Michael Auslin offers an odd response to an article in The National Interest arguing against attacking Iran:

While it’s true that bombing North Vietnam, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the like did not alone result in regime change or the loss of support for fascist/authoritarian regimes, there are two ways the Iran case is different. The first is that none of those regimes had experienced significant popular unrest prior to hostilities with the United States; Iran, on the other hand, has been convulsed by street protests and uprisings. The legitimacy of the mullahs is far more tenuous than was that of Ho Chih Minh or Adolf Hitler. Thus, a bombing campaign might indeed give hope to anti-mullah forces and result in wider protests. Secondly, the U.S. bombed Vietnam et. al. when we had been at war with them for years, and thus the population was already either organized to support their governments or emotionally on a wartime patriotic footing. An Iranian policy that brings war to the country through bombing may rightly be viewed by Iranians as the cause of the problem, and not a reason to further support the regime.

I would refer him to the Hooman Majd letter I mentioned earlier, since Majd states quite clearly that there isn’t much desire for overthrowing the regime, and the population isn’t going to respond to an attack on their country by turning against their government. Iranians aren’t going to see an unprovoked Western attack on their country as the result of government policy, or at least they aren’t going to blame their government more than they will blame the attacking forces. Dissent against the regime is difficult enough when their country isn’t being bombed. In wartime, it would become even more so. By attacking Iran, the U.S. and any allies involved will unite the population against us and behind the regime.

However much the legitimacy of the regime may have been weakened in recent years, it is not obvious that it has any less than the others Auslin mentions, and an attack on Iran would create an opportunity for the regime to exploit patriotic and nationalistic sentiments to its advantage. If there were a case where a population would be worn down by foreign attack and moved to turn against their government, it is much more likely that it would be one where the country had been experiencing bombing for years rather than weeks or months. An attack on Iran wouldn’t occur in a vacuum. The Iranian public would understand that the attack was an extension of a policy of trying to force Iran to abandon its nuclear program, which is something that most Iranians do not want to give up, and for that reason they would correctly see such an attack as an assault on their national rights and sovereignty.

I’ll quote Majd again:

But virtually none of these Iranians believe that revolution is imminent, or, for that matter, even desirable [bold mine-DL]. Iranians inside Iran recognize that the regime, the Supreme Leadership, and the concept of an Islamic Republic still enjoy some support (however difficult it may be to quantify). The religious classes, branches of the military, and those in rural areas might be very much opposed to the status quo, but actively support the regime, as they define it. Like everywhere else in the world, most Iranians worry about their pocketbooks, and the economy is what they want to see improve more than anything else.

And most Iranians inside Iran would support the nation — even the regime — should foreign forces initiate aggression against their country. Khatami, who still enjoys the residual affection of many reform-minded Iranians for his principled stand on human rights, political prisoners, and the need for a more democratic system, said as much in December as the “smell” of war wafted over Tehran. (It wasn’t just my optician.) In case of war, Khatami said publicly, we Iranians are all united.

Indeed, Colby and Long argue much the same in their article:

Iran showed gruesome fortitude and chilling cohesion during the Iran-Iraq War, when it sent waves of youths into mass infantry attacks, and nothing in Persian history or today’s Iran gives reason to think Iran would do anything but rally around the flag of the Islamic Republic when under attack.

The problem here isn’t just that an attack on Iran wouldn’t spark an uprising against the regime, since that never happens, but that the U.S. and its allies would be at war with the Iranian nation as a whole in a conflict that they started. The war would be illegal and unprovoked, and the attacking governments couldn’t hide behind the fiction that they are opposed to the regime and not the people. In the wake of the attack, the U.S. and its allies will have guaranteed that new generations of Iranians will be hardened in their distrust of and hostility to the West. It will probably also take the existing popular support for the nuclear program and turn it into broad-based support for a nuclear weapons program.