Canadians should not downplay the regime’s potent threat to our country

We don’t yet know how the repressive and murderous Islamic Republic of Iran will fall, or when. After the recent uprising and the regime’s bloody response, the most likely outcome may well be some form of military junta arising from the conventional armed forces. A worse outcome would be a coup by the more ideological Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or Basij voluntary militia.

But however it ends, the rule of Shiite clerics and the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are probably not long for this world, and they will not be missed. Even by their own standard, their rule has failed disastrously, since no one has done more to embarrass and discredit political Islam than the Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors.

The 1979 Revolution was one of the few modern uprisings that began unarmed. There was plenty of violent language — “Death to America!” was regularly chanted during and after the revolution — but the Ayatollah Khomeini’s supporters formed a broad coalition, including religious clerics, bazaar merchants, students, intellectuals, leftists and ordinary citizens. They were inspired by vague messages of spiritual renewal recorded on cassette tapes smuggled into Iran and distributed through mosque networks.

The violence and killing began after the revolutionaries’ victory. Moderates and liberals were sidelined. Repeated crackdowns on internal dissent began and proved harsher than anything known under the former regime. Everything is worse now, 47 years later. And the result is that the rule of clerics has turned the religion of one of the world’s great civilizations into nothing more than a third-world resistance movement run by sadists.

There is no clearer symbol of this than that slogan “Death to America.” Destroying western culture, power, and influence, embodied chiefly by America, is seemingly the Iranian regime’s only goal. And it shows. The mullahs and their henchmen hate the American-led west more than they love Iran.

Under their leadership, Iran has reached a combination of interlocking crises, any one of which could be fatal on its own. The regime is practically bankrupt thanks to hyperinflation, rampant corruption, crippling sanctions, frozen assets abroad and falling oil revenues. Costly proxy wars and last year’s confrontation with Israel have drained resources without yielding any gains. Alliances with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the defunct Assad regime are in ruins, and Iran’s regional influence is fading. We can add to those problems chronic mismanagement of water resources which has nearly destroyed the agricultural sector. The result is a vicious cycle of rising food insecurity, increased reliance on imports, and accelerating inflation.

The people of Iran deserve to be free of such torments. Canadians of goodwill can rightly welcome the end of the Islamic Republic for compassionate reasons alone. But Canadians should be aware that the regime is, and has always been, a direct threat to Canada.

The Iranian government and its agents in the IRGC have exploited Canada’s generosity and openness. They move here and launder money through our real estate sector. At least 20 senior members of the Iranian regime are known to have made it through our immigration system. Many more are under investigation. A Toronto-based Iranian businessman Salim Henareh has been investigated by the RCMP for money-laundering since 2007 and is wanted in the United States for helping the Iranian regime evade sanctions.

Worse, Tehran’s agents have been directly responsible for the deaths of Canadian citizens or dual nationals through regime-led directives and actions. Canadians have certainly been killed in the present wave of protests. In the past, the regime has been responsible for deaths in custody and military strikes on civilians. Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, brutally tortured, raped and killed in prison in 2003, may be the most famous example. But there are many others, including the 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 in which 55 Canadians were killed. The Iranian regime has hired Canadian citizens to carry out assassinations on American soil. And numerous assassination plots have been foiled in Canada. One notoriously targeted former minister Irwin Cotler. All these problems were known or clearly foreseeable when the Harper government suspended diplomatic relations with Iran in 2012. Since then, there has been no reason to re-engage.

Finally, we should not forget that Iran has been just as aggressive as Russia and China when trying to influence our elections. Armies of online bots linked to the Iranian regime promoted and inflamed pro-Hamas protests on university campuses over the past two years. And this is to say nothing of Iran’s role in funding Hamas and helping to plan the massacre of October 7th.

One important impetus for 20th century anti-western sentiment and terrorism was the Soviet Union. Canadians ay remember this if they were alive at the time or are younger and know their history. But Soviet-sponsored Third Worldism withered when the USSR began to moderate in the later 1980s before its collapse in 1991. Since then, the mantle of anti-western hatred and terrorism passed to Iran and its proxies. A similar collapse of the Islamic Republic would not only inaugurate a free Iran, but would also make the world much safer.

The Iranian regime is rightly regarded as the enemy of the Iranian people. That is how it behaves. The regime is also the enemy of the entire western world, and Canada is no exception. The sooner it falls, the better for Iran and us.

Michael Bonner is a senior fellow of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, a historian of ancient Iran, and the author of the forthcoming book The Crisis of Liberalism: The Origin and Destiny of Freedom.