Making Regime Change Work Again in Iran |
America made regime change work reasonably well in Iran in 1953. It can do so again, if it admits what many Iranians – perhaps most – are openly saying nowadays: that it was right in 1953, the Shah was a great era for Iran, and while nothing is perfect and lasts forever, it was America more than the Shah that failed in 1979.
America’s media and politicians and colleges won’t admit this. But we can still make it work, if we clearly recognize our own interests and the similar interests of the Iranian people, and act on them.
America’s acquired allergy to affirming and acting on its interest
America’s has a vast material interest in a free Iran. It has a vast moral interest. It has an existential strategic interest. It has a quite large economic interest.
The actual problem is that America doesn’t allow itself to discuss its interest, at least not in a way that advocates for acting on it. It tells itself this would be selfish, capitalist-imperialist, etc – the whole litany of accuse-words.
This leaves America without an anchor of stable interest to keep it to its foreign policies; particularly, not to keep it to a policy of fighting consistently to free Iran of the hostile regime there. We allow ourselves to hit back at time to time and drive it back a bit, but we have given ourselves an allergy to following through and finishing the job.
We sorely need to discuss our interest positively with one another. It is the only way to put to the side the instinct in recent decades of bugging out too fast when we’re in a fight.
The imminent danger of a bug-out and an Iranian nuke
In fact, bugging out too quickly is what Trump and his aides have kept signaling for the last two weeks that we will do. This is what they say most of the time, in between the moments when Trump himself intermittently makes quite lucid observations to the contrary.
Bugging out would leave the Iran regime most likely sprinting for a nuclear weapon, with all its fissile materials and all its Russian-Korean-Chinese help. We have to avoid that outcome.
We need to get the Administration past its habit of impulsiveness. That requires making conscious its and our interests in staying serious here and now. And also providing, for the long term, the background justifications needed to stabilize public support for seriousness.
Meanwhile we keep hearing the Administration expound in favor of the habit of irresponsibility and bug-out. But then there are brief, important periods when it acts on common sense. The start of this war in Iran was one of them.
Then Trump’s entourage went back to the “in-and-out”, “one-and-done”, “no-regime-change” memes, its calling anything more than a few days a “forever war”, its consequent capricious behaviors. It’s hard to avoid noticing that these memes and behaviors have disturbingly much in common with those of rape culture.
The Saudis have been using the opposite meme: they were against starting the war, probably because they’ve come to feel that America has become like the kind of guy who can’t finish what he’s started. But they’re saying now that, since we’ve started the war, we need to finish what we started.
They’re right about this.
The immediate, urgent solution
At this moment, we need a practical-mental fix to make this war come out well. We need to attach to this war a full, open awareness of a strong practical interest in succeeding it carrying it to the finish, or of the huge threat we would face to our deepest interests if we don’t go to the end.
We need this fix, to make the common sense stick in the present intervention in Iran – stick until we get the full result that is needed. And that result is nothing short of a normal, real regime change.
Real regime change, let us remind ourselves, has always in history meant a real change of regime, not just a cosmetic shift in leader. It means making a transition out of the old regime and into a fundamentally different new regime.
The long-term, long-needed solution
The long-term solution is to regain the traditional American mentality in foreign affairs.
In almost all our history, we had coupled material interests with moral interests, or “interests with values”. Honest professors like Robert Osgood wrote books on the coupling of Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations. This dual realism anchored our endeavors. It restrained them from caprice and gave us staying power.
We did this coupling with especial solidity in the first decades after 1945. But the practice began to waver under the pressure of the growing alienation of the intellectual class after 1960. This class, and the media with it, increasingly called it selfish capitalist imperialism when we tried to do anything good in the world that was also useful to ourselves.
In the 1990s, when our presidents undertook interventions, they sold them on the perverse ground that we had no interest of our own in them — even when in fact we did have an interest, or could have if we wanted to. Not surprisingly, we began to fail in our efforts, sent scrambling by a single adverse event.
We gave humanitarian interventions a bad name, by refusing to attach an interest to them, imposing unrealistic conditions on how we conducted them, and refusing to carry through. We fled scrambling from Somalia, leaving it from chaos, after a single small bad event.
Under Obama we went further. We refrained from helping the Green Revolution in Iran, a regime change that would have been greatly in our interest. Yet we gave rather enthusiastic revolutionary support, in the Administration and in the media, to the toppling of our allies who had led Egypt and Tunisia for forty tolerably good years. This was against our interest. We expressed pride in doing it against our interest, as a way of showing that we weren’t “hypocrites”.
Was it actual hypocrisy for the American elite to do this, not just “hypocrisy” as a slogan they used for accusing America or for denying its moral standing? Maybe, but they did not feel it that way.
You see, the meaning of the “no regime change” line for them was not the literal words. Rather, it was something like this formula:
“No to supporting regime change in our interest; that would be American selfishness in our view, or even capitalist imperialism. But yes to regime change against our interest; that really is selfless, and shows that now we’re no longer being imperialist hypocrites.”
That same year, we held back on supporting the oppositions and rebels in Syria, whose cause was in our interest as it was against Assad, the anti-Western dictator there. Then belatedly, in face of the global outcry against the regime’s massacres, we gave them just enough arms to hold off the regime but never to overthrow it. That was a safely moral posture, according to the above formula. It kept the war going, and the stalemate with it. 500,000 Syrians died for the sake of this delusion of neutralist morality.
We also refused to stop the escalating killings in Libya by our ancient enemy Qaddafi; as Hillary Clinton at the time told Congress, we shouldn’t overthrow him because that might seem to be in our interest. Then we finally intervened in a way designed to separate it from our interests and just stop the killings, not actually overthrow Qaddafi. We deliberately scrambled from Libya when, despite ourselves, the Brits and French got tired of the dallying and Qaddafi was overthrown and killed.
Next we turned down the appeal to stay from the legitimate, internationally recognized provisional government in Libya. Staying would have established a long-term presence and influence in Libya, something that could be called “capitalist imperialism” in Obama’s circles. We might well have gotten a naval base in Tripoli out of it – a real interest, and a good one. And we’d have also gotten better oil flows to the global market – a truly forbidden “selfish” (actually mutual) interest. We’d have avoided the Benghazi massacre. We’d have avoided the destabilization that ensued in Libya and in the entire region, as Libya’s radical Islamist militias, empowered by our withdrawal, spread through the region and beyond, sparking our setbacks that are still playing out down south in the Sahel.
By the way, Obama admitted years later that he made a mistake in pulling out of Libya so fast. You won’t remember this, since the mass media – which have to be counted as all but his own party media – never made a thing of it. Criticizing an American president for withdrawing from a position of power in the world – it was not the sort of thing that they understood as their job as media intellectuals. But still, Obama himself had the decency to acknowledge that it was a mistake, even if only platonically and after the consequences were brutally obvious and it was far too late to correct the mistake/crime. We should be asking now: Would Obama also have the decency to support it if, say, Trump refused to make the same mistake as Obama admits to, and instead stuck around somewhere that he had won a position of power, like maybe Iran soon? Would Obama advocate for it and support it when it makes a difference? I would like to leave the door open to the former president to show some decency and speak up for that, if he happens to come across these lines. But I have to admit that I don’t really expect he would.
How to cure our disease and make regime change work again
What is the cure for this disease of forsaking and messing up benign regime changes in our interest, while too often welcoming regime changes against ourselves?
For the immediate moment, we must apply a tactical cure: getting ourselves an even clearer material interest in the Iran war, and avowing our full interests, outlined briefly above, in a full Iran regime change.
To be sure, this is not a general cure for the instinct of scoring own goals and selling ourselves short in wars. And we will sorely need a general cure. We will need to get more generally out of this reckless irresponsibility about the larger consequences, if we aren’t going to keep marching toward self-defeat under isolationists and interventionists alike.
But for now, attaching a material interest to our endeavors would greatly mitigate the bad instinct this time.
For the long run: How to cure that bad instinct?
It requires overcoming the deep roots of this irresponsibility, roots that have grown deep down in all the institutions of the mass media and intelligentsia – and in the rhetoric and the very thinking of our political leaders in both parties for three decades and longer. Decades in which Bush and Obama and Biden and Trump all repeated the same foolish slogans against regime change. Each directed these slogans against their predecessor, forgetting that their predecessor had campaigned on the same demagogic slogan and only later, once in power, found that it was an absurd dogma. Each in turn discovered that same thing and turned around to do the opposite, usually not very intelligently. None of them of drew adequate intelligent conclusions about their mistake, or tried to change the prejudice against regime change they had spread. They only pled special circumstances and rationalizations for intervening anyway, arguments that served to confuse their interventions and reinforce the prejudice. And in some cases turned the prejudice about regime change on its head, from minus to plus, seeking regime change against every non-democracy as if it were the solution to all problems.
It is left to us, the free and thinking citizens, to draw the logical and adequate conclusions. Not obscure, difficult conclusions, just practical sensible conclusions about regime change, as American leaders had done for 350 years before the 1960s. We are completely free to do so – if we can free our minds from the decades of simplistic polemics and begin to think straight again. Maybe not enough intellectuals have done that in recent decades; but still, some have, and all in principle could.
We need to exercise our intellectual freedom well at this time. For only if we do it can we hope to get our parties and leaders to do likewise. Only if some of us lead the right way will our elected leaders follow the right way and to start getting it right again – start making our interventions great again.