(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When it comes to the propaganda of fallen heroes, the Islamic Republic is in a league of its own. But its capacity to squeeze blood from headstones is coming up against the law of diminishing returns.
Four decades after its war with Iraq, giant murals of Iran’s “martyred” soldiers still dominate its urban landscapes and their names mark streets, buildings, schools, parks and bridges. Their ranks are constantly topped up with the more recently deceased — even, on occasion, with the victims of the regime itself.
A year ago, the families of Iranians killed when a Ukrainian jetliner was shot down after taking off from Tehran received ghoulish phone calls from the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs, a giant organization controlled by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The callers offered not condolences or apologies for the killing of the passengers, but congratulations on their “martyrdom.”
Not long before that, Khamenei had declared that people killed during the regime’s brutal suppression of anti-government protests were also to be treated as martyrs, and their families compensated.
Last week Iran’s martyrdom machine was again cranked up to full capacity to commemorate the death anniversary of Qassem Soleimani, arguably the regime’s greatest hero since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini himself. Killed by an American drone in Baghdad last year, Soleimani was more than the leader of the elite Qods Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He was, as I wrote at the time, Khamenei’s “most effective instrument of terror, a commander distinguished for his unquestioned obedience and apparently inexhaustible appetite for violence.”
Soleimani was commemorated in mural and song, even an English-language dirge. In a series of carefully choreographed events, Iranian leaders and commanders of proxy militias across the Middle East declaimed paeans to their slain hero and swore vengeance against the U.S.
Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Ghaani, directed verbal salvos at President Donald Trump, warning that the instrument of revenge could be someone “from inside your own home.” The head of Iran’s judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi, who is widely tipped to succeed Khamenei as Supreme Leader, promised that those responsible, including Trump, would “no longer be safe on the Earth.”
This would be stirring stuff … except we’ve heard it all before. And it does not conceal the inconvenient fact that, a year after his death, the Islamic Republic’s great champion remains unavenged. Khamenei’s refrain that it will strike “at the right time” has simply worn thin in the repetition.