The U.S. has only strengthened the Iranian regime’s hand – which it’s been doing since 2003

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Adnan R. Khan is a writer and editor based in Amsterdam and Istanbul.

Back in April, 2003, a month after the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, I was invited by a teacher friend to speak to his English class at Tabriz University, in northwestern Iran. I was in Tabriz to report on how Iranians were feeling about a U.S. military presence next door, but under the watchful eyes of a repressive and paranoid regime, very few were willing to take the risk of talking with me in public.

My hope was that, in the relative privacy of the classroom, students might be more open. After all, it was young people like them who had led protests demanding political reforms. But I was dead wrong. The students – close to 30 of them, mostly women – proved adept at spinning uncomfortable political questions into social commentary or simply laughing them off.

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After the class, as I was looking for a taxi, a car drove up beside me. Inside were two of the female students, including one who had been the most vocal. Her name was Parisa. “Get in,” she ordered, her eyes darting around the street. I hopped into the back seat and she drove us to a quiet corner of the university.

She began by scolding me for being so naive as to think that I, a stranger, could walk into a public university in Iran and ask students to open up about their political views. Most of her peers, she said, were excited about the American invasion of their neighbour: getting rid of Saddam Hussein, the mad dictator who had put Iranians through a brutal eight-year war in the 1980s, was a welcome bit of comeuppance. Now they hoped that America could do the same for Iran: Topple an oppressive theocracy and help young Iranians build the liberal society so many craved.

More than two decades later, a warped version of Parisa’s ambitions has come to pass. The U.S. and Israel launched a war on Iran on Feb. 28, killing then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on its first day. The war has succeeded in one narrow sense: Political power has indeed shifted away from the religious elite. But instead of ushering in the liberal order Parisa hoped for, it has transferred power to Iran’s most powerful security institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), transforming Iran from a brutal theocracy into an arguably more brutal military dictatorship.

But that process didn’t start this year. The hinge moment came back in 2003.

The invasion of Iraq triggered panic among Iran’s religious elite and its security establishment. The Iranian state, built on a carefully calibrated foundation of religious ideology and charismatic authority, was right to be concerned: American leaders had fabricated reasons for invading Iraq, and there was nothing stopping them from doing the same to Iran.

Its rulers, including Ayatollah Khamenei, watched as America’s shock-and-awe bombing campaign decapitated Iraq’s leadership, leading to regime collapse. The perception across Iran’s power centres was that it was similarly vulnerable – that its security services were too centralized.

And so Iran kicked off a period of rapid security-sector reform. In 2005, Mohammad Ali Jafari, then-head of the IRGC’s Center for Strategy, introduced what he called the “mosaic defence” doctrine. The IRGC would spread forces across the country in cell-like formations that could operate independently of one another, so that if the Americans took out any one cell, the others could continue to operate.

Then, two years later, Ayatollah Khamenei appointed Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a senior commander in the IRGC and a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, as head of the Basij militia. Mr. Zolghadr had made his name in the IRGC as a brutal but efficient administrator and a hard-liner vehemently opposed to the reformist movement.

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Before his appointment, the Basij had been more of a “Boy Scout” organization, according to Younes Saramifar, an anthropologist at Vrije Universiteit who has written extensively about Iran’s power structures; they had local chapters, were attached to neighbourhood mosques, and dealt mostly with cultural and religious issues. “Zolghadr was the one who started integrating the Basij militia into the IRGC in order to organize and manage them better,” he told me. “So rather than a people’s movement, it became more militarized.”

The Basij was an ideal candidate for militarization under the mosaic defence doctrine. Before Mr. Zolghadr’s reforms, it was already a loosely affiliated network of regime loyalists, many of them veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, who could be called upon to quell anti-regime protests or to rally support for pro-regime demonstrations. As a bonus, Mr. Zolghadr’s hierarchical restructuring peeled millions of Basij volunteers away from the mosques and mullahs, and brought them under the direct control of the IRGC.

Around that time, I was in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, trying to substantiate rumours I’d heard about a new CIA listening post that had popped up on the outskirts of Sulaymaniyah, near the Iran border. As a young, naive freelancer with an empty rolodex, I did the only thing I could: I went to the facility to see what was up.

I was met at the gate by a Kurdish translator. When I asked him which American agency was running the facility, he rebuffed me, telling me (in distinctly American-accented English) that this building, covered in a metal forest of satellite dishes and communications antennas, was a guest house for Iraq’s then-president, Jalal Talabani.

Just at that moment, a buff, heavily tattooed man wearing a U.S.-issued military T-shirt and camouflage pants jogged past us into the compound. The translator rolled his eyes, shrugged, and told me I had to leave anyway.

Clearly, the Americans were up to something. Then, in April, 2006, Seymour Hersh published his explosive exposé, The Iran Plans, in the New Yorker. Its first sentence said it all: “The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack.”

That attack didn’t materialize then, but the perception of one was enough for Iran to accelerate its security-sector reforms. The IRGC’s influence deepened, and Iran’s fledgling reformist movement collapsed under a merciless Basij, now operating as an arm of the IRGC.

In 2015, the Obama administration signed the Iran nuclear deal. That offered a glimmer of hope – it opened up space for reformists to re-enter politics, even as it funnelled billions of dollars into IRGC coffers – but the moment passed quickly. When the Trump administration withdrew from the deal in 2018 and adopted its “maximum pressure” policy, the hard-liners in the IRGC celebrated. By that point, they knew how to bust sanctions and continue to make money. And now, they possessed a massive network of armed loyalists ready to crush potential dissent.

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The U.S.-Israel war was the final push the IRGC needed to take full control of Iran, Dr. Saramifar told me. All the pieces fell into place: With the mosaic defence doctrine functioning as intended, the U.S.’s decapitation campaign failed to collapse the regime. Then, after the Supreme Leader was killed, IRGC commanders moved quickly to engineer the rise of his son, Mojtaba – a former volunteer member of the IRGC’s 27th Mohammad Rasulullah Division during the Iran-Iraq war – to replace him. Many of the IRGC’s current senior commanders come from the same division, and are on a first-name basis with the new Supreme Leader.

The assassination of Ali Larijani on March 17 was also a gift to the IRGC. Mr. Larijani was the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, the nerve centre of Iranian state power, and was close to the late Ayatollah and the clerical elite. In his place, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian appointed none other than Mr. Zolghadr – likely under pressure from the IRGC.

“Life must be understood backward, but it must be lived forward,” the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote. Yet we seem to be living through a fragmented reality where Donald Trump can say, apparently with a straight face, that only he can stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and so there is nothing more pressing on his mind – not even the impact his quest is having on the financial health of Americans, or the stability of the world. In the absence of historical context, the vast majority of Republicans and many of Mr. Trump’s core MAGA supporters still think he’s made the right choice, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Many experts say that Iran is now more likely to pursue a nuclear weapon, and that it was the 2015 deal, which Mr. Trump torpedoed, that was preventing it from acquiring one. In just over a decade, millions of Americans appear to have forgotten those basic facts.

The historical amnesia gets worse the further back you go. In June, 2003, encouraged by the George W. Bush administration, Iranian students launched demonstrations on university campuses that ballooned into mass protests against the clerical regime. They were viciously put down – and that was before the IRGC’s reforms. Today, with Iranians badly demoralized and Iran’s security structures redesigned for maximum repression, taking to the streets has become impossible. Regime change from the grassroots, as the Trump administration sought, was always unlikely at best.

Ultimately, the arc of history that has brought us to this moment owes its trajectory to the disastrous decisions made by the last two Republican U.S. presidents. That’s not a partisan statement; it’s just plain facts.

I wonder sometimes what happened to Parisa. Did she join, and survive, the 2003 protests? I left Iran before they kicked off. If she did, she would have seen America – the country she thought could bring her freedom – contributing to the walls closing in around her. That is perhaps the cruellest irony of all: The country she looked to for salvation, the one that so easily dismantled the brutal regime in Iraq and gave her some furtive hope, ultimately became the architect of Iranian despair.