As bombs fall on Tehran and the Supreme Leader lies dead, Washington is once again mistaking the destruction of a regime for the creation of a new one. The disastrous legacies of Afghanistan and Iraq are repeating themselves – but this time, Britain has refused to join.

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury; killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, striking IRGC headquarters across Iran and aiming, in President Trump’s own words, at regime change. The strikes were militarily precise. What comes next is not. For a quarter century, the United States has demonstrated a consistent capacity to destroy governments it dislikes and an equally consistent inability to determine what replaces them. Iran is unlikely to prove an exception to that pattern.

Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Now Iran.

The pattern is not new – and that is precisely the problem. After September 11, the United States invaded Afghanistan, dismantled the Taliban in weeks, then spent twenty years sustaining a government that collapsed within days of American withdrawal. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was gone within the same timeframe, but the sectarian fragmentation that followed was severe enough to create the very conditions that drew Iran – now under American bombs, deeper into the region’s political architecture. Libya, in 2011, followed an identical pattern of institutional collapse: Gaddafi dead within months, the country ungovernable ever since. Three wars, three administrations, structurally similar outcomes. Washington excels at dismantling regimes, but consistently fails to secure the power vacuums it creates

Iran, however, is not Iraq; it is categorically harder. Iraq covers 438,000 km²; Iran covers 1.648 million km², roughly 3.5 times larger with terrain that compounds every operational dimension of that scale: the Zagros Mountains in the west, the Alborz range in the north, a vast central desert plateau, and the porous southeastern Baloch borderlands. Iraq is largely flat and desert; Iran is mountainous, vast, and home to 90 million people carrying a deep civilisational memory of what foreign intervention has historically produced. If the United States spent a decade in Iraq only to leave behind a fractured state, it has no workable formula for a nation that dwarfs it in size, population, and complexity. Terrain at this scale has never been permanently secured by an outside power; it is simply endured until the costs of occupation force a retreat.

Washington may be quietly gambling that Iranian balkanisation will neutralise Tehran’s regional reach. But state collapse does not vaporise ballistic missiles or the Axis of Resistance; it merely dismantles the central command that restrains them. The 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani already proved this dynamic: without his oversight, Iraqi proxy militias quickly fractured into volatile, autonomous factions that repeatedly defied Tehran’s efforts to de-escalate. Extrapolate that breakdown across the entire Middle East. Without the IRGC enforcing strategic discipline, networks across Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen would entirely untether from a rational state actor, transforming into unaccountable warlords armed with state-tier precision munitions. Syria offered a preview of such a vacuum. A balkanised Iran would be its sequel at five times the scale, with Russia, China, and Turkey already waiting at the edges

Suffering does not mean surrendering

Washington appears to have interpreted Iran’s domestic condition in early 2026 as an opening. The rial had lost more than 80 percent of its value, the Ayandeh Bank collapsed in late 2025, and the regime had spent months killing its own citizens to suppress the largest protests since the 1979 revolution. On paper, this looked like a regime on its last legs. But a government killing its own people to stay in power is not the same as a government about to welcome foreign intervention. The Iranians who marched without hijabs were demanding change on their own terms; accountability from their own state, in their own language, on their own timeline. Foreign bombs do not accelerate that process. They end it.

Iran carries 2,500 years of civilisational memory, including a very specific lesson: in 1953, the CIA removed Prime Minister Mossadegh; democratically elected, broadly popular- reinstalled the Shah, and presented it to the world as a victory for stability. What followed was nearly three decades of authoritarian rule, a revolution, and the birth of the Islamic Republic itself. Operation Epic Fury has handed that same regime exactly the narrative it needed at exactly the moment it was most vulnerable.

Bombing diplomacy into oblivion

What makes the timing of Operation Epic Fury particularly hard to defend is what Washington walked away from to launch it. In February 2026, US and Iranian negotiators met in Muscat for indirect nuclear talks for the first serious engagement since Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018. Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi put a concrete proposal on the table: a multi-year suspension of uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief. Oman’s Foreign Minister, serving as mediator, publicly stated he was confident a deal was within reach, describing Iran’s commitment to never producing weapons-grade nuclear material as entirely new ground. A second round was already scheduled in Geneva. Washington launched the strikes before it took place. The message delivered; not just to Tehran but to every government watching – is that American diplomacy is a waiting room for military action and none an alternative to it.

The most consequential paradox of Operation Epic Fury however, may ultimately be nuclear. Khamenei’s fatwa against nuclear weapons was a political instrument that gave Tehran cover to enrich uranium to near-weapons grade without formally crossing the line. With Khamenei dead, that fatwa has no institutional successor capable of enforcing its political authority. Any successor consolidating power under active bombardment has every reason to draw the obvious conclusion: that Iran’s fundamental mistake was not having a nuclear deterrent before the bombs fell. The lesson is not new; North Korea watched what happened to Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, two states that had abandoned their weapons programmes, and drew its own conclusions. Every government watching Operation Epic Fury is drawing the same one now. The strikes designed to prevent Iran from going nuclear may have made it inevitable.

The starkest difference between this war and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is not found in Tehran’s response, but in London’s absence. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the UK was Washington’s indispensable coalition partner. This time, Prime Minister Starmer chose not to participate, stating: “This government does not believe in regime change from the skies”. He cited Iraq explicitly. Trump rebuked him publicly, describing the refusal to grant use of Diego Garcia as unprecedented in the relationship between the two countries. The country that deployed forces to Basra and Helmand has looked at Tehran and stepped back.

Colin Powell’s warning in 2002; “if you break it, you own it” – was ignored in Iraq. It was ignored in Libya. All indicators suggest it is being ignored in Iran today. But Iran presents a final strategic risk that neither Baghdad nor Tripoli did: a post-regime Iran, bombed into chaos and stripped of its fatwa-based nuclear restraint, will likely conclude that the only lesson of this war is that it should have built the bomb sooner. Washington may not have solved the proliferation problem. It may have just made it permanent

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)