When the Bombs Fall, the Clerics Hide

The Khomeinist War, Rouhani’s Plea, and the Cracks in a Crumbling Regime

In the wake of Israel’s sustained airstrikes on Iran’s military and nuclear infrastructure since June 13, 2025, a strange and telling silence has settled over the Islamic regime’s highest clerical authorities. These senior clerics, traditionally quick to sermonize in times of national crisis, have vanished from public discourse. As explosions rock key defense facilities, and the leadership reels from the loss of top IRGC commanders, Iran’s vaunted “Guardians of the Revolution” appear more like shadows retreating behind the veil of clerical robes.

The one prominent voice that has emerged amid the rubble and censorship is that of former President Hassan Rouhani. But let’s not be fooled by his newly adopted tone of reason. Though he now calls for de-escalation and compromise—urging moderation as the regime faces external assault and internal collapse—Rouhani is not a bystander or peacemaker. He was a core architect of the very repression that brought Iran to this breaking point. As president from 2013 to 2021, he presided over the brutal suppression of peaceful protests, most infamously during the November 2019 uprising when the regime murdered hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians. Rouhani was not merely a passive figurehead. As head of the Supreme National Security Council, he was directly responsible for ordering the crackdown. His hands are not clean—they are stained with the blood of those who cried for freedom.

Rouhani’s sudden concern for diplomacy is not born of conscience. It is born of fear. He understands better than most what the fall of the regime would mean for him personally. He knows the depth of public rage that awaits him—rage from those who remember the internet blackouts, the mass arrests, the prison executions, and the lies. His attempt at “reason” is a last-ditch effort to preserve his position, his privilege, and perhaps his life. He is not speaking on behalf of the people; he is pleading for himself, hoping the regime survives long enough for him to rebrand yet again as a misunderstood moderate. But the Iranian people have not forgotten who Hassan Rouhani is—and they know exactly what will become of him when the house of cards finally collapses.

There are multiple reasons for the broader clerical vacuum surrounding him. At the center of it all is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—86 years old, reportedly shuttled between secure bunkers, and surrounded by the ruins of his former power structure. The June strikes obliterated key regime figures: IRGC commander Hossein Salami, missile chief Amir Ali Hajizadeh, intelligence director Mohammad Kazemi—all believed to have perished or been incapacitated. This decapitation of the regime’s military elite has left the clerical class stunned, wounded, and fearful of making a wrong move that might trigger further Israeli or even American retaliation.

But beyond fear, there is also calculation. The regime’s clerics are not stupid—they understand that Iran’s social fabric is badly frayed. After months of economic collapse, regime-inflicted crackdowns, and international isolation, there is no widespread public appetite for war. By remaining silent, the clerics may hope to preserve what remains of their authority and avoid inflaming tensions that could provoke internal unrest. In a way, their absence from the national conversation reflects a desperate attempt at self-preservation: if they say nothing, perhaps they will not be blamed when the system inevitably falters.

Yet this silence has consequences. Traditionally, the clerics acted as the regime’s moral compass—guiding not just theological matters, but justifying foreign policy decisions as righteous and divinely sanctioned. Today, they have abdicated that role. With the regime hemorrhaging both commanders and credibility, the people are left to interpret events on their own. The result is a vacuum filled by doubt, satire, protest, and opportunism from figures like Rouhani.

Behind the scenes, rumors swirl that Khamenei has tapped a small trio of senior clerics to succeed him, should he become unable to rule. This revelation, though unconfirmed, adds another layer to the clerical silence. Why speak up in a moment of crisis, when the real game may be succession? For these men—many of whom were groomed under Khomeini and have spent decades preserving their own power—the war with Israel may be less a battlefield than a backdrop to their own internal struggle for the future of the regime.

But to understand the clerical regime’s detachment, one must first understand what they actually believe about Iran itself. For the Islamic regime, the concept of nationhood is a facade. From Khomeini to Khamenei, the theocratic worldview has never been rooted in loyalty to the land, the people, or the culture of Iran. Iran is incidental—a geographic vessel, a stage from which to launch a transnational revolution. Their allegiance lies not with Iran, but with Islam as they interpret it: a rigid, totalitarian framework that seeks dominion not just over Iranians but over the entire globe. In their view, borders are arbitrary, culture is irrelevant, and history is a tool to be rewritten or destroyed in service of their mission. Iran could just as easily be any land pliable enough to host their revolutionary experiment; it’s just “geography.”

This is why the regime sends missiles to Gaza but leaves Iranian schoolchildren hungry. It’s why the IRGC builds drone factories in Yemen while pensioners in Isfahan dig through trash for food. The clerics do not serve Iran. They use it. They do not protect the nation. They exploit it as a launchpad for an ideological war that most Iranians want no part of. The people are props; the soil is a platform; and the flag is camouflage for a larger ambition: the creation of a pan-Islamic dominion that annihilates the individual and dissolves nations into a monolithic theological empire.

This form of thinking—radical, reductionist, obsessed with their version of purity and domination—is precisely what Dr. Iain McGilchrist warns against in his groundbreaking work on brain hemispheres and civilizational decline. According to McGilchrist, when societies become entrapped in abstracted thinking from lived reality, obsessed with control and rigid systems—they begin to lose their capacity for empathy, nuance, and authentic connection. They become brittle. They turn on their own people in the name of order. They elevate ideology above life itself. The Islamic regime in Iran is a textbook case. It has long abandoned the living soul of Iranian culture—the legacy of Hafez, Rumi, and Khayyam—and replaced it with surveillance, control, execution quotas, and demands that the nation sacrifice itself to the altar of their sermons.

This regime does not want to be flexible enough to understand the world as it is. It understands the world only as a set of obstacles to its mission. And when that mission begins to collapse—as it is now, under the weight of Israeli airstrikes, economic ruin, and devastating internal decay—their response is not to reflect, reform, or reconnect. It is to double down, to hide, to lie, or to go silent. In this silence, one hears not just fear, but the brittle creak of a worldview so rigid it can no longer bend—and so, it must break.

As the bombs fall and the clerics hide, it becomes clearer than ever that the Islamic regime is not a national government. It is a cult of conquest masquerading as a state. And the people of Iran—creative, wounded, defiant—are its first and greatest victims.