At the abandoned Iranian Embassy in Damascus, Iran’s fall here from powerhouse to powerless is most evident.

For years, the embassy, ringed with rows of concrete blocks, sharp-tined fences, and an array of security cameras, served as the cockpit of Tehran’s “Axis of Resistance.”

The regional strategy built and sustained allied militias from Lebanon to Yemen to counter Israeli and American influence in the region and serve as Iran’s own first line of defense.

Owing to the work done in this building – with its royal blue, gold, and teal tiles designed to resemble the finest ancient mosques in Iran – Tehran could claim regional superpower status.

But when Syrian rebels mounted a lightning 11-day offensive this month to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, neither Iran nor its powerful ally Russia could prevent the collapse.

Overnight, Iran’s costly, yearslong investment in Syria disappeared.

Today a handful of rebel fighters from the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia stand guard at the embassy, where the bulletproof glass has been tested by rifle rounds.

Warding off the evening cold with a fire, the guards give voice to widespread anti-Iran sentiment in Syria, as more and more crimes of the regime – for so long propped up by Iran – are revealed each day.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Passport photos sit on a table at Syria’s Palestine Branch prison in Damascus, Dec. 17, 2024. The prison, with its piles of interrogation documents and its dank collection of cells, offers evidence of the systematic cruelty of the toppled Iran-backed Assad regime.

“We hate them a lot, to the first degree. ... They made us suffer a lot,” says one guard, wearing a black scarf and a look of confidence born of military victory.

“They were here to kill the Syrian people,” he says, noting Iran’s key role in crushing a popular anti-Assad uprising that began in 2011, and eventually morphed into a civil war with foreign powers backing disparate armed groups.

“They were strong when Assad was here. The minute Assad was out, they were no longer strong,” says the HTS fighter, who did not give his name. “No, never. There is no way of reconciliation with Iran.”

An axis in decline

The fall of the Assad dynasty after more than half a century in power is the latest major blow to Iran and its alliance.

Across the region, Iran is reeling from sweeping changes triggered by axis member Hamas’ surprise Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and Israel’s ongoing response, which has gravely weakened Hamas and leveled the Gaza Strip.

In Lebanon, thousands of Israeli airstrikes have wiped out the leadership of Hezbollah, the crown jewel of the axis, and severely damaged the Shiite militia’s military capacity. Syria was the indispensable node through which Iran supplied Hezbollah with missiles, weaponry, and cash. For now, that path is closed, Hezbollah acknowledges.

On Thursday, Israel responded to recent missile and drone strikes on Tel Aviv by Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen with another round of airstrikes involving dozens of Israeli jet fighters, 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) away.

In Tehran, Iranians are still absorbing that the deterrent power of the axis “has been substantially reduced,” says Nasser Hadian, a professor of political science at Tehran University, now retired.

“Still there is a sense of shock and confusion in Iran, and discussion of how and why [Syria’s fall] happened. Thus there is not yet a clear vision of what we should do now,” he says.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Syrian Shiite Muslims join the celebrations of the fall of the Assad regime near the gilt Sayyida Zaynab Mosque, an important Shiite shrine, in southern Damascus, Dec. 14, 2024.

“The Israelis have used this chaos to advance their interests.”

Gone are the days when Iranian hard-liners and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alike would speak of Tehran controlling decisions in four other regional capitals: Sanaa, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut.

In Iran, the strongest public criticism has come from hard-liners who had carried out the axis strategy, which included recruiting Shiite militiamen from Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight in Syria’s civil war, and bolstering Shiite militias in Iraq and Yemen.

“Assad’s departure was definitely a blow to the resistance front, and this is an undeniable reality,” a former Revolutionary Guard intelligence chief, Hossein Taeb, said Tuesday. “The stakes have gone higher and resistance must seek new avenues.”

In a speech Tuesday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the “assumption” by the United States and Israel “that resistance has come to an end is erroneous.”

“It was very dangerous for boys”

In Syria, foreign fighters marshaled by Iran – especially when that battle took on the Islamic State in the mid-2010s – were often portrayed as “defenders of the shrine,” an ornate gold-domed mosque complex south of Damascus that Shiites believe houses the remains of Sayyida Zaynab, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad.

Thousands of Iranian Shiite pilgrims came to the shrine each year.

But residents of Sayyida Zaynab – a poor district – say Hezbollah forced Sunnis as well as Shiites to fight with the axis.

“Hezbollah took many boys in this area, and took them to any front line in Syria. ... It was very dangerous for boys,” says Ahmad al-Fayad. Two of his sons were arrested by the regime during a sweep in 2013, charged as “terrorists,” and disappeared, he says.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Shiite Muslims worship at the Sayyida Zaynab Mosque, which they believe holds the remains of the granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, in southern Damascus, Syria, Dec. 14, 2024. Iran had used the presence of such an important Shiite shrine to partially justify its military presence in Syria.

He was not surprised to hear that a torn portrait of Mr. Khamenei was stomped on at a pro-HTS celebration down the road, which attracted scores of local Shiites.

“We are very happy about it,” says Mr. Fayad. “As a result of the previous injustice carried out by the [Iran-backed] militias, you can watch Khamenei’s pictures being torn.”

That injustice continues, as far as residents are concerned, in the form of at least one weapons depot, hidden in a residential compound in Sayyida Zaynab that locals say was once an Iran-Hezbollah base.

Axis fighters removed most traces of their affiliation, leaving piles of finely shredded documents and a single reference sheet listing all Iran-related axis locations in the Damascus area.

But room after room is filled with boxes of .50-caliber machine-gun rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, and larger ordnance.

“We are afraid of this. ... It’s very dangerous for our people,” says one local man, as the sound of Israeli aircraft overhead blends with the laughter of children playing nearby, as if at a school. Israel has mounted 500 airstrikes in Syria to prevent the fallen regime’s military capability from being used by the new rebel rulers.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Stockpiles of ammunition, mortars, and rockets fill several rooms on a base abandoned by Iranian and Hezbollah forces in the Sayyida Zaynab neighborhood of Damascus, Dec. 14, 2024. With Israel targeting Syrian arms depots, local residents say they fear for their safety.

Downturn

Iran’s fortunes in Syria began to wane last April, when Israel struck a building adjacent to the Iranian Embassy, killing many of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s senior commanders in Syria. That strike prompted an unprecedented missile and drone attack on Israel from Iranian soil.

Damascus residents near the site of the Israeli strike say cars with Lebanese license plates removed all documents and other sensitive materials, and the rubble of the entire five-story building was gone within three days.

“We don’t want them in our neighborhood – they are not welcome at all,” says one man called Hashem, who witnessed the strike.

The Iranians “are very strong; we were afraid of them,” says Abed, a guard at a nearby building.

Could Iran come back?

“Why?” asks Abed, bemused at the question. “If they are going to come back and be peaceful, not hurting people, or causing destruction or [Israeli] airstrikes, maybe it is not a problem.”

Amr Alfiky/Reuters

A man sits outside Sednaya prison, which was known as a slaughterhouse during Bashar al-Assad's rule, in Syria, after Mr. Assad's ouster.

The dizzying pace of events since the collapse of Syria’s dictatorship, including daily revelations of its brutality leavened by inspiring images of celebration, has risked obscuring the single most important aspect of President Bashar al-Assad’s demise.

It has opened up a rare and unexpected opportunity for regional powers – and their most important outside ally, the United States – to help build not only a new Syria, but a stabler, less combustible Middle East.

And that has raised a question in a part of the world where opportunities have been missed more often than they have been grasped. Will regional leaders keep their eyes on that prize, and work together to try to win it?

Or will their own national interests and political agendas override efforts to make common cause?

Even if they do manage to act together, a lot will have to go right inside Syria for them to succeed. Without them, the task facing Ahmed al-Sharaa, leader of the main rebel group that toppled the dictatorship, will be even harder.

The good news is that both Mr. Sharaa and the key outside powers – America, Turkey, Qatar, and Israel – know what’s at stake.

All have their own reasons to want a stable, inclusive new government in Damascus, focused on rebuilding Syria from the horrors of the old regime and the destruction caused by years of civil war.

All want to avoid the worst-case alternative: a resurgence of ethnic tensions, infighting among anti-Assad rebels, and the prospect of jihadist groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) using the situation to regroup.

Yet each outside power also has its own concerns.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with the United Nations special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, in Aqaba, Jordan, Dec. 14, 2024.

Qatar and Turkey view themselves as the lead players. They wanted Mr. Assad out from the start of the civil war, and backed Mr. Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other rebel groups.

They are also well placed to help provide tools needed to rebuild the country: security ballast from Turkey, the NATO military power on Syria’s northern border, and oil millions from the Gulf.

But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also wants something else: a military hold on the north of the country, and an end to the enclave controlled by a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which he sees as an extension of Kurdish separatist forces inside Turkey.

Turkish-backed militias have wasted no time in attacking SDF positions, and Mr. Erdoğan has reportedly been mobilizing Turkish army units along the border.

The SDF is more than America’s key ally in defeating ISIS. It now runs internment camps where some 9,000 captured ISIS fighters remain confined.

On Syria’s southern frontier, another regional military power – Israel – seems equally determined to try to shape Syria’s future.

When Mr. Assad fell, the Israelis moved their troops on the Golan Heights – captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war – across the U.N.-policed demarcation line with Syria.

Their reasoning was that with Mr. Assad’s army gone, they needed to prevent other armed groups from taking control of the dividing line.

They have since advanced further into Syrian territory and taken additional positions atop Mt. Hermon, the northern Golan peak overlooking Damascus and southern Lebanon.

Israel’s key goal, it appears, is to prevent Mr. Assad’s successors from reviving Syria as a route for arms shipments from Iran to its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

Mr. Sharaa has said that won’t happen. But the Israelis aren’t ready, at least not yet, to take him at his word. They point out that while he broke with jihadi Islam in 2016, his political roots lie with Al Qaeda.

Matias Delacroix/AP

Israeli soldiers cross the security fence, moving toward Syrian territory in the Golan Heights region.

And what of the U.S., which has strong ties to all the key regional players?

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been playing an active role in bringing together a regional coalition seeking an orderly transition. He has stressed the need to keep Syria together, head off infighting, and empower a government that respects all the country’s ethnic and faith groups.

But President-elect Donald Trump’s initial response to Mr. Assad’s ouster was a social media post pronouncing Syria a “mess” and saying America should stay out of it.

Still, the sheer scale of the political upheaval could convince both Mr. Trump and the key regional leaders to help create a stable and inclusive new Syria.

The rarity of this opportunity also makes it precious. The closest parallel was nearly 50 years ago, when then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat jettisoned decades of enmity and abruptly announced his readiness to travel to Israel, kickstarting diplomacy that led to a peace treaty.

There are reasons for caution, too. They are perhaps best summed up in an old fable I heard when I arrived as a young correspondent in civil-war-wracked Lebanon in the 1970s.

It’s about a frog and a scorpion. The scorpion asks the frog to ferry him across the Nile, only to be told, “No! What if you sting me halfway across, and I drown?”

“Why would I do that?” the scorpion replies. “I’d drown, too!”

So the frog agrees. Halfway across, the scorpion does sting him. “Why?” the frog asks plaintively, as they sink.

The answer? Hayda ash-Sharq al-Awsat. “This is the Middle East!”

Mark Schiefelbein/AP

Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be director of the FBI, attends a meeting in the office of Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec. 9, 2024.

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel, a fierce loyalist, to be the next director of the FBI has sent politicians casting about for historical comparisons.

J. Edgar Hoover presided over the FBI with nearly unchecked power for about a half-century. Democrats invoke him as they warn about Mr. Patel, suggesting he will target political enemies. Republicans compare Hoover’s tenure to what they say is a modern “deep state” resisting and harassing Mr. Trump.

So we went to the expert. Yale University Professor Beverly Gage won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2023 for her book “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” The book examines how Hoover built and operated the agency, and it was the first substantial work in decades to grapple with his complicated and often dark legacy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start big-picture. What do you make of these comparisons between Hoover and Mr. Patel?

What strikes me about it as a Hoover biographer is actually how different Kash Patel and J. Edgar Hoover are.

Hoover was a big institutionalist. He spent his whole career in government. He believed in the power and independence of the FBI. He loved the FBI. He probably loved the FBI too much, and came to see it as sort of the great protector of the American way of life.

Kash Patel, on the other hand, is kind of coming in with a wrecking ball. He has said that he wants to kind of reduce the independence of the FBI, make it much more responsive to the political needs and desires of the White House. And he really wants to, in a lot of ways, dismantle the bureaucracy that Hoover built. He has said that he wants to shut down the FBI headquarters inside the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Michael Ostuni/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

Beverly Gage, an expert on J. Edgar Hoover, appears at New York Historical's Eighteenth Annual Weekend with History April 14, 2023, in New York.

Hoover manipulated and sometimes threatened lawmakers, including presidents, who stood in his way. Between the isolated institutional power that Hoover gathered and the FBI being loyal to a president, which do you think presents more risk?

Hoover built a bureaucracy that he used for his own political ends. Sometimes that was promoting his own power. Sometimes that was protecting the FBI’s secret files. And sometimes it was making his power known in Washington. Famously, he had files on congressmen and members of the press and major activists like Martin Luther King.

He abused the civil liberties of thousands and thousands of Americans, often people who were doing things that were perfectly legal. So Hoover, in some ways, invented how to use a big institution like the FBI for your own political ends. But the interesting thing is that he was not partisan, quite, in the way that he did it.

Kash Patel is coming in and saying, “I believe in Donald Trump. I wrote a children’s book series about Donald Trump in which I call him King Donald. And I am here to do whatever Donald Trump wants me to do.”

We have a contrast between two different dangers. One is sort of an independent, unaccountable, unelected FBI, like the one that Hoover ran. And the other is this highly politicized, highly partisan version that Patel seems to want.

This seems strange to say, because I am no great fan of J. Edgar Hoover’s. But I do think that Hoover had a real understanding that for the FBI to maintain any kind of real legitimacy – in terms of its investigations, in terms of people believing what it said – it had to be outside of partisan politics, or its credibility was going to collapse. So in this moment, I do see this hyperpartisan, highly politicized version that Patel is promoting as probably the greater danger.

AP/File

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, 1954.

Are you worried about Mr. Patel at the head of the FBI?

I am worried about Patel at the head of the FBI.

Look, some of what he is saying makes a certain amount of sense. Some of what Patel wants, which are more checks and balances on FBI power – greater accountability and transparency – to the degree that he wants to realize those things with any sincerity, some of them are a good idea.

But I think that that is not his deepest agenda. His deepest agenda is to take this incredibly powerful, secretive institution and turn it against the enemies of the Trump administration. He’s openly said he wants to go after members of the press. He wants to go after politicians. He wants to build cases against people who criticize the president. And that seems to me to be both pretty dangerous and pretty hostile to traditions of free speech and democracy.

There’s this real tension and contradiction in what Patel says, between the “I am the great reformer; I am going to come in and make this an institution that serves all citizens with transparency and integrity and lack of partisanship,” and then these incredibly partisan “I’m going to crush the administration’s enemies, be they kind of elite politicians and media or movements on the ground.” And those things just don’t go together.

From the outside, I tend to see the partisan side outweighing the reform side. But I guess we’re possibly going to find out which one he really means.

Cliff Owen/AP/File

The FBI's J. Edgar Hoover headquarters building is seen in Washington, Nov. 2, 2016.

Mr. Patel has described the FBI as “an existential threat to our republican form of government.” Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley told me the other day that he thinks the FBI has been operating “like J. Edgar Hoover on steroids.” Do you think criticisms like these are fair and warranted? Are there parallels between how the FBI operated under FBI Directors Christopher Wray and James Comey before him, and how it operated under Hoover?

I don’t think that Comey and Wray were running the FBI like J. Edgar Hoover. Honestly, they didn’t have the power to run the FBI like J. Edgar Hoover, even if they’d wanted to. They are in a much weaker director’s position. There’s a lot more transparency. There’s a lot more rule-bound and law-bound policy.

I think that [criticism] is mostly coming from a partisan place. But there are sort of interesting ways in which someone like Patel does sound like a pretty classic civil libertarian, whether you’re talking about the 1970s or you’re talking about the 1920s. In those moments, that critique was often coming from the left, not from the right, as it is today.

I think the [modern] FBI has tried to do the best it can. But by its very nature, when it’s involved in these political investigations, it cannot make perfect judgments that everybody’s going to agree to.

And of course, the FBI has a long and deep history of being hostile to the civil rights and civil liberties of all kinds of American citizens.

So in some broad perspective, does the FBI and a large intelligence bureaucracy pose certain dangers to civil liberties if used in the wrong way? Absolutely. Is that what’s genuinely inspiring this wave of attacks on the FBI? I am less persuaded of that.

The FBI director’s 10-year term was a post-Hoover, post-Watergate reform. Presidents haven’t always adhered to this standard, but it has been mostly upheld since Richard Nixon. What impact could Mr. Trump’s decisions to fire Director Comey in 2017 and force out current Director Wray have?

I think it is a problem. We do not want the FBI director basically being the president’s sidekick or loyalist. The FBI is supposed to stand apart from all of the partisan pressures of any sort.

It’s a very difficult thing to do to find the right balance between an institution that is going to be politically responsive, responsive to the public will, democratically responsive, and also is going to be outside of politics and able to make the really hard calls around highly politicized investigations.

That 10-year term was put there for a pretty good reason: It was supposed to be longer than the term of any single president, to give the FBI some insulation from politics, while at the same time making sure that nobody was going to serve 48 years in that job like J. Edgar Hoover did. It wasn’t a bad compromise. It seems like one that’s collapsing now.

Mr. Patel has discussed prosecuting Mr. Trump’s opponents, including political adversaries. How much do you think the post-Watergate reforms like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will help act as a check on this?

I think there are real checks now to [guard against] that kind of very straightforward, authoritarian “I’m going to throw my political enemies in jail.” It’s hard to make criminal cases. There are lots of limits on that.

It’s a little bit easier to launch investigations, launch intelligence queries that are very expensive for their targets, that turn up all sorts of untoward information, that are forms of threat and harassment in their own right.

I think it’s totally possible that we will see things like that emerge.

But this is a big, powerful, autonomous bureaucracy, and it’s actually not very easy to change it.

I’m not enough of an insider at the bureau to have any sense of how this would go, but one of the big questions is: What will employees and officials at the FBI do? Will they resist these changes? Will they embrace these changes? How the rank-and-file responds is going to be one of the big determining factors of whether or not he can do what he says he wants to do.

There are some real laws and outside forms of accountability. But a lot of it is a matter of internal policy, and for outside organizations, whether you’re talking about Congress or ordinary citizens, through the Freedom of Information Act, even being able to find out what’s going on. So that seems to me to be an area which certainly has much more structure and many more safeguards than it did during Hoover’s era. But I think it’s still a real danger zone.

It was a stage show that defied the norm, re-creating one of the United Kingdom’s most devastating miscarriages of justice.

And “Make Good: The Post Office Scandal” did it as a musical. There were choreographed dance numbers, power ballads, and pounding rock riffs.

But as this show toured sleepy village halls across England, it also told the story of 983 British Post Office managers falsely accused of theft: allegations that destroyed their reputations, livelihoods, and, for some, landed them in jail. Later, it was revealed that accounting discrepancies due to errors in the Post Office’s Horizon computer system were to blame – a fact that the 364-year-old institution repeatedly tried to cover up.

“Make Good,” which wrapped up in early December after six weeks on the road, highlights how news stories can sometimes be told – and better told – in an entertainment format. Like the drama series about the Post Office scandal aired a year ago, “Mr Bates vs The Post Office,” dramatizations of the news can often draw more attention to an event. They can also build public pressure for injustices to be addressed. And that can happen even when the media did due diligence in covering the news when it happened. Entertainment just seems to hit differently.

“Theater is the best empathy machine we’ve ever built. You start to think about someone else’s worldview, start to stand in their shoes,” says Jeanie O’Hare, writer of “Make Good.” “I do think it makes stories cut through.”

Seeing the drama, missing the news

Watching the musical on a winter’s night in Marsden, a village tucked among the hills of northern England, many in the audience are visibly moved. There are four actors on stage, but also live musicians and a community choir; the room is crowded. As the show builds to a finale, the sound pushes in from all sides.

For Ms. O’Hare, a former chair of playwriting at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, it was the scandal’s emotional punch that spurred her imagination. She created the show alongside composer Jim Fortune and theater companies New Perspectives and Pentabus, troupes that specialize in reaching the kinds of rural locations where local Post Offices act as cornerstones of the community.

She was not alone in seeing the scandal’s storytelling potential. In December 2023, ITV, one of the U.K.’s major TV channels, released “Mr Bates vs The Post Office.” It received widespread acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

Andrew Billington

From left, Victoria Brazier, Samuel Gosrani, and Charlotte Delima perform as part of the touring company of the show “Make Good: The Post Office Scandal” in the United Kingdom.

But the series also revealed an uneasy disconnect between the British public and the media. Many viewers were outraged that they had not previously heard of the scandal and blamed the U.K.’s mainstream media for failing in their work. Journalists in turn protested that they had indeed followed the case; specialist publications such as Computer Weekly and the political magazine Private Eye had reported doggedly for more than a decade. Audiences, they said, had simply not been listening.

The spat mirrors a deepening social mistrust: According to the Reuters Institute’s “Digital News Report 2024,” just 36% of Britons say they trust the news “most of the time.”

That trend pushes productions such as “Make Good” and “Mr Bates vs The Post Office” into the spotlight. And that encourages traditional media – searching for ways to survive in a digital landscape dominated by social media – to seek ways of delivering the same emotional punch as their dramatized counterparts. In the Reuters Institute’s “Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2024” report, 43% of news publishers said they hoped to offer “more inspirational human stories” to re-engage increasingly news-avoiding audiences.

But pitting journalism against an artistic medium such as theater or television does not necessarily make for a fair fight. Even painstakingly researched shows such as “Make Good” can combine characters’ stories to create greater poignancy. They also have the advantage of looking at a story as a whole. The musical spans more than two decades and compresses them into a show that lasts little more than two hours.

“A complete story taken in one sitting has an impact on you in the way that 3,000 snippets of news through your social media or radio or television just can’t,” says Ms. O’Hare. “You have to exist in the world of complete narratives. I think that’s the way our imaginations work.”

Setting an example for the future

More hope lies in the idea that journalism and more modern, story-driven projects can complement, rather than contend with, each other.

While “Make Good” tells the story of the Post Office scandal, it also acts as a starting point for the audience to explore larger, more far-reaching issues, deliberately pushing people to reflect on the growing role of technology in their lives.

Former Post Office employee Chris Trousdale was wrongly prosecuted for false accounting, and shared his experiences with both the producers of “Make Good” and “Mr Bates vs The Post Office.”

He hopes that the scandal will leave a lasting legacy by prompting businesses and people to be more critical of technology. “It’s not, ‘Oh look, the little British Post Office had a problem.’ This is a warning shot across the bow,” Mr. Trousdale says.

“The risk is that something like AI will cause this to happen again,” he says. “And I want everybody in the world to think of the U.K. Post Office. I want them to think, ‘Let’s not prosecute that person. Let’s not fire them. Let’s just investigate a bit further before we act.’”

In the meantime, news coverage of the Post Office scandal continues. A yearslong official inquiry into the affair is still ongoing, while those wrongly accused are still waiting for authorities to return the assets of which they were stripped during court proceedings. The battle for compensation is set to be an even longer fight.

But for those who felt its devastating effects firsthand, continued public engagement is key. The form it takes is secondary.

“The best thing about the musical is you can feel that voice hitting you; it hits a raw nerve,” says Mr. Trousdale. “All of this is about making sure it doesn’t happen again. And if the best way for someone to digest this story and that information is by watching a musical – so be it.”

My go-to place for holiday lights is the Los Angeles County Arboretum. For $30, I can walk through a cathedral of tiny white lights and wander in a field of tulip sculptures aflame with color. It’s a joyous outing for family and friends during dark December days.

But this year, the Arboretum canceled its Lightscape because of a construction project. I understood, but it felt a bit like the Grinch stealing Christmas. Then I remembered the annual neighborhood “Light Up” just up the hill from my front door.

It’s legendary. Like millions of people across the country, residents in Pasadena’s Upper Hastings Ranch neighborhood decorate their houses for the holidays. But this enclave of palm trees and ramblers is different. It has decked its homes as a group project for over 70 years. Joy bridges generations. Adults who visited as kids now bring their own children. Yesteryear’s wooden Santa lawn ornaments mix with synchronized LED lights as a bus from a senior center rolls down the glowing streets.

“I’ve been coming here since a kid, and now I’m bringing my daughter here,” says Jason Sancho. He, his wife Aiko, and their daughter are parked in front of the Harbeck family home on Tropical Avenue. Windows open, they’re watching a multi-media, wowie-zowie light show as a recording of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus punctuates the air. Two years ago, the Harbecks won $50,000 in a national lights contest. Mr. Sancho plans to visit four more times. “It’s an awesome house,” he says.

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

Aiko and Jason Sancho park in front of the Harbeck house in the Upper Hastings Ranch neighborhood of Pasadena, California, where they watch the multimedia light display Dec. 9, 2024.

The neighborhood Light Up started in 1951, when many homes were owned by World War II veterans, who bought them with GI loans. Residents first put out paper bag luminaries, which quickly evolved into themed street decorations and a competition. The local grocer awarded a turkey or ham to those with the best decorations. Today, the neighborhood association still hands out awards – bells that designate the residents’ top choice; the most humorous; most religious; and the best use of lights and theme.

Sarah Wedel, walking her dog on a recent afternoon with her neighbor Prashanti Thompson, recalls driving around Upper Hastings Ranch as a kid. Her parents folded down the back seats of their car and slid a mattress in so the children could sip cocoa and admire the lights from their makeshift bed on wheels.

Eventually, Ms. Wedel bought her grandparents’ home here. When her own children were little, they would wake from afternoon naps to catch the lights just as they were coming on. “It’s very sweet,” she says about the neighborhood at this time of year.

Now that their kids are bigger, the two women are improvising on the tradition by hosting a walking hot-chocolate party to see the displays. “The tradition’s grown on us in a really beautiful way,” says Ms. Thompson.

When her family moved here in 2013, she found a wooden cutout of a painted penguin in the garage and asked her realtor to contact the previous owners. Turns out the penguin lives permanently in the garage, passed down from homeowner to homeowner. That’s one aspect that hasn’t changed, with illuminated cutouts of Santas, reindeer, Christmas trees, angels, and other figures lining the streets according to theme.

Francine Kiefer/The Christian Science Monitor

Pasadena, California, cycling club leader Abraham Perez-Negron reaches his destination on the group's annual holiday lights tour – the Baghdadlian house in the Upper Hastings Ranch neighborhood – Dec. 9, 2024.

The two friends have stopped to talk on Carriage House Road, where the crowning jewel of the holiday light show stands – a three-level property where every inch twinkles, right up to the tops of the palm trees. Last week, a Pasadena bicycling club of 44 riders returned to this spot on their annual holiday tour, gazing up at the bedazzling mass of color.

“It’s really nice to feel inspired by the lights and that you’re all experiencing something together,” says Abraham Perez-Negron, the ride leader. “It lights up everybody’s face.”

That’s exactly what the owner wants.

“Christmas makes me happy,” says Hourig Baghdadlian. Before she moved into this house in 2012, she used to bring her children to see the lights. Now, she’s spreading the joy herself. “I like to decorate my inside; I like to decorate my outside. It brings a smile to everybody’s face,” she laughs.

Each year, she adds more lights, which now take two months to install. When she drives up to her front gate at night, people clap. Her UPS and FedEx delivery drivers bring their families. She’s also mindful of her neighbors because visitors sometimes trample their property. Traffic can pile up.

“My husband said, ‘You know, don’t go crazy this year,’ because we think about our neighbors too.” She bought only one thing this year: A giant, red Christmas ball – the cherry on top.

There’s no requirement to decorate, though some residents mention social pressure. And the amount of decoration has waxed and waned over the years.

Ali Martin/The Christian Science Monitor

Giant light-up letters spell out "LOVE" on the front lawn of a house on Candy Cane Lane in Los Angeles’ Woodland Hills neighborhood, Dec. 9, 2024. People who live in this community have put on spectacular annual light displays since the early 1950s.

Still, people come from all over to Upper Hastings Ranch and other neighborhoods that take on holiday personas at the end of the year – like Christmas Tree Lane in nearby Altadena, Sparkleball Lane in Fullerton, and Candy Cane Lanes in El Segundo and Woodland Hills. That’s where my Monitor colleague Ali Martin checked out the decorations last week.

The Woodland Hills display winds through an eight-block cluster of streets that were home to walnut groves when the tradition began in the early 1950s. Just three houses stood on Lubao Street back then when those neighbors gathered to make their street festive for the holidays.

Around the corner on Jumilla Avenue, cars line the dark street, their shadowy silhouettes interrupting a backdrop of twinkling lawns and spotlit Christmas characters. Snow, here, is imagined – luminescent in radiant dots covering white tarps. Bluey and friends stand watch on one balcony; The Grinch makes more than one appearance; Nativity scenes evoke the holiday’s spiritual roots.

The greetings are clear: Merry Christmas, all are welcome. It’s the season of charity, of love.

That’s the draw for Maria Tello. “Once you come in here, it changes all your perspective,” she says. “I’m not like a very Christmasy person, but I mean, if I feel it, I’m pretty sure that people that like this are very happy.”

Ms. Tello and her family drove in from Reseda, about 15 minutes away, and parked nearby to meander these streets on foot, hot chocolate in hand, pajamaed children in tow.

Four-year-old Liam is happy – and that’s why the family keeps coming back, says Ms. Tello, with a grateful nod to the homeowners.

“Thank you,” she says.

Staff writer Ali Martin contributed to this story from Los Angeles.

AP

An Iranian woman, without wearing a mandatory Islamic headscarf, walks in Tehran, Nov. 15.

The Islamic regime in Iran has had a bad run lately. The collapse of its ally in Syria. The weakening of its proxy militias in Gaza and Lebanon. Embarrassing intelligence failures. Bombardments by Israel. Rarely has Tehran been more isolated.

Yet on Tuesday, when supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed in a public address that “The resistance [to Israel and the West] is not over,” he also spoke of a vulnerability from within.

“Everyone, especially women, should be vigilant about the enemy’s soft tactics and not be deceived by slogans and temptations,” he said. By “advocating for women’s rights ... they incite unrest in the country.”

The ayatollah’s warning comes amid a resurgence of the women’s rights movement that erupted two years ago when a young woman died while in police custody after being detained for not covering her hair properly. The incident kindled the most vigorous pro-democracy protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Violent crackdowns drove the resistance underground, although many women continued to defy the hijab laws. Two factors have now brought it back into the open.

The first is a bill that would impose severe restrictions on women’s public attire as well as penalties for anyone – including cabdrivers and restaurant owners – seen to be abetting violations of its provisions. The second is the temporary release of Narges Mohammadi, the women’s rights activist awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year, from prison for medical reasons.

Both of these factors may come to a head in the coming days. Approved by lawmakers in 2023, the Law on Supporting the Family Through the Promotion of the Culture of Chastity and Hijab may be enacted as soon as this weekend. Ms. Mohammadi is due back in prison a few days later.

The regime has reason to be worried. Iranians are already battered by rolling power outages, mandatory rationing of winter heating oil, and a currency in free fall. In recent days, civil society groups have gathered tens of thousands of signatures on petitions opposing the new hijab law. 

On Dec. 14, the head of the Supreme National Security Council requested a delay in implementing the law. Even the measure’s supporters agree that it is probably unenforceable.

“Society has moved forward, yet officials are pushing a law that risks further alienation,” Azar Mansouri, a reformist leader, told Foreign Policy.

Nobel laureate Ms. Mohammadi, meanwhile, has used her brief freedom well. She spoke with the Nobel committee for the first time, resulting in international calls for her permanent release. On Tuesday, she spoke with CNN. “Whether I am inside Evin [Prison] or outside Evin, my goal is very clear, and until we achieve democracy, we are not going to stop. We want freedom and we want equality,” she said.

Swift turns in global events may alter the course of nations, yet in Iran, the battle over veils has unveiled a mental liberation. “Today, in Islamic Iran, women are experiencing an unprecedented awakening, actively pursuing education and striving to secure their rightful demands,” declared Mawlana Abdol Hamid, a leader of Iran’s minority Sunni Muslims, earlier this month. “Demanding one’s rights is not a cause for concern; rather, it reflects the vitality and liveliness of a nation.”