IRGC head Hossein Salami's fatal flaw: Arrogance - analysis
The IRGC had felt they could inflame wars, but they didn’t believe it would come to Tehran’s own doorstep.
The Iranian regime suffered an unprecedented blow in the early hours of Friday morning. Key figures in its military leadership, including in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have been killed.
Iranian state media have confirmed that several key IRGC members, such as its commander, Maj.-Gen. Hossein Salami, were killed. The fact that these men went to sleep on Thursday night without any concern about what might happen is an illustration of how arrogance drove Iran’s regime to this moment.
Salami's fatal mistake: Arrogance
Just a day before he was killed, Salami had claimed that any Israeli attack would be met by an unprecedented response. He claimed Iran was ready for “any war.” Salami’s entire career as head of the IRGC was filled with these kinds of boasts.Back in February 2019, before he was appointed head of the Guards, he had warned that Iran could defeat Israel. “We warn them [Zionists] that if a new war breaks out, it will result in their termination,” he said at the time, then second in command. He said Israel should not “play with fire” and claimed that the Jewish state would be destroyed. Iran has constantly claimed that Israel will be destroyed and the US will be driven from the region if there is a war.
Salami was a key architect of the Iranian regime’s arrogance. This arrogance was a theme in its increasingly bold moves in the region. It became more involved in Iraq; it intervened in the Syrian civil war; it increased the power of Hezbollah; and it used Hezbollah to hijack Lebanon’s politics and bankrupt Israel’s northern neighbor.
After 2015, the regime also backed the Houthis and gave them missiles and drones to attack Saudi Arabia. It also moved the Shahed 136 type of drone to Yemen back in 2019 – then it provided the same drones to Russia to attack Ukraine.
The arrogance grew. It attacked Saudi Arabia directly in 2019 and attacked ships in the Gulf of Oman using mines and then kamikaze drones. Iran encouraged proxies to attack US soldiers in Iraq in 2019 and 2020. It also targeted Iraq’s Kurdistan region using missiles. It even used ballistic missiles to target armed groups in Syria and Pakistan. Iran’s regime felt it was on a roll from 2015 to 2023 when the October 7 attack happened.
Tehran believed its own arrogant rhetoric, of which Salami was a key figure. He said in 2019 that Iran could destroy Israel. He made the same claim in 2021. Yet the IRGC leader apparently did not take any safeguards in terms of his own protection in Iran. He felt that Israel would not dare attack Iran and assumed he and his commanders were safe.
The Guard Corps had been involved in wars across the region, sending forces to Iraq, Syria, and other countries. It had felt it could inflame wars but didn’t believe they would come to Iran’s own doorstep.
Even after the Israeli strikes in 2024, which followed Iran’s attacks on Israel, the IRGC felt secure. It saw the talks with the Trump administration and assumed all was fine. It even likely saw the tensions grow on June 11 and 12 with reports of US State Department personnel preparing to evacuate Iraq and other countries. However, Salami and his commanders thought that nothing would happen. After years of threatening Israel, they felt that they would never pay a price.
Iran often accused Israel and the US of being “arrogant powers.” In 2020, Iran’s then-president Hassan Rouhani described America as “the wicked hands of global arrogance, with the usurper Zionist regime as the mercenary.”
Despite the regime’s claims that others were arrogant, it was Iran that was arrogant in assuming it could terrorize the entire Middle East and spread proxy wars across the region and not face any pushback. With the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, it must have wondered if it had miscalculated. But it didn’t seem to heed the lesson.
