Critics of American participation in the joint military effort with Israel against Iran call it a war of choice.  They’re right, but the choice was made in Tehran, not Washington.  Despite months of dialogue and an offer of free nuclear fuel forever, Iran refused to say “the magic words ‘we will never have nuclear weapons.’”  That wasn’t brinksmanship and it wasn’t a bluff.  Thousands of dead leaders, security chiefs and soldiers later, its military assets crumbling and its economy collapsing, Iran still refuses.

If US President Donald Trump was “curious” why Iran’s clerical regime didn’t fold during his prodigious military buildup, he must be gobsmacked that they continue to withhold the magic words in the teeth of the massive execution.  One might have expected the Iranians to agree to the necessary minimum terms and begin cheating as usual.  But that might no longer be an option.  Iran’s “secret” nuclear facilities are not secret for long – penetration of the government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) by Israeli and US intelligence is now too thorough.  Outsourcing enrichment to another country like Pakistan, Russia or North Korea, while logistically feasible, may be politically impossible.  No other country wants to risk Iran’s fate once its helpfulness is inevitably exposed.

Why is the Iranian regime willing to risk its own survival in the dogged pursuit of weapons it may never obtain?  Maybe the lure of future invincibility is too beguiling, maybe they believe their own sermons about the Last Hour arriving when Musims exterminate the Jews.  Or maybe, more prosaically, they have reckoned they can survive ruinous bombardment more easily than capitulation over nuclear weapons.

After the US and Israel exhaust their munitions, interceptors, and political support, even a greatly diminished IRGC will still be stronger than any other Iranian power center – 47 years of repression and careful supervision of the conventional army (Artesh) guarantee that.  With outside help, the Kurds in the northwest and Baluchis in the southeast might be strong enough to seize and perhaps even hold some territory.  But they cannot threaten the IRGC.  And even multitudes of sparsely armed protesters are no match for internal security forces that are easily, as we have recently seen, augmented with foreign Shia mercenaries.

Islamic radicals are nothing if not patient.  As long as the IRGC remains internally unified, the country can limp back to viability using its vast oil and gas reserves and established trade relationships, particularly with China.

Capitulation, on the other hand, risks fracturing the IRGC and triggering a mutinous backlash by hardliners who see betrayal.  That could pose a genuine existential threat.  Authoritarian regimes don’t just collapse, they are overthrown – often from within.  Consequently, replacing Ali Khamenei with younger leadership will not herald generational change.  Any new leader will defer to the hardliners, who constitute a greater internal threat than disappointed reformers.

If there is a path to regime change, it must create and exploit another fissure within the IRGC.  I continue to believe that would mean targeting IRGC economic assets specifically – refineries they control, ports they tax, front companies they own – and framing it as attacking a criminal enterprise rather than the lifeblood of the country.  The hope would be to confront a critical mass of IRGC members with the prospect of such utter economic devastation that they decide the costs of loyalty are too high.  It would require identifying and cultivating pragmatic IRGC commanders who prioritize personal survival over ideological continuity, and creating a viable defector pipeline with amnesty guarantees and secure communication channels.

Those are just the daunting logistics.  It would also require a determined gradualism that that promotes the necessary panic before actually inflicting vast, irreversible collective punishment on the civilian population.  A mission that destroys a country in order to save it is a failed mission.  A regime that has lost its economic base has nothing left to lose or negotiate with.  But could weapons stocks and already weak US political support sustain the necessary patience to avoid such failure?

Finally, a realistic strategy for regime change would demand a strong stomach for authoritarian successors.  The IRGC, in some form, will remain in charge of the country under any conceivable scenario.  They control the guns and most of the money.  Shorn of its fanatical theocratic ideology, the IRGC might be coerced into responsible regional behavior consistent with its own self-interest.  But it won’t be sharing power.  Like the current regime and its predecessor, it will focus much of its energy on suppressing the restive ethnic minorities that make up half the country and challenge Persian nationalist rule.

The alternative to a continuation of authoritarian rule isn’t a multiethnic democracy; it’s Iraq, a failed state whose formal democratic structures quickly devolved into managed permanent dysfunction.  At least during transitional chaos and probably long after that, only the IRGC will be capable of preventing factional fragmentation from taking hold and actually running the economy.

The greater the contrast between the best-case outcome and the current theocratic despotism, the more it will resemble life under the Shah.  That would be quite an improvement.  Mohammed Reza Pahlavi modernized the country, supported education, and promoted women’s rights even as he ruthlessly suppressed dissent.  Compared with today’s malign regime, which slaughters its own people like Stalin, persecutes heretics like Savonarola, and squanders the country’s wealth on proxy wars targeting Israel as water supplies dwindle and the rial becomes worthless, such a reversion can’t come soon enough.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)