Iran's Strike Back: How US-Israel Bombs Consolidated Regime Power

The rally is not what the CIA expected

It is the 179th night in a row. Since the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on March 1, hundreds of Iranians have gathered every evening at Enghelab Square in central Tehran, raising fists and chanting slogans that would have been unthinkable even two weeks before the strikes began.

“We will not let the Strait of Hormuz pass,” they shout — meaning they will block it. “Death to America.” “Death to Israel.”

Western officials, before the strikes even started, urged the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government. The logic was straightforward: crush the regime’s military infrastructure, watch the population turn on its leaders, repeat.

It did not work. Instead, the opposite happened. A 22-year-old web designer named Nima Bazargan, who was not alive during the 1979 revolution, told reporters he was driven to these nightly rallies by patriotism — not ideological loyalty to the Islamic Republic. His generation, which had neither witnessed nor experienced the revolution firsthand, is now standing in the streets defending the very state they might otherwise have opposed.

What the flag seller knows

Dawood Moghanloo, a 44-year-old street vendor near Enghelab Square, has sold flags at pro-government rallies for years. The difference now, he says, is mundane but telling.

“Before, I sold dozens a day,” he said. “Now I sell three or four. Everyone already has one.”

The flags in question are red, emblazoned with the word “revenge” — a quiet but deliberate shift in tone from devotion to the regime to vengeance against its enemies.

Moghanloo also addressed the claim, repeated by foreign media, that the Iranian government pays people to attend these rallies. “Look around,” he said. “There are no government buses. Nobody is being transported. People are spending their own time and their own money to be here.”

The visual evidence supports him. The large articulated buses that typically ferry state-organized protesters to Tehran demonstrations are conspicuously absent. What remains is a crowd that appears, by all available accounts, self-mobilized.

The disappeared opposition

The most striking contrast is what is absent. In January, anti-regime protesters filled Tehran’s streets and clashed with security forces. Tonight, they are nowhere to be found.

Fateme Larti, a 45-year-old housewife at the Enghelab rally, put it plainly: “The enemy wants to divide us. But it won’t work. We will resist until we die.”

The disappearance of organized dissent does not necessarily mean popular support for the government. But it does mean that, six months after the worst external attack in Iran’s modern history, the regime faces no internal challenger capable of organizing on the scale it did in January.

The calculus is brutal: whether Iranians love their government or simply loathe their enemies more, the effect on power is the same.

Trump’s errors

The rally crowds are not just a product of fear or propaganda. They are also a reaction to specific language from the Trump administration. President Trump demanded Iran’s unconditional surrender — a demand no sovereign government can accept without surrendering its identity — and openly threatened a massive attack on Iran’s energy infrastructure, the country’s economic lifeline.

On a commercial building wall near Enghelab Square, graffiti depicts the Statue of Liberty toppled and broken. It is a crude image, but it communicates exactly what the rhetoric was designed to communicate: that America is the enemy, and the Islamic Republic is the only barrier.

Israel’s own doubts

Meanwhile, across the region, Israel’s government is running into the same wall of reality it helped create. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the past six months claiming victory — saying Iran’s missile industry has been destroyed, its navy and air force neutralized, its supreme leader eliminated.

But a poll published in July by the Israel National Security Institute found that only 15 percent of Israelis believe Israel won the military campaign. Thirty-seven percent said Iran won. Forty-three percent said the outcome was undecided.

T Amir Haioman, director of the institute, stated plainly: “There has been no fundamental change to Iran’s regime or its nuclear program.”

Netanyahu, undeterred, suggested on July 25 that military operations could resume. “I question whether we can reach an agreement with that barbarian nation,” he said, mocking US-Iran ceasefire talks. “The Iran issue is not over. We need to finish this issue.”

What this means for negotiations

The rally phenomenon changes the geometry of any future deal. When the US approached Iran in 2015, the government could point to economic hardship and argue that sanctions relief was a pragmatic necessity. Tonight’s Enghelab Square tells a different story: the Iranian public has internalized the conflict as a civilizational struggle, not a policy dispute.

Any American negotiator approaching Tehran in the next year will find a population that has been emotionally mobilized around resistance — not by state propaganda alone, but by the lived experience of bombs falling on their cities and their leader being assassinated. The government did not need to fabricate patriotism. It arrived naturally.

This does not mean Iran cannot negotiate. It means the terms will have to be dramatically different from what Washington or Tel Aviv may expect. Concessions extracted through military pressure will face domestic backlash that no Iranian leader can survive — not because they are ideologically committed to defiance, but because the alternative, in public perception, is surrender to the very powers that just bombed their country.

The paradox is stark: the United States and Israel may have achieved their immediate tactical objectives, but in doing so they appear to have made any future diplomatic settlement considerably harder to achieve.

The bottom line

Iran’s rally squares are not a sign of strength for the regime — they are a sign that the regime has survived something that, by every conventional calculation, should have broken it. The question for Washington and Tel Aviv is whether they are prepared for the consequences of a adversary that has not collapsed, but consolidated.