I haven’t written about Iran for the past few days for a very simple reason: the news is unreliable. I’m not just talking about the MSM, which is almost reflexively consistently unreliable on a host of things. I’m talking about all sources to which I have access, and that includes the blowing hot and cold messages from President Trump.

Of course, that doesn’t stop me from thinking about what’s going on there and even having opinions. But my opinions probably aren’t worth all that much, either. But here are a few anyway.

For example, I saw the reports to which commenter “Richard Aubrey” refers here:

Saw a report a day or so ago with what remains of the, more or less, civilian government saying they have no more say; the IRGC is in complete control.

Presuming this is the case, with whom do we negotiate? How much more killing does it take to convince the IRGC? Bering at least superficially military in structure, they no doubt have lines of succession well known and probably generally accepted.

As I said, I saw those reports, too. They usually include the idea that the people in control now are real “hardliners,” compared to the civilian government. The thing about that, though, is that for decades I’ve read and believed that the civilian government of Iran was mere window-dressing with little to no power, and that the hardliners (mullahs, IRGC) were really in charge anyway. So I conclude that if the pretend civilian leaders are gone now and the hardliners in control, that only changes the superficial appearance of things.

Then there’s the other problem Richard Aubrey mentions, “with whom do we negotiate? How much more killing does it take to convince the IRGC?” But that’s been the problem from the start of the negotiation phase. That’s been the problem even before the war began; you may recall that the war was preceded by fruitless and frustrating negotiations as well.

You may also recall that, at the start of the present negotiations, Trump kept saying we’re not sure if the people with whom we’re negotiating have any power over much of anything. At some point, they “proved” they did by letting some ships through the Strait or something of that sort, but that hardly proves much of anything in terms of the big picture. We know – and Trump knows, and Rubio surely knows because he’s talked about it at length – that the IRGC are fanatics who are uninclined to give up. And so we are left with the same question we’ve had from the start: what’s the point of these negotiations?

Your answer depends on your opinion of Trump, and if you think he’s a clueless idiot then that covers it. I don’t think he’s a clueless idiot – and I certainly hope I’m right about that – and I wrote recently about the possible tactical reasons for the negotiations, so I’ll just repeat here what I said then:

I strongly suspect (without actually knowing) that the reasons for the negotiations are as follows: (1) to reset the clock on the war for purposes of the need for Congress’ approval (2) intelligence gathering and planning (3) turning up the economic screws and letting the Iranian leadership fester in the problems that result (4) giving the Gulf States a needed rest; and (5) waiting to get what we want – the open Straits and the nuclear material – and then following up with more regime-weakening moves.

The IRGC could not care less about the Iranian people and their wishes. Then again, the regime never has. They have killed many many thousands for merely opposing them, and they’ve been doing that for decades. When the regime first came to power, they marked it by mass executions of their opponents and their rivals (including the leftists who had helped them). Periodically, there were incidents like this one in 1988:

Between late July and September 1988, the Iranian authorities forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed thousands of prisoners for their political opinions and dumped their bodies in unmarked individual and mass graves. Minimum estimates put the death toll at around 5,000.

This source says it was more than 30,000 in 1988, but who knows? The link was written in 2019, and it included the following:

Iran is among those governments that execute their opponents. 120,000 people have been executed in Iran since 1981 for their opposition to the government, at-least one-third of whom have been women. According to the international laws, pregnant women must not be executed, whereas in Iran, at least 50 pregnant women have been executed in the 1980s. …

Iran holds the world record in number of executions per capita. According to Amnesty International: “more than half (51%) of all recorded executions in 2017 were carried out in Iran.”

And those are the official executions.

So, the hardliners are in control now? They’ve been in control since 1979.