979. In the meantime, of course, the West is cursed with the necessity to do something and doing something, or doing nothing, will inevitably be perceived as taking sides, whatever the intention. The West is caught in a dilemma: it has pursued “nation-building,” if necessary by force, for thirty-five years now, and has suffered the direct and indirect effects of nations falling apart, to the point where it really doesn’t want that to happen any more. (I speak from experience of both.) On the other hand, it would like Iran to sort of disappear, if possible, and stop being a nuisance, but if the current regime falls everybody knows there won’t be a smooth transition, but yet another crisis of disintegration to add to those we already have, with incalculable, but generally nasty, consequences for the West, especially the Europeans. But this is the situation they’ve got themselves into.
I don’t pretend to know what the Israeli government wants, but I can think of two obvious objectives. One is just to have a war, especially one that lasts a long time, and creates a permanent psychosis and keeps Netanyahu in power. After all it’s been spoken about for so long that actually starting the war can come as a relief, like the thunderstorm after the humid weather. More speculatively, I think that, with due allowances for scale, they may be trying to do to Iran what they did to its client Hezbollah. That organisation, remember, still has much of its weaponry (which the Iranians wouldn’t let them use) but has withdrawn from the conflict and lost much of its political power in Lebanon to the point where the stalled political process has been able to restart and the country now has a President and a government. The analogy would be an Iran much of whose military infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, many of whose leaders and scientists were dead, and where the government was too busy trying to suppress threats to its own power to worry about the nuclear programme. If that’s the plan, it won’t work in my view, because Hezbollah was only one faction in Lebanon, and the rest were able to combine to choose a President. But there’s no alternative government waiting in Iran, where the regime is by far the most powerful actor, and where none of the other factions can really be more than nuisances. But maybe that’s the plan, or at least the hope.