We can do a lot to further hollow out the regime’s capacity to project power, but only the Iranian people can push it over.
We can do a lot to further hollow out the regime’s capacity to project power, but only the Iranian people can push it over.
S ince 1979, the Shiite jihadist regime of Iran has been the most insidious geopolitical challenge for the United States. “Death to America” has been not merely its slogan but its organizing principle: The objective of revolutionary jihadism is to spread the dominion of its fundamentalist version of sharia — Islam’s classical law and societal framework — throughout the world. As the leader of the West and backer of the shah, whom Ruhollah Khomeini’s insurrection toppled in 1979, America has stood as the obstacle to the regime’s sharia-supremacist ambitions. The Iranian government’s Jew hatred is doctrinal. Its hatred of the United States, and its plots against America in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria — indeed, even on our own streets — is strategic.
I have thus long been of a mind, and have said here more times than I can count, that regime change must be our policy. That is true now as much as ever. The government in Tehran is yet again trying to put down a popular uprising by murdering Iranians — this time, by the thousands. (How many thousands is disputed; that it is in the thousands in incontestable.)
In the face of these atrocities, President Trump and his administration have given the Iranian people rhetorical support — a stark and welcome change from the cold, deaf ear that President Obama turned to their cries for help in 2009. Trump, furthermore, has warned that military action would be taken if the regime persisted in the killing. The killing has continued nonetheless, and there are signs that an American attack — one that would presumably be more broad-based than the U.S. strikes in June against the regime’s nuclear facilities — is imminent.
Let me make a few points.
First, the call for regime change has never been a call for military conquest, at least to my mind. What many of us have sought was a policy goal of regime change, in the Cold War Reaganesque sense: the use of every lever of government power to pressure our enemy — to leave no doubt of our understanding that the regime is our mortal enemy — with the goal of its collapse (and with the understanding that, compared to the Soviet Union, the Iranian regime is gimcrack).
Of course, military operations should never be off the table. In fact, one of the great blunders of bipartisan Washington dogma has been irrational fear of Iranian nationalism: the conceit that, if we struck Iran, its sophisticated, comparatively well-educated, population — one that is not innately anti-Western and whose rich culture stretches back millennia, long before the founding of Islam — would, in a nationalistic fever, rally behind the monstrous jihadist regime that represses them. And it should go without saying that “if we struck Iran” refers to striking the countless regime targets in Iran — not using force in a jihadist-style or Putin-style pulverizing of civilians.
This notion has led Washington to treat the Iranian homeland as if it were a safe haven . . . even in 1983, when the regime’s Hezbollah militia in Beirut mass-murdered our troops (220 Marines, 18 Navy sailors, and three Army soldiers); even in 1996, after it killed 19 of our Air Force personnel at Khobar Towers; even after 2001, despite the training and logistical support Iran had given to al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 and its harboring of top al-Qaeda operatives afterward; even in the ensuing wars, as Iran zealously abetted anti-American jihadist networks in Afghanistan and Iraq; and even as the mullahs plotted to have top American officials assassinated right here in our own country.
What I’ve recommended has been more pithily framed by retired General H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser: When we hit back after they strike, make them understand that “we know the return address.” That’s not a call for all-out war, just for being gimlet-eyed that the regime is an incorrigible enemy. Yet, Washington has farcically portrayed our choices vis-á-vis Iran as either all-out war or appeasement — with transnational-progressives, ever since the Carter administration hailed Khomeini as a reformer, maintaining that we needn’t worry because the “moderates” would inevitably evolve the regime into, if not alliance, at least a modus vivendi with America and the West.
The apotheosis of this delusion was Barack Obama. There is no shortage of rebuke, and deservedly so, of President Trump’s itch to abandon the post–World War II global order dominated by America and our allies, in favor of a version of “great power” geopolitics in which — for the siren song of “stability” — Russia and China could expect deference from America in their “spheres of influence.” But years before that, Obama undertook to reorder the Middle East into an Iranian sphere of influence. The idea was that Israel and America’s traditional (albeit endlessly vexatious) Sunni Muslim allies would be taken down several notches and counter-balanced by the ascendant, moderating mullahs (fortified by Obama’s nuclear deal and lucrative commercial relations with Europe). This would supposedly enable the U.S. to turn its attention to East Asia. (How’s that workin’ out?)
All the while, as our government pleaded with our enemies to make nice (and sought the intercession of our enemies in Moscow to help us do it), the Iranians persisted in underwriting anti-American jihadists, collaborating with Russia and China against Western interests, and pursuing death to America — because that’s what the regime is about. Its nature never changes. It has to be defeated in the long term and, in the interim, countered and degraded whenever and wherever doing so is practicable.
On that accounting, President Trump has been a godsend. He assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the most consequential military leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Quds Force that directed the regime’s jihadist militias. And Trump not only struck at Iranian proxies when they attacked Americans; he also conclusively ended the madness of comforting the regime in its assumption that its homeland was secure. That was a double coup because the president simultaneously demolished most, if not all, of Tehran’s nuclear weapons development facilities.
To be sure, Trump would not have taken this risky step had not Israel’s defense forces softened up the target and eviscerated its air defenses. But only the U.S. armed forces were capable of the mission to dismantle and render uninhabitable the most heavily fortified fortresses in Iran, and Trump pulled the trigger. For all the damage being done by the lawfare and self-dealing of Trump’s governance, Operation Midnight Hammer will stand the test of time as a boon for American national security.
It should go without saying that the Iranian people have to take their country back. We can help them a great deal — maybe our help could even be decisive. But while it is in our vital interests to see the regime deposed, it is not in our interests to achieve that outcome by a ground invasion and occupation. We can do a lot to further hollow out the regime’s capacity to project power, but only the Iranian people can push it over.
After the past year, it seems quaint to raise this, but Trump should seek congressional authorization. He won’t, naturally, but he should.
Constitutionally, he has a better case for unilateral attack on Iran than other military forays in which he has flouted Congress. The fact that a regime is murdering its own people, but is not threatening the United States, is not a legitimate basis for a president to respond forcibly without congressional authorization. But a president needn’t have a single reason for acting, and rarely does. Iran remains the leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism against the United States — that is why there was nothing objectionable about Trump’s strikes against Soleimani, Iran’s terror proxies in Syria, and Iran’s nuclear program. And while I believe the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force should be overhauled if not repealed entirely, it is still on the books. Much reliance on it has been a substantive reach. To rely on it against Iran would be a reach only temporally: There would have been no al-Qaeda as we knew it in the years leading up to 9/11 without Iranian support and training; and, as noted above, Iran provided the 9/11 suicide hijackers with logistical support beforehand and then harbored top al-Qaeda operatives afterward. The 2001 AUMF fit the Iranian regime to a tee.
No, Trump should go to Congress because, if the decades since World War II have taught us anything, it should be that, in our democracy, military expeditions require public support to be sustainable. Building public support means going to Congress and making the case why military force is necessary. It means explaining the conflict, articulating both what our objectives are and how we expect to navigate the aftermath — understanding that war is uncertain.
Trump doesn’t think this is important, but he should. Even if he can get in and out with few or (we pray) no casualties, a messy outcome in Iran would be his outcome, alone, if he has not gotten Congress on board. And as we saw in Iraq, even when President George W. Bush got Congress on board, Democrats still used the failures and flawed assumptions of the mission against him for political advantage. That could go double for Trump if he acts unilaterally and things go wrong — which is always possible in the Middle East, a complex powder keg.
Finally, I am not an optimist by nature, but here’s why I think this could go right.
The eminent historian Niall Ferguson is undoubtedly correct that counterrevolutions generally don’t go well. Iran, he argues, is a counterrevolution because the radical revolution occurred in 1979 with the regime’s capturing of the country. Revolutionary regimes are brutal, and their tried and true tendency is to put down counterrevolutions brutally. Jim Morrison and the Doors were wrong: As between the guns and the numbers, it’s usually better to have the guns. The Iranian regime has the guns. The Iranian people appear to be rising up heroically, but they’re likely to be stymied unless swaths of the IRGC and other security forces turn against the regime. So far, if there are signs of that, I’m unaware of them.
Sounds grim . . . especially considered in conjunction with my earlier point that regime change ordinarily cannot be accomplished by air strikes. There has to be ground action that actually ousts the rulers. If it’s not going to be our troops (and it’s not), then the Iranians have to do it themselves.
So why am I cautiously optimistic? Because of the unusual historical circumstances. We’ve seen in the last two years that the Iranian regime, in its own territory, is thoroughly penetrated by Israeli intelligence. Based on the capabilities the Israelis have shown — including assassinating Ismael Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s political bureau, in an IRGC facility in Tehran itself — we have to assume top leaders in the regime (the IRGC more importantly than the ayatollahs) can be reached. And if there are potential breakaway elements of the IRGC and the broader regime, there has to be exceptional Israeli and American intelligence about that.
Just as significant: Iran has no air defenses. The IDF shredded them in the Twelve-Day War, and the U.S. operation against the nuclear sites was executed without a hitch because the regime is defenseless. That is not a vulnerability the mullahs can have addressed in the succeeding six months with the country descending into chaos. Yes, the regime can still mow down Iranians in the streets, but they can’t do anything about the hell that can be rained down from above.
Consequently, I have to believe that, if the president gives the green light (as he seems poised to do), our incomparable forces can, with impunity, destroy any regime target they are directed to destroy. If that does not embolden the public and any disgruntled IRGC factions, I don’t see what can.
I doubt Reza Pahlavi, the deposed shah’s son living in exile in the West, will prove to be a figure Iranians can rally behind. The West tends to overrate the popularity of opposition figures who are known to the West but have dubious standing in their country — where the uprising is happening and its heroes are born. If new leadership emerges, it will come from those fighting in Iran for Iran right now.
Whether the Iranian people succeed or not, regime change should be our objective, and our strategy ought to be to degrade the regime at every opportunity. This is an exquisite opportunity.