President Trump and Israel’s leadership have taken the bold step of launching a full-scale attack on Iran with the apparent goal of regime change. There’s no question that the current regime has been a “bad actor” in the Middle East, and the US seems to have longstanding grounds for this move in response to the hostage-taking of Americans back in 1979 and the subsequent spread of terrorism. But will it work, and what constitutes “working?”
It would be lovely if this turns into a Persian Spring, with the Iranian military laying down its arms, democratic leaders quickly assuming power, and Iran becoming a nation of 92 million happy campers with minimal casualties among them. But this is the Middle East.
The current war, or whatever you call it, is not our first regime-change play in Iran. In the 1950s, the country briefly tried democracy, but the US and Britain found the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh too lefty, especially after Iran’s nationalization of oil. The CIA and MI6 engineered a coup and restored the Shah’s monarchy. Many Iranians resented the intervention for a long time, and the revolution of 1979 installed the current theocratic regime and resulted in the taking of US hostages. It’s my own theory that if President Jimmy Carter’s helicopter hostage-rescue effort had succeeded, he would easily have been re-elected. But it didn’t, and his administration was forced to negotiate the unfreezing of Iranian assets. The hostages were freed, but only when President Reagan took office.
When did war actually “work?” World War II. All the bases were touched. Congress formally declared war against the Axis powers when the President asked for it, and after years of hard fighting, with not just bombing but troops on the ground, and a huge loss of life, the conflict ended with the formal surrender of Germany in May of 1945, then Japan in September. Democracy followed, but with the US and other countries running former enemy nations for a while to fix what had been broken. Their populations were mostly compliant.
But that was then. If the Trump-Netanyahu gambit were in the plot of a TV series, it might have a nice neat ending. But we are only a little way into the first episode, and it seems a sure bet that this series is not going to be a short one, and there could be much pain added to the script before it’s over.
If you will allow me a little metaphor mix here, these two leaders have deployed a powerful drug to destroy what they consider a cancer, and they may succeed at that. But the after-effects remain mostly unknown. The dice are still rolling, and who knows when they will stop?
