4-29-26 The War in Iran (Feasibility of Regime Change)
I’ve previously written about how haphazard the initiation of this war with Iran was. The chosen strategy was an extensive air campaign, but it isn’t entirely clear what the goal was. Was it regime change? Control of shipping in the Persian Gulf? A permanent solution to the Iranian nuclear weapons program? A permanent solution to Iran’s ballistic missile program? Destruction of Iran’s proxies in the Middle East? Ultimately, an end to Iran as a relevant geopolitical threat in the Middle East? It isn’t entirely clear, however I would guess that with the mass protests in Iran at the start of this year, and the extensive assassination campaign of Iran’s leaders at the highest level, it is likely that the US and Israel were hoping for regime change. Which in all fairness, if it had succeeded and they were able to put in place a government friendly to the “West”, would have probably allowed the US/Israel to achieve all of the goals I had previously mentioned.
Air campaigns alone are famously unable to lead to regime change (particularly authoritarian regimes, which Iran certainly is) in a vacuum. It generally requires one of two strategies: a ground invasion and occupation by the foreign power, or else an armed domestic movement that can seize and maintain control of the levers of government. Since there was clearly no American or Israeli ground invasion, and no evidence of an impending invasion in the near future, it’s obviously not the former strategy, and it’s likely that the US/Israel were hoping that there would have been a domestic uprising given the manifestations of popular discontent earlier this year. But would it have worked?
Feasibility of Ground Invasion
First let’s look at the likelihood of success of a ground invasion. There are numerous parallels to draw from in the last 5 decades: the American involvement in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Iraq, and the American invasion of Afghanistan, to name some obvious ones.
An American ground invasion, that is appropriately planned and prepared for, is likely to be successful in defeating the Iranian military’s conventional military capabilities, capturing the major cities, nominally deposing the current regime, and nominally placing their chosen puppets in the government that are friendly to American and Israeli interests. The Americans may even have the support of the majority of city-dwellers in Iran who were hoping for the overthrow of the Iranian government and are hoping to see liberalizing measures taken in their country.
However, Iranian soldiers currently in the IRGC are ideologically very motivated to serve as protectors of the Revolution (that is to say, a Shia theocracy roughly in the form that exists today and has existed since 1979), and it is nearly inevitable that there would be a widespread insurgency. Because of the large size of the country, and the huge swathes of mountainous terrain in Iran, this would be a very difficult insurgency to stamp out, and will be composed of extremely motivated soldiers (read: people with combat training) who are likely to have plenty of equipment they were able to salvage from their military’s defeat. In order to prevent these insurgents from toppling the new puppet government, it will likely require a prolonged occupation. This occupation will not be able to definitively stamp out the insurgency, but instead the goal would be to develop the armed forces of the new government enough that they can hold the insurgency at bay without immediately collapsing when the occupation forces withdraw.
Obviously, I’m drawing a lot of parallels to the occupation of Afghanistan here, but there are several key differences between what an occupation of Iran would look like, and what the occupation of Afghanistan entailed. First, Iran is a much larger country that would require a larger commitment of soldiers to adequately occupy. The Iranian insurgents are also likely to be better trained than their Afghan counterparts. On the other hand, Iran is a much more developed country than Afghanistan, with a significant portion of the population living in cities that are likely to support a liberal government. So in this scenario of an American invasion of Iran, it may play out differently than the American invasion of Afghanistan, but there are a lot of parallels: occupation of a mountainous country with large portions of the population ideologically motivated to fight to the death against soldiers from an occupying army that are much less motivated to stay there.
At any rate, it would require a long American occupation, and it’s much less likely that the American public will tolerate a long occupation compared to 2001. First of all, the groundwork is not really in place for consensus-building amongst the American public for the invasion of a foreign country the way it was before invading Afghanistan or Iraq a quarter of a century ago. The attacks on the World Trade Centers were fresh in American minds, and Bush & Co. effectively utilized the media to demonize Saddam and hammer home the threat of Iraqi nuclear weapons and the possibility of further terrorist attacks against Americans for almost 2 years before Iraq was invaded (never mind that Iraq did not have nuclear weapons, and indeed, had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Centers). There was, by comparison, very little effort made towards justifying these attacks against Iran by the current administration, and arguments that it needs to be done on behalf of Israel now garner much greater skepticism from the American public.
There is a tremendous amount of weariness amongst the American public now for involvement in protracted conflicts in the Middle East after the events of the last 25 years. There is also a much greater sense of economic pessimism now then there was 25 years ago, with continually worsening wealth disparities and a reduction in real wages that continue to financially squeeze the majority of the American population. An expensive military adventure that could last years would be political suicide in this climate. Finally, there is also the possibility that public opinion of such an occupation would sour if it proved to be too costly in terms of American lives. This was less of an issue with the occupation of Afghanistan or Iraq, as, for the all the tenacity of the insurgency, total American casualties in both theaters combined were only a few thousand. Compare this to the Vietnam War, where tens of thousands of American casualties (along with many other reasons for opposing the war) motivated some of the largest political demonstrations in US history.
Feasibility of Armed Domestic Movement
So if an American invasion is untenable for the aforementioned reasons, what about an armed domestic movement to overthrow the government? There was certainly optimism on the part of the Americans that this would occur, because there is obviously a significant portion of the population that would like to see a different, more liberalized, government in place, as manifested by the protests earlier this year that were met with such a heavy hand by the current regime. The problem is that they are unarmed, and the vast majority will have no military training and no access to military equipment.
Another candidate to take up this mantle of regime change is the Iranian Army, an entity separate from the IRGC and speculated to be less hardline, more liberal, and more likely to side with the masses in the event of a popular uprising. I continue to hear this theory every few years when Iran goes through massive protests, and despite the government response to these protests often being violence, we’ve seen no prior evidence of intervention by the Army. Perhaps the American hope was that an extensive air campaign that weakened the IRGC and killed many of its leaders would lead to a mass popular uprising and the Army would then step in to depose the current government. Not unreasonable, but it has not yet been borne out; it’s likely that there are many elements in the Iranian Army that are happy with the current regime and would support it, particularly in the face of a foreign aggressor.
There was some discussion at the start of the war that arming the Kurds and having them act to depose the Iranian government was a possibility, but it is laughable to think that arming a small, insular ethnic minority to complete the task of toppling the regime is a viable strategy, and the Kurds themselves showed no interest in playing this role (an altogether wise response, given the history of the Americans using Kurds to achieve some strategic objective only to abandon them once it became politically expedient, as was seen in Iraq and Syria time and again).
And if there was a mass uprising against the government, and the Army did take their side so they weren’t immediately massacred, what would be the result? A civil war in one of the largest and most populous countries in the Middle East, and a civil war that would not end in the Americans or Israelis achieving their objectives. The pattern of civil wars in the Middle East in the 20th and 21st centuries has proven one lesson over and over again: in a protracted conflict, it is the religious extremists that will ultimately win out. We again have numerous recent examples to draw from: but two obvious and relevant ones are the Syrian and Lebanese Civil Wars.
In the SCW for example, the initial popular uprising against the government consisted of many varied and disparate groups that ultimately had one goal in common: the removal of Assad from power. The Syrian government cracked down hard, and over the following years, most of the initially “moderate” fighters would either die, become Islamists, or leave the country. Eventually, the armed opposition to Assad consisted entirely of Islamists (such as Al Qaeda/Al Nusra or ISIS).
In Lebanon, after Israel invaded and occupied the South in 1982 after years of war, the more moderate Palestinians were pushed out and it was the hardline Shia group Hezbollah that was birthed to fight the Israelis. In the civil war that ensued in Iraq after the Americans deposed Saddam, it was primarily Islamist Sunnis and Shia that fought each other for years. In Palestine now, armed resistance to the Israeli colonizers is carried out almost entirely by the Islamist Hamas, when for much of the 20th century it was the more “moderate” PLO that played this role. And in Afghanistan, the resistance to the American occupation was carried out by the Taliban, and later also, ISIS.
Perhaps one exception was the brief ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2012, after which the army launched a coup that overthrew them and re-established a relatively secular military dictatorship, but this was more due to a failure on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood to dismantle the entrenched power structures within the Egyptian Army after Mubarak was overthrown.
It’s not that those who use religion as their sole motivation are more violent than their counterparts driven by more secular political ideologies. It’s that those motivated by their strong religious beliefs are more willing to die for a cause due to certainty in an afterlife where their sacrifice will be rewarded. And Shiism, even moreso than Sunnism, places a strong emphasis on martyrdom. A civil war in Iran would begin with the most radical Shia group in the country (the IRGC) having a large amount of manpower and arms, and the support of much of the religious populace, and I simply don’t see a secular opposition coming out of that conflict as the victor without overwhelming military superiority, something that is unlikely to happen without American boots on the ground (which is untenable given what we discussed above).
I’ll finish by quoting a large passage from my favorite work of non-fiction, Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilization. This passage is rather long to be quoting here, but I found it very powerful. Fisk is a British journalist, and here he is embedded with the Iranian army as it is invading Iraq and attempting to capture Basra during the Iran-Iraq War. The footnote is mine.
“We crawled up to an embankment of mud that physically shook as the Iranians fired off their 155s from the waterlogged pits behind me. I peered over the lip and could see across an expanse of bright water the towers and factory buildings of Basra’s suburban industrial complex … A mob of [Iranian child soldiers aged 13-14] stood around us laughing. ‘Why be afraid?’ one asked ‘Look, we are protected. Saddam will die’
A few hours earlier, Saddam Hussein had declared that the causeway here would be turned into a furnace – [I] had a shrewd suspicion he meant what he said - in which the Iranians would perish. Yet this boy’s protection consisted of just one red bandanna wound tightly round his head upon which was inscribed in yellow God’s supposed invocation to destroy the Iraqi regime. … One small boy- perhaps thirteen or fourteen- was standing beside a dugout and looked at me and slowly took off his helmet and held a Koran against his heart and smiled. This was the Kerbala 5* offensive. And this boy, I was sure, believed he would soon be worshipping at the shrine of Imam Hossein. It was, in its way, a sight both deeply impressive and immensely sad. These young men believed they were immortal in the sight of God. They were not fearless so much as heedless- it was this that made them unique and yet so vulnerable. They had found the key, they had discovered the mechanism of immortality. We had not. So he was brave and laughing, while I was frightened. I didn’t want to die.
…
I returned from the battle of Fish Lake with a sense of despair. That small boy holding the Koran to his chest believed – believed in a way that few Westerners, and I include myself, could any longer understand. He knew, with the conviction of his own life, that heaven awaited him. He would go straight there – the fast train, direct, no limbo, no delays- if he was lucky enough to be killed by the Iraqis. I began to think that life was not the only thing that could die in Iran. For there was, in some indefinable way, a death process within the state itself. In a nation that looked backwards rather than forwards, in which women were to be dressed in perpetual mourning, in which death was an achievement, in which children could reach their most heroic attainment only in self-sacrifice, it was as if the country was neutering itself, moving into a black experience that found its spiritual parallel in the mass slaughter of Cambodia rather than on the ancient battlefield of Kerbala.
…
I would spend days, perhaps weeks, of my life visiting the cemeteries of Iran’s war dead. … They are nearly all young and they are honored, publicly at least, with that mixture of grief and spiritual satisfaction so peculiar to Shia Islam. … [I spoke with a] young Revolutionary Guard. … What did his parents feel when he was away? ‘I have three brothers as well as me at the front,’ he replied. ‘My mother and father know that if I am martyred, I will still be alive.’ But did his parents not wish him luck- not tell him to take care when he left for the war? ‘No,’ he said, a slight smile emerging at such Western sentiment. ‘They believe that it is God’s wish if I die.’ But would his parents not cry if he died? [He] thought about this for a long time. ‘Yes they would,’ he said at last. ‘And so did the Prophet Mohamed, peace be upon him, when his son Ibrahim died. But this is not a sign of weakness or lack of faith. It is a human thing.’”
Footnote:
* The Battle of Kerbala in 680, where Husayn, grandson of the Prophet (pbuh) was defeated by the Umayyads and massacred along with his family, is perhaps the defining event in the Shia-Sunni split, and a major reason why such an emphasis on martyrdom is placed in Shiism. Kerbala is located in Iraq, and the capture of Basra would have allowed Iran to move to Kerbala next.