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Regime Change Made Easy (By Ignoring All of the Problems and Costs)

Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt want to make any attack on Iran into a war for regime change: If the United States seriously considers military action, it would be better to plan an operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the regime, potentially resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and […]

Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt want to make any attack on Iran into a war for regime change:

If the United States seriously considers military action, it would be better to plan an operation that not only strikes the nuclear program but aims to destabilize the regime, potentially resolving the Iranian nuclear crisis once and for all.

Their preferred method would seem to be “bomb a lot of targets and wait for the revolution”:

It would not even need to be a ground invasion aimed specifically at toppling the government. The United States would basically need to expand its list of targets beyond the nuclear program to key command and control elements of the Republican Guard and the intelligence ministry, and facilities associated with other key government officials. The goal would be to compromise severely the government’s ability to control the Iranian population.

If this sounds extremely fanciful to you, you’re not alone. What do Fly and Schmitt have to say about the objection that Iranians would rally in support of their government rather than blame it for the unprovoked attack on their country? This is their answer:

In fact, given the unpopularity of the government, it seems more likely that the population would see the regime’s inability to forestall the attacks as evidence that the emperor has no clothes and is leading the country into needlessly desperate straits. If anything, Iranian nationalism and pride would stoke even more anger at the current regime.

The authors know how to make breezy assumptions, I’ll give them that. The one example I can think of when a war-weary population changed their government during wartime was Russia in WWI. That took two and a half years, millions of casualties, and even then the new government kept fighting the war. Once Russia finally did drop out of the war, it did so under vastly worse leadership.

Wars are usually poor times for increased dissent against one’s own government, and it gets worse when the country is under attack and the regime is authoritarian. All of this assumes that regime opponents in Iran will see an attack on their country as an opportunity to seize power, and that they will be able to do so. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to think any of that is true.

Does it make any sense that Iranian nationalists are going to focus their anger on the regime when their country is under attack? Has that ever been the natural response of any nationalistic public? Nationalists tend to be angriest with their government when they perceive it as failing to defend national honor. Humiliation of their nation is one of the things that angers nationalists the most, and it would be fairly humiliating to have to abandon something that Iranians perceive as a matter of national rights to appease foreigners.

The authors assume that the government is deeply unpopular. That could be true, but it doesn’t follow that any nation is going to turn on its unpopular regime when foreigners attack it. Ackerman mocked this idea yesterday:

Now, why do we have to presume that the Iranian regime survives the attack? Because responsible strategists don’t have the luxury of stipulating a deus ex machina will solve the hard problems for them. People attacked by a foreign power do not typically say, “The foreigners who killed my auntie are right! This regime has got to go! Hosain, Reza, let’s grip up!”

He adds in another post today that Fly and Schmitt’s article embodies an extreme example of considering only the best case for how an Iranian war will turn out:

For two dudes so apocalyptic about the consequences of a nuclear Iran, they’re absolutely sunny about the ease with which a new era of sunshine will warm southwest Asia once the American bombs drop.

I want to emphasize that this is their entire plan: launch a massive barrage of attacks, and then hope that large numbers of Iranians will do the rest of the work for us. What Fly and Schmitt are really proposing is that the U.S. orchestrate a much larger version of the 1953 coup with the significant difference of using a large-scale military attack on the country as the trigger, and their plan depends on the Iranian public’s collaboration in the plot. It would be laughable if it weren’t such a grave matter.

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