Saddam also walked the streets of Baghdad before they found him in a hole |
On Friday last week, as American bombs fell within earshot of Ferdowsi Square, Iran staged one of those spectacles of performative defiance that authoritarian regimes produce with the instinctive fluency of a body producing antibodies – not because they believe it will change the trajectory of the war, but because the theater itself is the strategy, and the audience is not Washington but the domestic population whose compliance requires the continuous manufacture of courage from the safe side of a podium.
As American and Israeli ordnance continued to redesign Iran’s military geography, the Islamic Republic’s surviving officialdom took to the streets of Tehran for al-Quds Day, marching with the studied nonchalance of men who believe God and state television make for adequate body armor. President Masoud Pezeshkian waded into the crowd as if strolling through a bazaar, not a war zone. Ali Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, strolled the streets of Tehran taking selfies. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi addressed supporters while explosions reportedly struck areas adjacent to the march.
The imagery was broadcast on state television with the production values of a propaganda ministry that has been rehearsing this particular genre of political choreography since 1979: leaders among the people, unbowed, unchained, unafraid. The chants were the same ones that have echoed through Iranian streets for 47 years – “Death to America,” “Death to Israel” – recited with the mechanical rhythm of a congregation that no longer hears the words but cannot stop the incantation because stopping would require confronting the silence underneath.
I watched this theater and thought immediately of Baghdad, April 4, 2003 – Saddam Hussein in military fatigues, walking through the Mansour district, waving to crowds, kissing children, projecting the image of a commander-in-chief so supremely confident in his own invincibility that he could stroll through a capital city under imminent siege. On April 9, as American tanks were already grinding through Baghdad’s outer districts, Saddam emerged into the Al-A’zamiyah neighborhood, standing atop a pickup truck near the Abu Hanifa mosque, embracing strangers, and waving to crowds from a car hood. His information minister, the tragicomic Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf – “Baghdad Bob” – was simultaneously assuring reporters that no American troops existed within a hundred miles of the capital. A bronze statue of him in Firdos Square fell that same afternoon. It was pulled down by a chain attached to an American armored vehicle. Eight months later, the........