Here’s how Iran could become a “forever war” |
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Here’s how Iran could become a “forever war”
“Mowing the grass,” explained.
The Trump administration’s end goals for the war in Iran, never particularly well-defined to begin with, appear to be narrowing.
While President Donald Trump once spoke ambitiously about regime change and insisted that he should play a role in selecting Iran’s next supreme leader — similar to Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela — the White House now says the war will continue until Iran can “no longer pose a military threat.”
When will that be? Trump says he will “feel it in my bones.”
This should have been obvious from the start. Air campaigns almost never overthrow regimes and there’s little appetite in Washington to send in ground troops. Some officials in the US and Israel still optimistically hope that the conditions for regime change may have been created. Some point to the example of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević, whose regime survived a NATO air campaign in 1999 but, badly weakened, collapsed in a popular uprising about a year later. Ethnic minorities like the Kurds could also take advantage of Tehran’s weakness to push for greater autonomy, fragmenting the government’s control if not overthrowing it entirely.
Trump might want “boots on the ground” in Iran. Just not American ones.
The dangerous lesson countries may take from the Iran war
But for now, those are theoretical scenarios. Trump has reportedly been briefed by advisers in recent days that Iran’s ruling regime is not close to collapse, despite the beating it has taken, and is likely to emerge from this war weaker, but even more hardline.
Defenders of the US-Israeli strategy argue it’s still worth it: that the destruction of much of Iran’s missile program, navy, air defenses, and nuclear program will make it much harder for the regime to project power across the region.
The problem is what happens when the war is over. Military and nuclear capabilities can be set back, but they can also be rebuilt. Trump himself has cited the threat from an Iranian nuclear program he claimed to have “obliterated” less than a year ago as (accurately or not) a major reason he launched an even larger war........