Bombing civilians can often mobilize support even for deeply unpopular governments.ARASH KHAMOOSHI/The New York Times News Service
Ian Buruma is the author of numerous books, including Year Zero: A History of 1945, and most recently, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah.
We still do not know how much damage last month’s U.S. air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities caused. “I believe it was total obliteration,” U.S. President Donald Trump bragged at the NATO summit in June. But an early U.S. intelligence report suggests that Iran could begin enriching uranium again in a few months; the International Atomic Energy Agency has reached the same conclusion.
One thing we can say with relative confidence, however, is that the massive Israeli-U.S. bombing campaign did not spark an uprising against the Islamic Republic – the outcome that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had hoped for. Mr. Trump even mused that regime change is the obvious solution to a government that “is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN,” but without clarifying whether efforts to “MIGA” should come from within or outside the country.
The notion that bombing civilians will break their morale and turn them against their own leaders is old and mostly discredited. It didn’t work during the Spanish Civil War, when the Germans and Italians bombed Guernica in 1937, or during the Second World War, when Adolf Hitler unleashed the blitz on Britain, or the Allies annihilated cities in Nazi Germany. Operation Rolling Thunder, which lasted from 1965 to 1968 in North Vietnam, failed to meet this goal, as has the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
Strategic bombing was a tactic devised between the two world wars, but during the Second World War, these attacks came to be associated with Arthur “Bomber” Harris, commander in chief of Britain’s RAF Bomber Command, and Curtis Emerson LeMay, a U.S. Air Force general. The latter, after wiping out Japanese cities between 1944 and 1945 and killing hundreds of thousands, once admitted that if the U.S. had lost, he would have been tried as a war criminal.
“Bomber” Harris got his wish to “kill a lot of Boche” (a derisive term used for Germans). But despite its broad use during the Second World War, this tactic never resulted in a popular revolt. And whatever the consequences of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was no uprising against the Japanese government.
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In fact, bombing can have the opposite effect: it makes people angry, which can mobilize support even for deeply unpopular governments. German efforts to demoralize Londoners in 1941 just made them more obstinate. Winston Churchill was of course popular. But the same response was evident among Berliners, even those who hated Hitler. People take pride in their resilience, especially when they are confronted by a common enemy.
This public stoicism tends to exist as much in dictatorships as in democracies. The North Vietnamese were forced to obey their leaders, but there is no evidence that American bombs broke their morale or caused a public mutiny.
The truth is that most people don’t like being bombed by foreign powers, however much they despise their own leaders. This is especially true in a proud country like Iran, with a bitter history of foreign interventions. In 1953, a coup backed by the U.S. and Great Britain snuffed out a fledgling democracy. Hatred of these Western countries may have diminished, but Iranians remain suspicious of their motives. And if it is hard to imagine Iranians rallying around Mr. Trump’s MIGA flag, the idea that they would regard Mr. Netanyahu as a political saviour is even more fanciful.
To be sure, weakening Iran’s nuclear capacity is a positive development. But as other Western military interventions in Asia and the Middle East have shown, bombing does not result in democratic change.
The defeat of Japan and Germany in 1945, and their subsequent democratic transformations, are sometimes cited as examples to the contrary. But democracies were constructed, or rather reconstructed, after the war by the elites of those countries under the patronage of allied occupation. No one is suggesting that the U.S. or Israel should occupy Iran, much less that doing so would have the same results as in Germany and Japan.
The only people who can topple Iran’s often brutal theocracy are the Iranians themselves. The regime is highly unpopular: a 2023 survey found that more than 80 per cent of Iranians would prefer a democratic government. Bombing Iran may have exposed the country’s military weakness, but it might also have weakened the growing opposition.
One can never tell what might happen when a regime is under pressure. But so far, the regime has clamped down harder on alleged traitors and dissidents. And Iran’s military weakness increases the chances that its leaders will redouble their efforts to build a nuclear bomb. This is surely not what Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump intended, or what most Iranians would want.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.www.project-syndicate.org