They Killed Iran's Leader to Break It — Instead They Made a Martyr | Prof. Jiang Xueqin Explains

I want you to look at what is happening in Iran this week because it is one of the most instructive things you will ever see in the study of power. A coffin is moving slowly across an entire country and then across a second country. It began in Tehran. It will pass through K. It will travel to Najaf and to Karbala, the holiest cities of Shia Islam, sitting inside Iraq and it will end in Mashad at one of the most sacred shrines in the Islamic world. Millions of people are lining the streets. The coffin has been placed on a great black platform built to resemble the Cabba itself, the most sacred structure in all of Islam. And inside that coffin is a man who 5 months ago the United States and Israel killed on the very first day of this war in a deliberate strike designed to end him. His name was Ali Kame, the supreme leader of Iran.

And here is the paradox I want you to sit with because it is the whole story. They killed this man to make Iran weaker. They killed him to break the regime, to shatter its command, to collapse its will. That was the entire logic of the operation. Cut off the head and the body dies. And yet here we are 5 months later and the man they killed is not gone. He is everywhere. He is more present in death than he was in life. His face is on every billboard. His name is on every tongue. And a nation that one year ago was tearing itself apart in protest against this very man is now, at least for this week, united in grief and rage around his memory.

So the question is not just interesting. It is one of the most important questions in all of strategy. How do you kill a man and end up making him more powerful than he ever was alive? And the answer to that question reveals a mistake so old, so deep, and so frequently repeated by the most powerful militaries on Earth that once you understand it, you will see it echoing across 3,000 years of history. So, let me take this apart carefully using game theory and structural analysis because there is a precise logic here and the logic matters.

Let me start by being fair to the people who ordered this killing because to understand why something fails, you first have to understand why anyone thought it would work. The strike that killed Kam was what strategists call a decapitation strike. And the theory behind it is seductive and it is simple. The theory says that an organization, a state, a movement is essentially its leader. The leader makes the decisions. The leader holds the thing together. The leader is the brain. And everyone else is just the body executing the brain's commands. So if you remove the brain, the body falls into chaos. The commands stop. The coordination collapses and the whole structure, leaderless and confused, either falls apart or surrenders. On paper, this is elegant. And against certain kinds of targets, it actually works.

But here is the first and most fundamental error. The error that sits underneath this entire operation. It is the assumption that a state is a person. that Iran, a nation of 90 million people with a clerical establishment built over decades with a vast military and security apparatus with a designed and written system of succession is somehow just Ali Kam wearing a country like a coat and that is not what a state is. A modern institutionalized state is not a person. It is a system. It is a network. And this distinction between a person and a system is the difference between a decapitation strike that works and one that backfires catastrophically.

So let me make that distinction precise because this is where the game theory becomes sharp. There are two kinds of power structures in the world. The first kind is what we can call personalist. This is a structure where power is genuinely concentrated in one individual where there is no clear successor, no deep institution, no system that can function without the man at the top. A warlord and his militia. A strong man who seized power in a coup and rules through personal loyalty alone. If you kill the leader of a personalist structure, you really can collapse it because there was never anything underneath him but his own personality. Remove him and there is a vacuum and the whole thing scatters.

But the second kind of structure is completely different. We can call it institutionalized. And in an institutionalized structure, the leader is important but the leader is a node not the network. Underneath him is a whole architecture, a bureaucracy that keeps functioning, a security service with its own interests and its own chain of command. An ideology that gives the whole thing legitimacy independent of any single man. And crucially, a mechanism of succession, a written, understood, rehearsed answer to the question, what happens when the leader dies? And Iran is the textbook example of an institutionalized structure. It has the revolutionary guard, a military and economic empire in its own right. It has the clerical establishment. It has the assembly of experts whose literal constitutional job is to choose the next supreme leader. Iran was built deliberately by men who assumed their leaders would be targeted and killed to survive exactly this kind of decapitation.

So what happened when was killed? Exactly what the system was designed to do. Within days, a successor was installed, his son, Mojaba. The machine did not collapse. It did what resilient networks always do when you destroy a node. It routed around the damage. The command structure absorbed the blow and kept functioning. So, the first thing you need to understand is that this strike failed on its own terms. It did not decapitate anything because you cannot decapitate a system that has more than one head and a plan for growing new ones.

But failure is not the interesting part. Failure would just mean the strike accomplished nothing. What actually happened is far more significant than nothing. The strike did not accomplish nothing. It accomplished the opposite of its goal. It made Iran stronger. And to understand how you have to understand the single most powerful and least understood force in this entire story, martyrdom.

Now I want to approach this carefully as an analyst because this is where most western strategic thinking goes blind. The people who planned this operation think in terms of capabilities. They think if we remove this man, the enemy has one fewer capable decision maker. They are counting pieces on a board, but they are not thinking about meaning. They are not thinking about what a death does to the story a people tell about themselves. And in the end, wars are not fought only with capabilities. They are fought with meaning, with will, with the story that makes ordinary people willing to suffer and sacrifice. And here is the brutal irony. There is no faster way to hand your enemy a powerful story than to give them a martyr.

Think about what a living leader is. A living leader is a politician. He makes compromises. He disappoints people. He raises the price of bread. He cracks down on protesters. He accumulates enemies simply by governing because governing means making choices that anger someone. A living leader is a target for his own people's frustration. And Kam in life was exactly this. Remember just one year ago Iran was convulsed by protests against his rule. The regime was cracking down violently on its own citizens. It was by any honest measure a deeply unpopular government sitting on a restless and angry population. That was the reality of Kam alive. He was a source of division inside his own country.

But a dead leader, a martyed leader is something else entirely. A martyr makes no more compromises. A martyr raises no more bread prices. A martyr cannot disappoint you because he is frozen forever at the moment of his death. Transformed from a flawed politician into a pure symbol. All the grievances people had against the living man evaporate. And in their place comes something much simpler and much more powerful. He was killed by our enemy. And now his death belongs to us. This is the martyrdom multiplier. And it is one of the oldest forces in human politics. And nowhere on earth is this force more potent than in Shia Islam. Because martyrdom is not a side theme in Shia identity. It is the beating heart of it. The founding event of Shia Islam is a martyrdom. The death of Hussein, the grandson of the prophet killed at Karbala more than 1300 years ago. And here is what you must understand about Carbala. The people who killed Hussein won the battle. They had more soldiers. They cut him down militarily. It was a total victory for them. And it did not matter because in dying, Hussein won something far greater than a battle. He won the moral imagination of a civilization forever. For 14 centuries, Shia Muslims have mourned Carbala. Every single year, have organized their entire spiritual and political identity around the memory of a leader who was killed by a tyrant and whose death became a permanent source of defiance.

So now look again at what is happening this week. They are walking Kamina's coffin through Carbala, through the exact place where the master template of Shia martyrdom was written in blood 13 centuries ago. They are placing his body on a platform shaped like the Cabba. This is not an accident. This is a regime that understands with perfect clarity that its enemies have just handed it the most powerful narrative in its entire culture. The tyrant killed our leader just as the tyrant killed Hussein at Carbala. And in that story, the killers are not strong. The killers are the villains of a sacred drama. And the martyr is the hero whose memory will outlast them all. This is what I mean when I say the strike accomplished the opposite of its goal. It did not remove a decision-maker. It manufactured a saint.

And there is a second force working alongside the martyrdom. And it is one that game theory understands very well. It is the rally around the flag effect. Here is the principle. Nothing unifies a divided group faster than an external attack. When people are fighting among themselves, they are focused inward on their grievances against each other. But the moment an outside enemy strikes, the entire structure of the conflict changes. Suddenly the internal fight is a luxury no one can afford and the group closes ranks against the outsider and this is the deepest irony of the entire operation. Remember the Iranian regime was weak from within. It was fighting its own people. Its legitimacy was crumbling and then its enemies did the one thing guaranteed to solve that problem. They attacked from the outside. They killed the leader and in doing so they took a population that was turning against its government and gave that population a reason at least for now to stand behind it. They converted domestic opponents into national defenders. The attacker solved the regime's single greatest problem, its lack of legitimacy at home better than the regime could ever have solved it for itself. When you are trying to weaken a government and instead you unify its people around it, you have not made a small error. you have made a strategic error of the highest order.

Now, let me show you where this logic leads next because the story is not over and the next chapter is already being written. Israel's defense minister has now declared that the son Mojaba, the new leader, is also in his words marked for death. So, the doctrine is becoming explicit. Kill every leader Iran appoints. And I want you to think this through with me as a game theorist would because the logic is devastating. If killing the first leader created a martyr and produced a successor, what does killing the second leader do? It creates a second martyr and it produces a third successor. You are not draining the pool. You are manufacturing saints one after another. And each one deepens the story, hardens the resolve and raises the emotional temperature of the entire conflict.

And there is something even worse buried in this logic. Every time you kill a leader, you make it harder for the next leader to ever make peace. Because now imagine you are Mo Taba. Imagine you are the son of a man they killed. The leader of a nation in mourning. Can you sit down and make a compromised deal with the people who killed your father? Politically, it is almost impossible to compromise now would be to betray the martyr. So the assassination does not just fail to end the war. It removes the very possibility of the negotiated peace that could end the war because it makes every successor a prisoner of the blood debt. This is what game theorists call a trap in a repeated game. When you play the same move over and over against an institutionalized enemy and every play of that move strengthens the enemy's resolve and forecloses the exit. You are not on a path to victory. You are on a treadmill that speeds up the longer you run.

And this is where I have to be fair to the other side of the argument because intellectual honesty demands it. Someone will say, "But decapitation does sometimes work." And that is true. Against a disorganized militia, against a personalist strongman with no successor, killing the leader can genuinely break the structure. And someone will say martyrdom fades. The passion of a funeral does not last forever. The unity of this week may dissolve into the old divisions within a year. And that is also true. This wave of grief and rage is real, but it is not necessarily permanent. and the regime's deep unpopularity may well return once the shock passes. These are fair points and I do not dismiss them.

But here is the thing. Whether or not the unity lasts, the strike still failed at its actual purpose. It did not collapse the regime. It did not shorten the war. It installed a successor. It created a martyr. And it hardened the path to peace. Even if the martyrdom effect fades, you cannot undo the fact that you tried to kill a system by killing a man and the system simply grew a new head and used your attack as fuel.

And this brings me to the pattern, the thing I most want you to take away because this is not a one-time event. This is one of the most reliably repeated mistakes in the modern history of warfare. Look at the record. The United States killed Kasm Solmani, Iran's most important general, in 2020. It did not end Iran's regional influence. His funeral drew some of the largest crowds in Iranian history, and his image became a rallying symbol. The United States killed Osama bin Laden. It did not end jihadist terrorism. In the years that followed, an even more extreme movement rose from the same soil. Israel has spent decades assassinating the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas one after another after another. And those organizations did not disappear. New leaders rose, often harder and more radical than the ones before them. Again and again, the most sophisticated militaries in the world reach for the same tool, the targeted killing of the enemy leader, expecting it to end the conflict. and again and again against institutionalized ideologically committed movements. It does not end the conflict. It feeds it.

And the reason is always the same. They are trying to solve a political and ideological problem with a physical weapon. They are aiming a missile at an idea. And you cannot kill an idea with a missile. In fact, the very act of killing the man who embodies the idea often makes the idea stronger because now the idea has a martyr and a martyr is an argument that can never be killed because he is already dead. This is the lesson that Carbala taught 13 centuries ago. And it is the lesson that the funeral procession winding through Iran and Iraq this week is teaching all over again to anyone willing to see it. The weapon that creates a martyr is not the weapon that can destroy him.

So let me leave you not with a prediction but with a way of seeing. When you watch the images from Iran this week, the oceans of people, the coffin on its sacred platform, do not see only mourning. Watch it the way a strategist watches it. See a regime that was fracturing being welded back together by the grief its enemies handed it. See a flawed and unpopular politician being transformed by the missile that killed him into a symbol his enemies can never reach. And when you hear that the son too has been marked for death, do not assume that killing him will finally solve the problem. Ask instead whether it will simply create the next martyr, produce the next successor, and lock the next generation more tightly into a war that no assassination can end. Because the hardest truth in all of strategy is this. There are some structures you cannot break by breaking the man at the top. And there are some men who are far more dangerous to you dead than they ever were alive. I am not offering you this as certainty. I am offering it as a lens and you should test it, argue with it, look for where it fails, but watch what happens next and watch it carefully because the people who ordered this killing believed they were ending something and history suggests they may have started something instead. Head.