People watch as smoke rises on the skyline after an explosion in Tehran, Iran, on Saturday.Uncredited/The Associated Press
Dennis Horak was Canada’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Yemen from 2015 to 2018 and chargé d’affaires in Iran from 2009 to 2012.
While the scope and intensity of the strikes may have caught many off-guard, the decision by the U.S. and Israel to launch an attack on Iran on Saturday comes as no surprise. Washington had been signalling for weeks that, barring a complete Iranian climbdown from its long-standing positions on nuclear enrichment and its missile inventory, an attack against Iran was inevitable, especially given the valuable assets the U.S. had deployed to the region.
What is much more of a mystery is what happens next – and whether these strikes will end Iranians’ suffering, or exacerbate it.
In his Saturday statement announcing the start of the conflict, U.S. President Donald Trump highlighted the need to prevent Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons and underscored the regime’s long history of violence in the region. These are all familiar touchstones of the U.S.’s decades-long policy toward Iran. But Mr. Trump’s comments in support of regime change were more explicit than any previous U.S. president had been willing to go. His call for Iranians to use this occasion to “take over your government” will be welcomed not only by the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets around the world a few short weeks ago, but also by millions of Iranians inside the country.
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But talking about regime change and actually achieving it are two very different things. Who is going to do it, and how, exactly? Monarchists abroad and supporters of the deposed Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi within the country have claimed that they stand ready and able to take over once the regime is toppled. But there is no evidence of their actual strength on the ground. Banners, slogans and posturing are no match for the guns of a regime determined to survive, as we saw in January, when more than 30,000 people may have been killed as security forces cracked down on protesters.
It will be challenging to turn the populist anger at the regime into a viable grab for power. The recent history of the Middle East is filled with cautionary tales about attempts at regime change by remote control. The removal of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya following a Western-led bombing campaign is a good if imperfect example of a similar situation in which regime change was the stated goal, but there was no plan for actually achieving it, beyond a hope that somehow new leadership would just emerge. The result, instead: years of chaos and civil war.
And it would be wrong to underestimate the institutional resilience of the Iranian regime. Mr. Trump has said that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been killed, but that in itself will not mark the end of the regime. The Islamic Republic has long had a succession plan in place for the 86-year-old leader, and other key officials can also be easily replaced. Meanwhile, the government retains powerful instruments of internal pressure as well as sufficient firepower to do considerable damage to oil infrastructure and shipping routes in the Gulf. The goal would be to raise the cost of conflict, for the Americans in particular. It’s the kind of escalation Iran has avoided in the past, but it now finds itself cornered, and may believe it has no other choice but to do so if its survival is really at stake.
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There is no doubt that the regime is facing an existential crisis unmatched in scale since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and its position is probably weaker than it has ever been, not least given the widening gap between the Iranian leadership and the people they rule. If the regime is hoping that Iranians will rally around the flag because the country has been attacked by foreigners, they will likely be sorely disappointed. The Islamic Republic is not the Iran they love, and millions despise what their country has become, even if they’re also understandably worried about the possibility of Libyan- or Syrian-style chaos.
Few tears would be shed if the Islamic regime in Tehran was indeed swept aside. Given its brutal nature, it is no surprise that countries like Canada, which might normally be reticent to support such military actions, have quickly backed the U.S. and Israeli attack. That reflects the depth of animosity the Islamic Republic has engendered around the world over the course of nearly five decades.
It’s not clear what the next few weeks will bring, or even what specific objectives the U.S. and Israel will need to achieve to declare “mission accomplished.” The Iranian regime, on the other hand, has the benefit of simple clarity around its goals: survive at all costs. That makes it dangerous indeed.