Inside the Black Box: The Questions No One Is Asking About Iran

There’s no shortage of coverage of this war.

But much of it starts from assumptions that may not hold up — and as our returning guest on the WhoWhatWhy podcast Shay Khatiri points out, it’s missing some of the most important questions entirely.

Khatiri explains that we tend to talk about Iran as if it’s a coherent, rational actor, with a clear chain of command and decisions being made in real time. But what if that’s not the case? 

What if authority is fragmented, decisions were made in advance, and what we’re seeing now is a system executing a plan it can no longer adjust?

That’s a very different picture — and it leads to a very different set of questions and possible outcomes. Not just about escalation, but about control. Not just about strategy, but about whether there is one — not for the United States, but for Iran.

Khatiri also brings in something largely absent from mainstream coverage: a more complicated view of Iranian society itself. Not simply a population under the pressure of war, but one that can be deeply patriotic and yet fundamentally detached from the regime — sometimes even seeing the war as a path, however painful, to change.

And then there’s the question that sits just beyond the daily reporting: What comes after?

If the regime weakens, what replaces it in a country where civil society has been hollowed out and institutions are thin or nonexistent? Khatiri argues that even the risk of civil war is not simply a product of this conflict, but the result of deeper structural conditions long in place — conditions that may now be coming to the surface.

He also looks at how this conflict could widen in less obvious ways, including the role and reaction of Gulf states, and what that might mean for the broader trajectory of the war.

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Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

Jeff: [00:00:10] Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We are drowning in information about this war. Every strike is mapped. Every explosion is geo-located. Every market move is analyzed in real time. It creates a kind of false confidence that if we can see everything, we must understand everything. But we don’t. Because the most important part of this story isn’t just what’s happening on the surface, it’s what’s unfolding beneath, inside a country that remains even now deeply opaque. We talk about Iran as if it’s a fixed actor, a coherent state, a regime making rational decisions, but that assumes a level of clarity that may not exist.

At the same time, there’s a kind of quiet consensus about how this ends, that eventually there’s some negotiated settlement: no regime collapse, no decisive victory, Just a return to something resembling the status quo, only poorer, more unstable and with everyone claiming success.The real question is how we get there. There is a version of this that is bad but contained. And then there’s the version that’s worse, where escalation outruns strategy, where miscalculation fills the vacuum of uncertainty, where the number of things we don’t know begins to overwhelm the things we do. 

And at the center of it all is Iran itself, not just the regime, but the country, a nation with an ancient identity that has survived conquest, religion, and revolution. A population that is by many accounts, deeply secular beneath a theocratic state. A society that is highly educated, intensely patriotic, and yet after decades of totalitarian rule, largely stripped of the institutions that make self-government possible. It’s a country full of paradoxes, and right now full of unknowns. Who is actually making decisions? How stable is that authority? What does the public really think beyond the fragments we see? And if this regime weakens or fractures, what comes next in a society that has, in many ways, been hollowed out.

These are not questions that show up in satellite imagery or daily briefings. They’re not answered by casualty counts or oil prices, or CNN pundits. They require a deeper understanding of Iran itself — its history, its identity, and the internal dynamics that most coverage simply can’t reach. My guest today, Shay Khatiri, has spent years studying those dynamics. From his time growing up in Iran to his work today inside a Washington think tank, he brings a perspective that goes beyond the visible war and onto the far more uncertain terrain beneath it. Because in a moment like this, it’s not just what we know that matters. It’s everything that we don’t. It is my pleasure to welcome Shay Khatiri back to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. Shay, thanks so much for joining us.

Shay: Well, thank you so much for having me. 

Jeff: I want to talk about whether or not this projection of Iran, in some respects, that it is a rational actor and that there is a process taking place by which decisions are being made. Whether that’s factual or not, or whether or not that’s just an illusion that’s being put out.

Shay: I think you are asking the right question, actually. By right, I mean,the most important question to ask. I just started working for CAMERA — it’s short for Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis; I hope that everybody goes and checks out our work there. The one thing that’s very interesting to me, especially given this role looking at press reporting on Iran, is that most journalists lack two things, two understandings. One is of Iran, and two is of just generally military affairs. And this is further a problem because the CENTCOM [US Central Command] and the Pentagon are not disclosing much information about the war in an unprecedented level. And also we used to have journalists embedded with the military. We don’t right now. As a result, you are seeing a lot of faulty analysis and reporting in the press, and nobody is really asking the question you are, which is what kind of regime is this?

Now to come to your question precisely. First, the question is, is the Islamic Republic a rational regime? Now, even then, rationality has gotten out of hand. The definition of rationality you have, in its original concept rationality is whether a state is suicidal or not. And the answer is no. No state is suicidal.

Now we have gone out of our way to assume the question of analyzing, correct analyzing and strategic prudence. All these come under the umbrella of rationality nowadays. And in that sense, well, I should say, if you’re asking Iran’s rational meaning, is it suicidal? No. Iran does not want to cease, rr Islamic Republic does not want to cease being a state.

If you’re asking if Iran is good at strategy, also the answer is no. It is not. It is quite bad at strategy. I commend an article in The Atlantic, by my former teacher and friend Eliot Cohen, on the subject published just this week. That we have given Iran way too much credit as in being good in strategy. Iran really is not good in strategy. The reason for their success is not their brilliance, but that they never were punched in the face until recently. So that is one part of the question. Now the second part of your question is the process in decision making. The process generally had been personalized in the supreme leader, meaning that there were all these advisors around him, but he would ultimately make the decision and there was no bureaucratic resistance to that decision. As you see in the United States, the president makes a decision, but that’s a long way from executing it or implementing it. In Iran, though, as soon as the supreme leader made the decision, it would be implemented. And as far as war commandeering goes, as we understand it, the decisions had been made already before the war, and the commanders had been informed about these decisions. That, expecting decapitation of the state and disruption of their communication systems, the commanders had been told what to do. Now this is not a good process because the biggest question in warfare is adaptability. You learn most about the war you are fighting in the middle of it. You cannot anticipate the war you are fighting perfectly. You never can do that, and that Iran does not have — good communication system — and with the Supreme Leader and then his, essentially, deputy Sadiq Larijani dead, we don’t know who even is dictating decisions. And if the decisions are just… if the decisions had been made before the war started and or they’re just continuing with those decisions, that’s not a recipe for success. That’s a recipe for disaster. 

Jeff: Is there the sense that there is any kind of coherent chain of command at this point, or are decisions being made by local commanders and if they are, what is the danger that’s potentially inherent in that for that going astray? 

Shay: So first, let’s dial back. Iran has never had a coherent chain of command because the chain of command was always determined by whoever is closest to Khamenei. I bring to you the example of Qasem Soleimani, who was potentially the most powerful official in Iran after Khamenei himself, but he was the fifth in the chain of command. Nobody but Khamenei could overrule him despite the legality of the chain of command that many people could overrule him. So that’s just one example. Now to come to your question of the dangers. The danger always would have been that a crazy commander would shoot a nuclear weapon in war like this against the wishes of his superiors.

That is not a concern we have. In fact, we are in this war in large part, to deny that possibility to Iran. So what is the danger, for whom, I ask. For the Islamic Republic, the danger is lack of adaptability. The danger is, lack of any strategic coherence that each commander is going to do his own thing without any idea that binds them without any strategic objective, let alone political objective that binds these decisions. So in that sense, the actual danger is that they will lose the war.

As for us, what the danger is? The danger, frankly, is that the status quo will continue until Iran is defeated. By which I mean it cannot get worse than this. Really, the only possible scenario is, we now see that Iran has 4,000 plus kilometer ballistic missiles, intermediate range ballistic missiles, which we did not believe they possessed in the past. Those can reach most of Europe, and the danger is that they would launch one of those against a civilian target in Europe and that we would fail, or Europeans would fail to intercept that missile. That could be a large casualty event. But as far as the strategic change of the war would go, well, the only change really would be that you could end up with France or Poland or the entire NATO also joining the war against Iran. But there would be a hundred thousand, sorry, a hundred, maybe even a thousand people loss of life. But beyond that, as far as, again, strategic questions go, there’s not a danger in losing the war because of this lack of coherence. 

Jeff: What about the negotiation part of this that we hear about, you know, the cliche is that Iran has never won a war and never lost a negotiation. Talk a little bit about that, whether you think negotiations are actually going on and what the truth might be about that at this point. 

Shay: We don’t know what is going on. The president is saying that we are negotiating with Iran. Iran is denying it. The press says Ghalibaf, the speaker of the parliament and a retired IGC commander, is the person we are negotiating with. Ghalibaf says, nobody’s negotiating with me. The reason I’m leaning toward believing that there’s something going on is, one, Ghalibaf said… his wording was very careful. Something like there hasn’t been any negotiation with the United States. Meaning that, putting it in past terms, or present and past terms, not say, talking about the future, that there will be. And two, we can have our questions of credibility of Islam Republic officials, as well as the US officials, but Israelis have been very good in, very accurate in reporting things. And Israelis are saying that these negotiations are, if not ongoing, will happen between Ghalibaf and the United States. So my expectation is that we will see some sort of negotiation, which is not crazy, by the way. In fact, if you go and read Henry Kissinger’s memoirs and other books, one of his problems always was that Americans cannot understand that you can have diplomacy during an ongoing campaign. So you could bomb the country and talk to them. Americans have always had this dichotomy of war or diplomacy, not war and diplomacy. It is quite possible that we will continue the military campaign while we are talking to the Iranians. 

Jeff: And how effective do you think the Iranians can be in these negotiations? You talked a bit about the lack of coherence in terms of their war strategy. What about a negotiating strategy and the way that might play out?

Shay: Well, negotiation. You don’t have a strategy negotiation in itself. You have… negotiation could be a part of your strategy. And again, the question goes back to whether there is a strategy to begin with. I do think that Iran is making it up as they go, and any negotiation with the United States will have to include a lot of domestic political, for lack of a better term, alliance management among the regime’s elite leadership. You see someone like Saeed Jalili, who’s a hardliner and very close with the IRGC, was or remains the deputy at the Supreme National Security Council. He’s very much against negotiations and Ghalibaf doesn’t have the stature that Khamenei had, to be able to say, this is what we are going to do and everybody shut up. He cannot do that. He’s not also very popular among the regime’s hardliners. In fact, he wanted to run for president and he was told not to because the hardliners were against him, and they used his corruption scandals against him to pull him out of running for president. First, what he needs to do is to get his own boys on board. And if it comes to negotiation with Iran, I wouldn’t put it past Ghalibaf, who is significantly less principal than Larijani was, to try to sell himself as a Delcy Rodriguez figure. And you see that his associates have been contacting American media since the war started to sell him as such a figure that, oh, you can actually work with this guy and he could be a moderate figure to steer the ship in Iran and keep it together.

I think if there’s any negotiation that will be the gist of what he will say. The problem is that Iran is not Venezuela, and I don’t think that he will be able to, excuse me, to convince people around him to start cooperating with the United States and to accept American demands. Keep in mind, for one, according to the Islamic Republic Constitution, Ghalibaf cannot even run the country. It has to be a supreme leader who’s a cleric, and he’s not a cleric. There is already a supreme leader. It is Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, who might or might not be dead already or in a coma. But even if he’s dead, unless there’s going to be a coup in Iran to overthrow the Islamic Republic Constitution and accept a civilian or a military head of state, Ghalibaf cannot himself be the head of state under the current regime. So there are all these questions that we do not have the answer to, and I don’t even know if Ghalibaf has the answer to.

Jeff: Where are the Iranian people in all of this? What do they know? What is their sense of the war? Talk a little bit about that. 

Shay: Well, since the war started, I received quite a few excited messages from Iranians inside. Happy that the war had started before it had even begun. For the month that we… everyone was in the limbo, whether we would attack or not. I will just use one anecdotal interview I conducted with someone, a middle-aged woman in Tehran. And she told me there was construction next to their apartment building, and every time there was a boom, everybody inside the house would jump excitedly. Oh, has it started? Did they hit? And it would turn out to be the construction. And she told me once she heard a big noise and ran out of the bathroom naked, completely naked, hande said, oh my God, the war has started. And it had not. 

Just to give you a sense of where Iranians were after the war started, I was not able to talk to many Iranians inside because internet connectivity had been completely lost. Over the past week or, well, past few days, I have been able to talk to a few people, and people are still excited about the war and the prospects that this war will take down the regime. I recommend you and your listeners to go and see my piece from last week, in the dispatch where I interviewed an Iranian woman in her thirties about the war, and the gist of her interview was, this is terrible. A lot of things are being destroyed, and there’s a lot of emotional and, well, psychological, emotional and physical damage being caused on the Iranian people. And then she says, do not let the war stop, keep bombing until they surrender. So that was the gist. 

Over the past few days, there has been some connectivity. I’ve been able to text with people inside and everybody’s freaking out about negotiations since yesterday. Everybody’s texting me angry, cursing at Trump not to stop the war, that how dare he betray us and stop the war to negotiate with these, with the regime leadership. So that is where Iranians are.

In fact, the woman I interviewed with made a very interesting point. It is kind of counterintuitive that she said, because so much has been destroyed, the war should not stop. And then her logic made sense. She said, this is a steep price that Iran is paying and Iranian people are paying, and it should not be paid in vain. If we have made this, if we have dug this, we better keep digging until we reach gold, essentially. So that’s where Iranians are. If anything, the destruction is further convincing them that the war should not stop, until it brings favorable results. 

Jeff: But there hasn’t been the kind of popular uprising that some anticipated.

Shay: No, there hasn’t. And there was a New York Times report last week, I think, the US government, the president has told Iranians, do not come out, it’s very dangerous. We’ll let you know when to come out. And it is also quite reasonable that people are not going to come out while bombs are falling from the skies.

People will come out, once the current phase of the campaign is over. Hopefully, my hope is that the next phase will not be withdrawal, but will move on from attacking military and suppression forces targets to civilian protection. So when people come out, the regime cannot easily crack down on them. But even if that’s not the case, I am quite confident that once this phase is over, people will come back to the streets to protest and take down the regime. In fact, Tim Mak, who has a great substack, reported a piece from around Iran’s borders a week ago or so. I apologize, I am getting all my dates wrong because I am so confused about what day even it is. I had this reported piece that a lot of Iranian diaspora have moved from all across the world to the border. So they be there ready as soon as the war, the current phase of the war, is over to move inside Iran to join the rebellion against the regime.

Jeff: How much is that potentially impacted, though, by the absence of governing institutions inside Iran? What comes the day after that rebellion? 

Shay: It is very difficult to predict that, and we should always expect the worst. The worst in this scenario, Iran is a totalitarian regime without any institutions that are independent from the state. Which is to say, if there is an institution that can maintain order, it’s the enemy of the Iranian people. I had a piece about this. I have, actually, an essay. The argument I make is that Iran has no civil society institution, which means that it is not ripe for republican self-government.

Ideally, well, not ideally, but the best case scenario that we can expect is a liberalizing strong man in Iran who allows institutions to emerge and take roots, but not a democracy that we would look at and say, this is an example for the rest of the world. That’s not going to be the immediate future of Iran because again, compare Iran with Iraq. Iraq, that we invaded, also did not have much civil society institutions, many civil society institutions, but it had two things. One was tribal population and tribal leaders who were respected by their fellow tribesmen, which led to the Sunni Awakening, and that was helpful in maintaining or reinforcing order in Iraq. Iran has 80 percent Arabic population; there’s no tribal leadership. And second, Iraq, like former communist states after the Cold War, had a strong religion, had strong religious institutions and attendance. In Poland, as soon as communism fell, Catholic church attendance went up, especially since the pope was Polish himself. But not just there: in other large post-communist states, religion was, is, and remains a significant part of people’s lives. In Iraq, people were religious and listened to their religious leaders, some in following them toward terrorism, but many following them toward Republican participation. Iran does not have anything like that. Iran has about 40 percent population that identifies itself as Muslim of any kind; 30 percent of them identify themselves as Shiite. And among those Shiites, 30 percent, many, are practicing but not mosque-goers, because mosque attendance implies that you are with the regime and nobody wants that affiliation. So you don’t have religious institutions either. It is quite likely that we will see anarchy and civil war in Iran before some order is maintained, which would be terrible.

That is a very strong possibility, and as I have said before elsewhere, that would not be our fault. That would not be the fault of the war. That was always a possibility. That could, in fact was very likely after the death of the supreme leader, that the rebellion in Iran would result in the Civil War. If anything, by having some military presence in Iran and by paying some attention to it, if anything, we are reducing such likely outcome — but still, it remains a high likelihood. 

Jeff: What happens in terms of the internal attitude of the Iranian people, if the status quo continues, if the war comes to some kind of end, some kind of negotiated settlement, some kind of a stalemate. Trump agrees to something that is pretty similar to the status quo, with minimal change, what happens then?

Shay: Well, the regime will have to figure out how to maintain order. I don’t know if it will be able to, but as I said, even a settlement will not prevent Iranians from going to the streets and attacking government institutions. That’s going to happen. The question is whether the regime is able to crack down on it. Last time, we don’t have exact figures, but much of the security forces refused to participate in the crackdown. What you saw was managed, in large part, if not mostly, by bringing in Iran’s foreign proxies, such as al-Shaabi from Iraq. And we have attacked some of those forces over the past month. And on top of that, this is still a regime that killed 40,000 Iranians two months ago. The question is, one, will the security forces fire at Iranians this time if they come to participate in the rebellion? And if they don’t, will the regime have a trick in its sleeve to be able to maintain order? Keep in mind, a lot of our targets have been, especially Israeli targets more than American targets, have been the suppression apparatus. We are heading besiege headquarters and checkpoints. We are dismantling what is… well, it’s not being reported because there’s no solid evidence for it, but I strongly suspect that we have completely dismantled Iran’s command control and communications systems, which means that they will not even be able to coordinate an effort to crack down on a rebellion. 

So, even a negotiated settlement will leave the question open for the Islamic Republic: Can you still resist the Iranian people? Larijani’s replacement was announced today, Gen. Zolghadr. And Zolghadr, who’s now the secretary — and it doesn’t sound fancy, but essentially the secretary is, for all intents and purposes, the head of the Supreme Security Supreme National Security Council.

He doesn’t have much foreign policy background. He’s been in the besiege, and in the judicial branch. He’s part of the domestic suppression apparatus, not the foreign policy apparatus. So my suspicion is that the regime is worried about this, more than the war, about the day after. 

Jeff: What about the involvement of the Gulf States at this point, and the fact that that is now becoming a larger and larger part of the story?

Shay: Well, if I had to guess, I mean, I don’t know with this administration. Any previous administration would be doing its best to prevent the participation of Persian Gulf States in the war. 

Jeff: But we see the headline today that the Saudis are, oh, yeah.

Shay: Yeah, yeah. So it is possible that the president would be saying, oh yeah, this is great, come and join us. But I could also see that the military leadership is trying to keep the Saudis out, because for one, strategically there’s not much they can add. But there is a political dynamic here to keep in mind, which is, Iranians would be happy to greet Americans, and to a lesser extent, Israelis as liberators, but Iranians do not have that easy relationship with Arabs. They see themselves, Iranian people, as superior, culturally and by their heritage, and they kind of blame the Islamic Republic to be an ’Arab in position’ on them. So by “Arab in position,” I’m going back to a thousand or 1200 years back. So just keep in mind there, the Book of Kings by Ferdowsi, the poet that revived the Iranian identity and Persian language. That’s essentially an anti-Arab manifesto. So that’s how Iranians would look at it. And I don’t know if they will be as enthusiastic inside Iran. Now, from the Arab perspective, I understand why they would want to do that because they are being attacked. And they need to make a point that we are not going to just sit idly by for the Islam Republic to attack us. We need to show to you how we can exact the price on you that any reasonable policy makers would be looking at, being attacked, and say, I need to attack back. And by any reasonable policymaker, I mean any head of government who does not run a Western European government, since they seem to be interested in being attacked, as was the Diego Garcia case.

I understand why the Arabs would want to participate and I would imagine that the CENTCOM is doing its best to keep them out. 

Jeff: What do you see finally as the biggest risk in all of this in terms of control, in terms of the situation getting out of hand? What is the biggest risk that you see right now?

Shay: I’ll give you two. One is a civil war in Iran. And if that breaks out, it could be the most disruptive event in, really in the world since 1939 or I guess 1945, let’s say. That could… Again, just look at how disruptive on international order the Syrian civil war was, and Iran is four times larger and much more conventionally capable. And its geography is much more important than Syria’s geography. It could result in World War III, even. I can give you a scenario — I’m not saying that it will necessarily happen, but I can give you a scenario. But again, I want to reemphasize, it will not be the fault of the United States or Israel for triggering such a civil war. That civil war has been likely, and been becoming likelier and likelier over the past 10 years. We just had our heads in the sand. So if it happens, I’m sure everybody will blame the belligerence on the war, but I wouldn’t blame them. 

Now, that is one risk. The other risk that we could face is that the Islamic Republic survives and is extremely vulnerable and realizes that it cannot achieve its political objectives in the way it wants because its skies are naked, and Israel and America can always attack it from the skies. So what’s the second best scenario? Second best scenario is to find someone who will protect you. By which I mean it would invite Russian and Chinese militaries, not tomorrow, but within the next five years, to come have joint production facilities in a way that, you know, I like to quote Gen. Foch. During the interwar years, Field Marshal Montgomery was visiting France and asks Gen. Foch how many British soldiers do you need to ensure the security of France, and Herr Foch responds, one single private and if war happens, we will take good care that he dies. Which is to say, you know, it’s one thing to attack Iran’s production facilities if everybody’s Iranian there, but if you have Chinese or Russian military officers working at those facilities, it becomes much more difficult for us to pull the trigger.

I could see something like that, for Iranians to offer the Chinese and the Russians something in exchange for, essentially using them as trip wires. Keep in mind, the Chinese wanted… It is in Chinese strategic documents that they want to have access and control. Well, not just access, control of all, any, maritime choking points. And the biggest one as we can see, or well at least right now, is the Strait of Hormuz, and we see how important that chokepoint is. The Chinese wanted to rent a naval base from Iran in their 25-year security agreement, that I think they signed in 2024, I believe. And Iran didn’t give it to them.

Now if anything, the importance of the Strait of Hormuz has been reemphasized and the Chinese would plausibly want that naval base even more. And they could offer it. They could offer it, on some protection in exchange to have, not just access, but control over the Strait of Hormuz. Something like that is quite possible. 

Another one, last one, that James Mattis, former CENTCOM commander and Secretary of Defense, told the panel during a speech yesterday, I think, is that the regime survives, but has made its point that it can actually control the Strait of Hormuz and starts taxing every ship that passes through as a form of money-making. I mean, that would entirely disrupt global commerce and shipping. How are you going to deal with that? There are all these risks that are out there. But also again, there’s a promise. You could have a somewhat orderly transition from the current regime to a new one. There could be a civil war in Iran, but the civil war could end in 10 years and in catastrophic terms, or it could end in three months.

That would be a good outcome. I’ll take it. If the right side wins. 

Jeff: Shay Khatiri, I thank you so very much for spending time with us. 

Shay: I appreciate it. Thanks. 

Jeff: Thank you and thank you for listening and joining us here on The WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast.

I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.