Graeme Wood

And I don't just mean Iranian people who have gone there for work, but...

Muscat Oman, which is also Oman has also been hit.

And Dubai have a lot of Iranians who have just fled there because they considered it a safer place to be than Iran, possibly not aware that that Iran would soon be attacking them.

So it's been a place of refuge for money and for people for some time, even high level people.

So yeah, it would be it's complicated for Iran to strike a place that that's also a place of refuge for its own people and its allies.

You know, there's one thing that's happened, which was the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran for the last 30 plus years.

His death was, you know, the rhetoric of it was martyrdom, but also the fact that he almost presented himself as a target in the sense that he was living apparently above ground in his own compound and doing so at a time when it was pretty clear the Israelis or Americans were going to try to assassinate him.

That brought back a lot of the rhetoric of martyrdom that one had heard throughout the history of the Islamic Republic.

And it brought it back after a period of, I would say,

not quite abeyance, but de-emphasis.

I would say that unlike ISIS, if you look at the actions and the policies of the Islamic Republic over the last few decades, Iran has been much more rational, much more strategic, and much less motivated by some of the ideological aspects that they were so fervent in embracing in the beginning of the Islamic Republic.

And ISIS was fervent up until the end.

So when you see someone sort of offering himself up for martyrdom, then you go back to thinking about all the rhetorical emphasis on the martyrdom of the early imams in Shia Islam.

So the martyrdom of Hussein, for example, which, again, I wouldn't have thought of that as an operational concept.

But there's a bit of that that I see in this war and with the death of the Supreme Leader.

You know, before the war, and I think still actually, I would have said that that ideology had largely run out of gas.

In Iran, at the very beginning, it was almost impossible to overstate in the early days of the revolution in the 1980s, how much it was part of what people were thinking.

And

to some degree that there are people who even

have kind of memory holds some of the things they were saying about, say, Ayatollah Khomeini possibly being this quasi-messianic figure, the hidden imam himself, which nobody believes anymore and people pretend they never believed.