The following essay is by Michael Peabody. His analysis of Iranian eschatology is spot on in my analysis. Michael’s site is outstanding on many of the issues of today. You can subscribe at the website below.


“What the West Gets Wrong About Iran”

An analysis of a theology-driven state, the martyrdom doctrine that shapes its war-making, and what to expect now that the bombs have started falling.
ReligiousLiberty.TV
Mar 14, 2026

I. The Framework the West Keeps Using
There is a template in Washington and in most Western capitals for how military pressure on a hostile state is supposed to work. You degrade capabilities. You kill commanders. You strangle the economy. You demonstrate that the cost of continued defiance exceeds any conceivable benefit. At some point, rational self-interest reasserts itself, the regime recalculates, and either a ceasefire is negotiated or the government falls. The template worked, more or less, in Libya. It worked in the Cold War arms race, where mutual assured destruction created a deterrence equilibrium built entirely on rational self-preservation. It worked in Iraq in 1991, where Saddam Hussein’s army disintegrated once it became clear that the territorial and political costs were catastrophic.

The template does not work against Iran. It has not worked for decades, through multiple rounds of sanctions, multiple rounds of proxy conflict, multiple rounds of targeted assassination, and now, as of February 28, 2026, a direct military campaign that killed the supreme leader himself. The West keeps applying the template and keeps being surprised when Iran does not behave according to it.

The reason is not that Iran is irrational. The reason is that Iran is operating from a different rationality, one built not on cost-benefit calculations but on eschatological expectation. To understand what Iran is doing and what it will do next, you have to understand what Twelver Shia Islam teaches about history and how it ends. Until you understand that, every intelligence assessment that starts from secular assumptions will be wrong in the same predictable direction: it will underestimate Iran’s willingness to absorb punishment, misread ceasefire acceptance as genuine defeat, and mistake tactical withdrawals for strategic collapse.

II. The Theology You Need to Know
Iran is a Twelver Shia state. Twelvers believe that legitimate leadership of the Muslim community belongs to the Prophet Muhammad’s bloodline through a chain of twelve infallible imams. The twelfth of these imams, born in 868 CE, went into what Shia theology calls occultation at the age of six. He did not die. He was concealed by God. He is, according to this doctrine, still alive, still present in the world, and waiting for the appointed moment to return and establish global justice. His return will be preceded by catastrophic conflict, widespread injustice, and the defeat of the forces of God’s enemies. Then he emerges, the world is set right, and history ends.

For over a millennium, this belief was largely quietist. The Hidden Imam would return when God willed it. Human beings could do little but wait. The transformation came in 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini invented a doctrine called Velayat-e Faqih, rule of the jurist, which argued that qualified clerics must govern as deputies of the Hidden Imam until his return. This doctrine embedded eschatological expectation into the constitutional structure of the Iranian state. From that point, the regime did not merely believe in the Mahdi’s return. It organized itself as the instrument of that return. The Islamic Republic was designated, in Khomeini’s own framing, the Vanguard of the Mahdi, a state whose sacred mission was to pave the way for the end of history.

The IRGC has absorbed this framework entirely. A 2022 study by the Middle East Institute documented how the destruction of Israel is framed within the Guard not simply as a geopolitical objective but as a religious obligation tied directly to eschatological expectation. A leading IRGC-affiliated cleric called explicitly on Guard members to eliminate Israel as the greatest obstacle to the Mahdi’s return. This is not rhetoric for domestic consumption. It is operational doctrine, and it shapes how the IRGC makes decisions under pressure.
When the IRGC frames military conflict as preparation for the Mahdi’s return, it is not using religious language metaphorically. It is stating a terminal value. Terminal values cannot be negotiated away. They can only be accommodated or defeated. The West has spent forty years trying to negotiate away a terminal value while calling it a negotiating position.

III. The Persecution Complex as Strategic Asset
Western analysts are trained to treat persecution complexes as psychological vulnerabilities, signs of insecurity, weaknesses that can be exploited by demonstrating the futility of continued defiance. In secular political systems, they are often right. A regime that convinces itself the world is against it tends to make paranoid decisions that accelerate its own collapse.
In an eschatological framework, the persecution complex is not a weakness. It is a load-bearing theological structure. The foundational trauma of Shia Islam is the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE, where Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, was killed with a small band of followers by the vastly larger army of the Umayyad caliph. This event is not ancient history to observant Shia. It is re-enacted every year during Ashura. It is wept over. It is the emotional architecture of the faith. Karbala established, at the religion’s emotional core, a template in which the righteous are outnumbered, politically marginalized, and killed, and they are still right. Their defeat was God’s test. Their willingness to die was the proof of their faithfulness.

Khomeini imported this structure directly into revolutionary politics. Every sanction became evidence that the arrogant powers feared God’s revolution. Every assassination became a martyrdom. Every military setback became confirmation that the regime was engaged in something real enough to make the forces of evil act against it. When your enemy attacks you, in this framework, you have not been damaged. You have been validated.
This is what makes conventional coercive logic dissolve against Iran specifically. Coercion works by making the costs of continuing exceed the benefits. But you cannot make the costs of dying exceed the benefits of paradise. You cannot make the costs of persecution exceed the theological premium that persecution pays. Every bomb confirms the prophecy. Every martyr joins the coming kingdom.

IV. The Iran-Iraq War: The Doctrine in Action
The best laboratory for understanding this doctrine is the 1980-1988 war with Iraq, specifically what Iran did when it ran out of conventional military options. Saddam Hussein invaded in September 1980 expecting to find a post-revolutionary military in chaos. He was partly right. Up to 14,000 Iranian commanders and officers had been purged, imprisoned, or executed after 1979. The professional military was working with American equipment it could no longer get parts for. Saddam Hussein looked at this wreckage and concluded he had a window.
What he had not accounted for was the Basij. The Basij paramilitary, founded in direct response to the invasion, was poorly armed and included members as young as twelve and as old as seventy. They had essentially no training and no logistics. What they had was the martyrdom doctrine. By 1982, Iran had driven Iraq back to the border. A rational state would have accepted a settlement at that point and rebuilt. Khomeini refused. Iran invaded Iraq instead, under the slogan that the road to Jerusalem passes through Karbala. It was not a military strategy. It was a prophecy with troop movements attached.

What followed was industrial martyrdom. The Basij launched human wave attacks on fortified Iraqi positions while actors playing Imam Hossein galloped along the lines on white horses to prepare the fighters spiritually for death. On March 20, 1982, Khomeini formally announced that schoolboys between twelve and eighteen could join the Basij without parental permission. Scores of children were given rudimentary training and sent directly to the front. Recruitment forms were nicknamed Passports to Paradise. Children were sent into minefields to clear them with their bodies, given keys reportedly symbolizing entry to heaven if they died as martyrs. Iranian official figures acknowledge approximately 36,000 school-aged children among the war’s martyrs.

The casualty ratio tells the story. In a conventional war between professional armies, the number of wounded typically exceeds the number killed. In the Iran-Iraq War, Iran’s ratio inverted. The dead outnumbered the wounded. This was not equipment failure or tactical incompetence. It was the doctrine performing as designed: minimally trained fighters sent forward in mass to clear obstacles, dying in numbers that would have broken any secular army. The Basij absorbed approximately 155,000 deaths in direct combat over the course of the war, per the organization’s own records.

And yet none of this produced a recalculation. Iraq had Soviet equipment, French aircraft, American intelligence, Saudi financing, and chemical weapons that the West largely declined to punish. Iran had ideology and replaceable human beings. From inside the martyrdom framework, the asymmetry was not demoralizing. The righteous are always outnumbered. Hussein at Karbala was outnumbered. If you are losing by every conventional metric, you are on schedule.

The Poison Chalice, 1988. When Khomeini finally accepted the UN ceasefire, he did not announce a strategic recalibration. He announced that accepting the ceasefire was itself a form of martyrdom: “Happy are those who have departed through martyrdom. Unhappy am I that I still survive. Taking this decision is more deadly than drinking from a poisoned chalice. I submitted myself to Allah’s will and took this drink for His satisfaction.” His son later recalled that after accepting the ceasefire, Khomeini could no longer walk and never again spoke in public. Loss was processed as sacrifice. The defeat became, in official retrospective framing by Khamenei, a “divine gift” and a “victory as clear as the sun.” The borders had not changed. Half a million were dead. Iran had won.

That reframing is not revisionism for domestic consumption. It is the framework working as designed. The revolution survived. The Mahdi’s vanguard endured. The enemy did not destroy it. By the internal logic of Shia eschatology, that is the definition of success.

V. What the Current War Confirms
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and numerous senior IRGC commanders. From a conventional strategic perspective, decapitating the top of the command structure of a theocratic state should produce one of two outcomes: collapse, as the legitimating authority of the system is removed, or rapid negotiated capitulation by a leadership structure newly aware of its own mortality. Neither occurred.

What occurred instead was immediate martyrological reframing. Khamenei’s death was processed within hours as a sacred sacrifice. IRGC commanders vowed revenge and launched what they called the heaviest offensive operations in the history of the armed forces of the Islamic Republic. Iran’s response was pre-planned, multi-domain, and clearly designed not for victory in a conventional sense but for sustained punishment combined with regime survivability: missile and drone strikes against U.S. forward bases in Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait; cyber operations against critical infrastructure; and proxy activation across the region.

Within ten days of Khamenei’s killing, the IRGC pressured the Assembly of Experts, through what multiple sources describe as repeated contacts and psychological and political pressure, to select Mojtaba Khamenei, the late supreme leader’s son, as his successor. The selection was announced on March 9. Analysts noted that this represented what scholars Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh called the collapse of the last egalitarian pillar of the revolution, namely that the mullahs, unlike decadent Persian shahs, do not do dynastic succession. Iran had, in its moment of maximum external pressure, reverted to monarchy. The IRGC chose Mojtaba not despite his lack of clerical credentials but because of his ties to the security apparatus. He is not a theological successor. He is a security-state successor.

The selection also carried immediate eschatological weight that Western analysis largely missed. Mojtaba’s father, mother, sister, wife, daughter, and young niece were reportedly killed in the February 28 strikes. The regime can frame him not merely as Khamenei’s heir but as a martyr’s son, a figure whose entire family was sacrificed to the cause. Within the Karbala template, this is not a political liability. It is a credential.

VI. Three Assessments: What to Expect
Based on the theological architecture described above, the historical precedent of the Iran-Iraq War, and current reporting on the post-Khamenei regime structure, the following assessments are offered in descending order of confidence.

Assessment One: Iran will not surrender in the conventional sense. The regime’s response to sustained military strikes will follow the pattern established in every previous round of pressure: martyrological reframing of losses combined with asymmetric retaliation designed to impose costs without triggering the decisive escalation that would threaten regime survival. Iran lacks symmetric conventional response options against the United States. It will continue to rely on layered retaliation: missile and drone strikes against U.S. bases, cyber operations against critical infrastructure, proxy activation in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, and geopolitical alignment with China and Russia. The trilateral pact with China and Russia signed in January 2026 provides diplomatic cover, satellite intelligence, and a commitment from Russia to rebuild Iranian air defenses. This is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign that Iran has correctly identified the binding constraint on U.S. operations, which analysts identify not as military capability but as domestic political will and the pressure of a depleted munitions stockpile.

Assessment Two: Regime change is unlikely in the near term, and the type that arrives may not serve Western interests. The IRGC is not a monolithic bloc, but in a moment of existential danger it becomes functionally unified around the minimum objective of regime preservation. Decapitation of senior leadership has happened before, after the June 2025 strikes on nuclear facilities, and the institution absorbed it through emergency appointments while continuing operations. The selection of Mojtaba Khamenei under IRGC pressure represents precisely the suppression-and-succession scenario that analysts at RAND identified as producing a more threatening regime, one that both stifles dissent and doubles down on resisting external pressure. As Brookings analysts noted, even if the United States and Israel continue targeting newly replaced leaders for weeks, the IRGC and its economic assets will not simply melt away, and even a future electoral process may not lead to a sustained democratic system, since such outcomes require nurturing over many years. The Iranian opposition is brave. It is not, as one New Yorker contributing writer observed, the kind of organized political infrastructure that can absorb a power vacuum and produce a functioning alternative government.

Assessment Three: The proxy network is degraded but the doctrine that generates it is not. Hezbollah has been significantly weakened. Hamas in Gaza has been operationally crippled. The Houthis have moderated their posture under the constraints of the 2025 U.S.-Houthi ceasefire. These are genuine tactical losses. But the proxy network was always less important than the doctrine that produces it. The martyrdom apparatus that the Iran-Iraq War institutionalized in the IRGC is not stored in a missile silo. It is stored in a theology and in the lived experience of men who walked away from eight years of that war still, in the words of one former CIA case manager, white hot. New proxies can be cultivated. New commanders can be appointed. The pipeline runs on ideology, and the ideology is intact. The IRGC commanders now running Iran’s war are not operating from a weakened eschatological framework. The killing of the supreme leader, framed correctly, strengthens it.

VII. The Question the West Has Not Asked
Every serious analysis of the current conflict focuses on what Iran can absorb militarily, how long U.S. munitions stocks can sustain the current strike tempo, whether the IRGC will fracture under sustained leadership decapitation, and whether economic collapse might finally produce the popular uprising that ends the Islamic Republic. These are real questions and they deserve serious answers.

The question the West has not asked seriously enough is this: what does Iran think it is doing? Not what it is doing tactically, but what it believes, at a cosmological level, is happening in history right now.

The answer, for the IRGC’s ideological core and for the new Supreme Leader it installed under pressure in wartime, is that Iran is the Mahdi’s vanguard in the final period before his return. The world is dividing, as they have always believed it would, between good and evil. The arrogant powers, America and Israel, are acting exactly as the prophecy said they would. The suffering of Iran is the suffering that precedes justice. The martyrs are accumulating in paradise. The worst of it may still be ahead, and that is not a cause for despair. It is a cause for endurance.

A regime that processes history this way cannot be coerced into surrender by the tools that produce surrender in secular states. It can be destroyed. It can be replaced, although what replaces it may be worse, or may be ungovernable. It can, under truly catastrophic conditions, be brought to accept a tactical pause that it will call a poisoned chalice and then reframe, eventually, as a victory. What it cannot be brought to do is abandon the eschatological framework, because the framework is not a policy position. It is the reason the regime exists.
Discussions of Iran’s nuclear program have focused for twenty years on centrifuge counts, enrichment levels, and inspection protocols. These are real technical questions. But as the Middle East Institute noted as far back as 2022, Mahdism remains a blind spot in Western strategic thinking. That blind spot has not narrowed. It has been institutionalized. And the bombs currently falling on Tehran are being interpreted, by the people making decisions in what remains of the Iranian government, through an eschatological lens that most Western analysts still do not have the vocabulary to read.
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Sources
1. Hungarian Conservative: War and Eschatology — How Iran’s Mahdist Ideology Shapes the U.S.-Iran Conflict
2. Times of Israel / Tim Orr: Iran’s War Against Israel — The Shia Eschatological Vision
3. Middle East Forum: Mahdism — The Apocalyptic Ideology Behind Iran’s Nuclear Program
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