1. The U.S. government has announced that its airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan have been “successfully” carried out, resulting in their destruction. This claim, however, has been met with skepticism by numerous experts, many of whom argue that the operation failed to achieve its intended objectives. Regardless, with this act the United States has effectively joined Israel in its military campaign against Iran.

2. Setting aside the question of what precisely has happened to the Fordow and Natanz enrichment facilities, one must ask: if these sites have indeed been destroyed, what then explains the continued wave of attacks? Why does Israel insist that its “military operations against strategic targets will continue”? What, in other words, is the endgame?

3. Is the aim of the U.S. and Israel in bombing military and economic infrastructure the overthrow of the Islamic Republic? The last two decades of Middle Eastern history suggest otherwise. Regimes do not collapse through aerial bombardment and sabotage alone. Without boots on the ground, regime change remains elusive. In fact, with each new strike, the machinery of repression grows stronger, civilian dissent is further suppressed, and fractures within the ruling class narrow. The material force required to bring down a regime does not lie in missiles but in soldiers who seize and exert power. One need only look at the fate of Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

4. Could it be, then, that Israel hopes to provoke a popular uprising—that amid the chaos, discontented masses might rise up and topple the regime? But this, too, is illusory. In practice, such attacks have caused widespread fear and displacement. In wartime, people tend to lose their sense of agency; their dependence on the central state for food, water, and safety only grows. Even in countries with strong labor movements, political parties, unions, and councils, the initial response to war is often fear—not rebellion. Citizens rally around the state in the name of security. Protest comes only later, when the economic toll, insecurity, and the senselessness of violence become undeniable: the war in Russia began in 1914, yet the mass uprisings came in 1917; in Germany, in 1918. In most nations, it was not until 1917–1919 that resistance truly emerged—and that was in wars between imperial powers, not asymmetrical conflicts like the one we are witnessing now.

5. We are facing the hard truth that the imperial powers—the United States and Zionist Israel—do not simply seek regime change in Iran. Their broader objective is to eliminate Iran’s regional influence and dismantle the collective agency of the country’s diverse population. This means the destruction not just of military infrastructure but of Iran’s social, economic, and political capacity—reducing it to a fragmented micro-state, like Afghanistan or Iraq, and removing it from the regional equation. The goal is not merely the end of the Islamic Republic’s ideological hegemony, but the erasure of Iran’s regional role and any emancipatory potential that might emerge against the current regime.

6. It is abundantly clear that the fall of the Islamic Republic will not bring forth a democratic or progressive alternative. The existing so-called alternatives—such as Reza Pahlavi and his reactionary entourage—lack both the will and the capacity to lead. The reformists, despite their organizational presence, have lost all credibility and remain part of the regime’s apparatus. Leftist forces and labor or political movements, meanwhile, are currently too scattered and too few in number to exert meaningful influence. If the collapse of the Islamic Republic and its institutions were to unfold, we would not witness the birth of even a capitalist order, but a descent into chaos: a fragmented society, local warlords, regional conflict, and a prolonged period of disorder and disintegration.

7. So what can we, as a fragmented and weakened left, do under these conditions? Decades of sectarianism, wishful thinking, failure to grasp evolving realities, and self-emancipatory illusions have left us marginal to the real social struggles of our time. We have not even managed to build an anti-war front of progressive forces united around concrete demands. And yet we now face the gravest of crises. If we cannot, in coordination with the regional left, form a united front; if we cling to delusions and fail to connect our limited resources with those of others in the region, then in the tumultuous and unpredictable times ahead, not only will the left disappear—it is likely that nothing will remain to be called human. The small seeds of liberation that still exist, scattered across many places, will be snuffed out. We are few. But acknowledging our smallness does not condemn us to insignificance forever. What it does require is decisive action to come together. Without that, our marginality becomes extinction. History does not wait. The void we leave will be quickly filled. And mourning the loss of humanity and liberation may be all that remains.

Hassan Mortazavi is the translator of Capital and other Marxist works into Persian.