The United States-Israel war against Iran is usually described in the language of strategy: Deterrence, escalation, military pressure, missile capacity, nuclear risk. All of these matter, but they do not tell the whole story.
To understand how Iran may fight and survive this war, we need to look beyond military calculations and into the moral world through which the Islamic Republic understands power, loss, and, above all, endurance. This is not merely a state under attack, but one whose ideological core has long been shaped by a Shia political theology of martyrdom, sacrifice and sacred resistance. That matters because wars are not fought only with weapons, but with narratives and values; meaning itself can become a political resource.
Since the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in US-Israeli strikes during Ramadan, hardliners have held state-backed mourning ceremonies night after night, even as bombs continue to fall. Among the Islamic Republic’s loyalists, especially within the paramilitary force, the Basij, are people prepared to die as martyrs for what they regard as rule by a divinely-guided cleric.
This does not mean the Islamic Republic is invulnerable. It means something more complicated and more troubling: External violence may not weaken it in the way its enemies expect. It may instead reactivate the symbolic and moral grammar through which the Islamic Republic has sustained itself for decades while legitimising repression at home and abroad.
The Islamic Republic was never just a bureaucratic state. It presented itself from the beginning as a moral project, one that fused sovereignty with sacred history. The central emotional and symbolic reservoir of that history lies in Shia memory, especially the battle of Karbala of 680, in which an Umayyad army massacred Prophet Mohammad’s grandson Hussein and the small party accompanying him.
In Shia tradition, this historical event has come to represent unjust power, innocent suffering, righteous resistance and redemptive sacrifice. It reminds believers that oppression does not necessarily mean defeat, suffering can signify standing on the side of truth, and death can become a form of witness.
This is why martyrdom is not a secondary theme in the Islamic Republic’s self-understanding, but one of its central organising values. For years, the ruling order has drawn legitimacy from presenting itself as the righteous victim and the guardian of a sacred struggle against Estekbar (imperialism), domination, humiliation and foreign aggression.
A political-theological order built partly on the sanctification of sacrifice can absorb attack into its own moral universe. What appears from outside as devastation can be narrated from within as testimony, endurance and faithfulness, with death itself becoming politically productive.
This is not speculation. Iran’s strategy in the current war is increasingly one of endurance and attrition: Outlasting its enemies, surviving the blows, disrupting energy flows and betting that the political resolve in Washington and allied capitals will fracture before Iran’s own does. Reports suggest that, despite heavy losses, there were no visible signs of internal collapse under bombardment.
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