This article reads a potential strategic scenario based on a real escalating trajectory in the US-Iranian relationship — not based on published events yet.
He who cuts the trunk of the tree sees the result immediately — which tempts him to believe that it's over. But the root does not know what happened above it. It moves towards the light — as it was before the cut and as it will be afterwards. Not because it resists, but because it does not know that there's something requiring resistance. And this is what's most troubling: fighting something that doesn't know you are fighting it.
Khamenei died in his home. Then Larijani — the man without whom no settlement could proceed, because the legitimacy he carried wasn't assigned by decree nor inherited by blood, but built on decades of presence in every closed room and every decision not written. Then Soleimani, the leader of the Basij, who was holding the thread separating internal security and internal explosion in dozens of cities. Three men left together — and the unforgivable mistake is to believe they represented the regime. They represented the brake! And the regime without a brake is not weaker — it is incomparably more dangerous. Unwritten brakes don’t die by a bullet — but they get lost when no one remains to remember them.
People who are bombed from outside do not hold their regime accountable at the same time — they rally around it instinctively even if they despise it intellectually. Every occupier in history has known this, and forgot it at the very moment he needed to remember.
The America that bombs the Iranian security system today is exactly the America that built its core — gifted the Shah his nuclear reactor in 1957, and secretly shipped two thousand missiles to Tehran in 1986 while Reagan was speaking out against Iranian terrorism! And reprimanded the Swiss ambassador in 2003 because he delivered the Iranian peace message! One who knows your keys does not need to knock on the door — and when they force entry, they find that the keys are useless if the homeowners change the locks.
And the root is not only in Tehran. It is in Iraq, where entities built by Iran over decades now possess their own logic independent of any central leadership — and removing the leadership does not dismantle them but frees them. A freed entity does not stop, does not negotiate, and does not know when to quit.
This poses a question Jordan has not yet formulated — not the question of war, but the question of what comes after: Who fills the vacuum? Jordan paid the price of every collapse in its neighborhood from its own pocket and in polite silence — and one and a half million Syrians entered the country as a crisis and stayed as fate, before the silence about them turned from denial to habit. A blazing neighbor does not respect boundaries — and boundaries not protected by fire are not protected by speeches. Calculated Jordanian silence is a card — but the expiry date asks no one’s permission when it comes.
And amidst all this, there is a party that has not been asked: the Iranian people. They neither choose the war nor are able to stop it — they stand where no one wants them, between a fire lit by those who rule them and a fire lit by those who liberate them, and they burn in both.
The smoke above Tehran is not the smoke of an end — but the smoke of a reformation. Heads are cut off and the root moves towards the light. And what's worrying is not that the regime might survive — but that what survives might not resemble what it was. The power that had brakes now has none. And he who removed the brake thinking that he removed the danger committed the oldest mistake in the history of wars: he confused the head with the root — and thought that cutting above the ground would ease what's beneath it.
But the root does not know rest. It knows only one direction — and it moves on.
