Podcast Summary

Podcast: Ask Haviv Anything
Episode 93: How to win Iran's forever war
Host: Haviv Rettig Gur
Date: February 25, 2026

Episode Overview

In this deep-dive episode, Haviv Rettig Gur explores the ideological and historical foundations of Iran's "forever war"—the overarching conflict the Islamic Republic wages against the West and its regional adversaries. Gur meticulously unpacks the layered roots of Iran’s "Muqāwama" (Arabic for "resistance"), connecting it to the ideological genealogy of modern revolutionary Marxism, Palestinian resistance, and Islamic theology. He lays out why Iran’s regime is so resilient to external military pressure and argues that its vulnerability lies in ideological exhaustion and internal dissent, not brute military force.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Unique Nature of Iran’s Regime and “Muqāwama”

• Timestamps: [00:01–25:00]
• Summary:
  • Gur opens by noting the prevailing debate about whether military strikes can deter Iran’s regime—he insists such thinking misunderstands the ideological DNA of the Islamic Republic.
  • Iran’s superpower is not military strength, but its theology of resistance—"Muqāwama"—a doctrine where absorbing suffering is considered redemptive and validating.
  • Gur warns: “Damage to Iran in war is not to the Iranian regime, a deterrent. It’s almost, almost a catalyst, almost a driver. The suffering of their own people is religiously justified and validating, and it is an immense leverage they have in the war itself.” [06:15]
  • Grasping this worldview is essential for forming any meaningful strategy for challenging Iran.

2. The Ideological Genealogy: From Qassam to Mao to Fanon to Khomeini

• Timestamps: [25:00–60:00]
• Summary:
  • Gur traces the roots of Muqāwama ideology through:
    • Izzeddin al-Qassam: Syrian-born imam fighting colonialists and Zionists (early 1900s), blending piety with class-based and anti-colonial struggle.
    • Palestinian Movement’s Maoist Turn: Palestinian commandos, inspired by the FLN in Algeria and Mao Zedong, shift from failed conventional war to “protracted people’s war” against Israel.
    • Frantz Fanon’s Psychological Violence: Fanon theorizes that colonial violence can only be countered by redemptive, unifying native violence—picked up and “Islamized” by groups like Hamas.
  • Quote: “Violence becomes not a means. Violence becomes an end. It becomes a redemptive cleansing ritual from this betrayal of God represented in the weakness of Islam.” [55:45]
  • Hassan Kanafani and Intersectionality: Kanafani constructs “imperialism” as a global, interconnected “beast,” a worldview that directly feeds into modern intersectional leftist discourse and is echoed in Iran’s vision of global anti-Western resistance.

3. The Birth of Muqāwama: From “Thawra” to “Resistance”

• Timestamps: [60:00–85:00]
• Summary:
  • Post-1967, with the rapid defeat of Arab armies, regional ideology pivots from rapid revolutionary change (“Thawra”) to patient, generational, sanctified “resistance” (Muqāwama).
  • “Thaura is a lightning bolt. Mukawama is the tide. It’s slow moving, it’s gradual. It’s also inevitable. All you have to do is not lose,” Gur explains. [73:10]
  • This approach valorizes endurance and martyrdom, refiguring “not being defeated” as victory.
  • Necessitates seeing the enemy as inherently fake/inauthentic, and “realness” as the source of staying power.

4. How Khomeini “Religified” Marxist Revolution and Made It Shia

• Timestamps: [85:00–120:00]
• Summary:
  • Ali Shariati, a Sorbonne-educated sociologist, fuses Shia mysticism with Marxism: recasts Imam Hussein as a Che Guevara-like revolutionary, repurposes grief rituals into activist symbolism.
  • Khomeini adapts these ideas, turning Iran’s state into a perpetual “revolution” for the “mustadafin” (oppressed) fighting the “mustakbirin” (arrogant oppressors—i.e., the West and its allies).
  • Iran fundamentally rejects nation-state logic, seeing nationalism as a Western plot to divide the Muslim ummah.
  • Martyrdom is recast as a goal, not a tragedy: “Khomeini synthesizes the Salafism of the Sunnis and the Shariati Red Shiism…all in the zeitgeist…The death, the dying, the act of sacrifice is the ultimate existential success.” [116:52]

5. The Sunni-Shia Fusion: Palestinians, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad

• Timestamps: [120:00–145:30]
• Summary:
  • Palestinian and Lebanese movements adopt and adapt Khomeinist martyrdom discourse.
  • Iranian support is fundamental to transforming Hamas and Islamic Jihad from social movements to regional militant actors: “The Iranians taught Hamas early on suicide bombing tactics, IED manufacturing…Hamas wouldn’t be what it is without Iran.” [139:18]
  • Hamas’s military escalation and proxy war are seen as direct products of Iranian investment and tutelage.
  • Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Houthis—they form a connected “Ring of Fire,” united by the Muqāwama ideology (even amid doctrinal Sunni-Shia differences).

6. Where Is the Regime Weak? The Failure and Internal Collapse of Muqāwama

• Timestamps: [145:30–2:10:00]
• Summary:
  • Key cracks have appeared since the Syrian Civil War, as Hezbollah became seen as an oppressor (supporting Assad), losing legitimacy in the wider Sunni world.
  • Massive, regime-threatening protests in Iran since 2024 show the Muqāwama losing the support of its own people. “Over 70% of Iranians oppose the Islamic Republic system. 69% specifically want the regime to stop calling for the destruction of Israel.” [157:32]
  • Protest slogans: “Neither Gaza nor my life for Iran...our enemy is right here. They lie that it’s America.” [163:00]
  • In Iraq and Lebanon, similar mass protests reject the narrative of endless resistance.

7. How To Win: The Counter-Muqāwama Strategy

• Timestamps: [2:10:00–end]
• Summary:
  • Muqāwama cannot govern, only destroy: Its “superpower” is permanent war and ability to absorb suffering.
  • Defeating it requires a multi-front strategy:
    • Economic & Social: Strangle financial networks (banking, oil sales, narcotics trade), expose corruption and hypocrisy—e.g., lavish lifestyles of officials and their families.
    • Ideological: Support internal dissent, amplify humiliation of failures, help Iranian and Arab activists expose regime contradictions.
    • Psychological: Undermine the regime’s sanctification of suffering by boosting narratives of life, prosperity, and local nationalism over endless sacrifice.
  • “You have to learn the enemy, you have to understand the enemy. And then you have to take the side of the people, the humble and the suffering, the mustadafin, who the enemy oppresses. As the Quran itself taught, following in the footsteps of the Hebrew psalms, it is the humble…who will inevitably inherit that country after the regime is dead and gone.” [2:19:30]
  • Gur suggests a shift is already underway as Iran's Gen Z retools "revolution" away from martyrdom toward an ethos of "woman, life, freedom."
  • Key tactics: Disrupt enemy financial flow, expose hypocrisy, support "joy as insurgency" (dancing at mourning ceremonies, celebration of life), empower genuine national aspirations instead of cross-border imperialism.

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Iran’s resilience:
  “You can absorb limitless catastrophic damage while the enemy facing the constant, never ending pressure of the mukawama, of the terroristic violence, of the harm to its capacity to just exist, inevitably will fall.” [04:10]

• On the inspirational lineage of martyrdom:
  “The martyrdom of Hussein at Karbala becomes a metaphor for revolutionary struggle and for martyrdom. He actually likens him to Che Guevara.” [101:40]

• On the public’s break with regime ideology:
  “No more muqawama. No more static and oppressive 47 year revolution. The regime that showed that it was willing to carry out Khamenei’s threat to kill vast numbers of Iranians is no longer popular. The Iranian public has walked away from the idea of the revolution, from the mukawama itself, decisively, I’m fairly certain. No great expert permanently.” [161:20]

• On the way forward:
  “How do you defeat an ideology that views death itself as a strategic win and catastrophic destruction as evidence of piety and devotion? You don’t just bomb facilities…You launch a counter-muqawama…across military, economic, cultural, and ideological fronts.” [2:12:30]

Important Timestamps by Section

| Segment Topic | Timestamp | |--------------------------------------------|------------------| | Iran’s undeterrable ideological regime | 00:01–25:00 | | Ideological roots: Qassam, Mao, Fanon | 25:00–60:00 | | The move from “revolution” to “resistance” | 60:00–85:00 | | Khomeini & Red Shi’ism | 85:00–120:00 | | Palestinian-Iranian fusion, proxy war | 120:00–145:30 | | Regime’s ideological exhaustion, protests | 145:30–2:10:00 | | Strategic roadmap to defeat Muqāwama | 2:10:00–end |

Concluding Thoughts

Gur’s episode is a tour-de-force history and strategy session—an anthropological, intellectual, and psychological autopsy of the Iranian regime’s greatest strength and its looming weakness. He aims to replace shallow labels (“radical,” “extremist”) with understanding, and to point the way toward a new strategy that can break both Iran’s regime and its revolutionary proxies by exposing their hypocrisy, empowering internal opposition, and supporting the emerging thesis of life over martyrdom.

He closes with a call to patience and to solidarity with those “humble and the suffering” whom the regime oppresses, arguing that only they can authentically overthrow the edifice of endless war.

Final Quote:
“Shariati’s Red Shiism was about the willingness to die. The new Thawrah is about the determination to live. Let’s help it out.” [2:27:10]