They need so desperately to forcibly prove that fighting the empire is impossible. That the possibility of improving your soceity in a sovereign manner without the supervision of imperialists is absolutely zero. That there is no future for a country that stands up to the US.

Otherwise, the Pahlavists must grapple with the fact that their regime butchered thousands while achieving nothing, but it was fine because they had it good and fighting back against the global empire was not possible anyways. The boot must step on someone’s neck, so better to be the one stepping then to be stepped on.

The Islamic Republic proves this is false by its very existence. They are able to maintain their sovereignty and improved the lives of their people simultaneously. They do so without needing to resort to imperial tactics and declare that a paradigm of mutual respect for sovereignty is not only possible but being built.

This is the psychological crux of the Pahlavists rage. One born of denial that the crimes their Shah commited weren’t at all necessary. A mortified rejection of reality which reveals that their cooperation with imperialism was not the single rational option but simply the most cowardly choice.

Iran’s victory and triumph on its own merits makes them ask questions like,

“What was all the death for?”

“Why didn’t we achieve the same gains?”

With the only sensible answers being,

“We were cowardly.”

Their entire ideology comes down to an inability to recognize that power does not need to be weilded by the mighty against the desperate. Their king’s might was their’s and it needed to be maintained or else they’d be the ones on the receiving end of poverty, destitutuion, and underdevelopment. Except the revolution proved that power can be wielded for the betterment of soceity, and that the Pahlavists privilege is what inhibited it.

Even when they have little to nothing of their former influence they can not let go of fact that the Islamic Republic stands as a beacon of their cowardice.