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According to Donald Trump, Iranians have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “The hour of your freedom is at hand,” he declared, as U.S. and Israeli warplanes pounded Iranian cities and the compound of the country’s supreme leader. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations.”
Trump’s comments made clear that America is seeking regime change. After decades of high tensions, tough recriminations and one-off attacks, Washington finally decided to try getting rid of the country’s government altogether — and it thinks ordinary Iranians will rise up and finish the job.
The country’s population, after all, is clearly fed up with the Islamic Republic. Over the last decade, Iranians have repeatedly staged mass demonstrations against the regime. Those protests typically only go away after the government responds with horrific force. In December and January, for example, hundreds of thousands of Iranians spent weeks demonstrating — until Iranian security officials shot and killed thousands of them. But now, American and Israeli warplanes are attacking Iran’s military and security apparatus and destroying other government institutions. They have killed the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and many other top officials. The Trump administration seems to be betting that the Iranian people will soon take over the regime change process, resume protesting and successfully remove a greatly weakened government.
To gauge how likely that response might be, I spoke to political scientists and Iranian experts, all of whom would love to see “people power” usher in new leadership in Tehran. But they also expressed deep skepticism that even this massive air campaign could produce a successful uprising.
For starters, they told me, aerial bombing campaigns have a terrible record at fomenting regime change in any state. Second, Iran has powerful repressive organs with a lot of experience in putting down popular unrest. In addition, Iran’s bureaucracy has been expecting — and preparing for — American attacks for generations. And even if Washington does successfully fracture or defang the Islamic Republic, exhausted and shocked Iranians may be too frightened or focused on survival to flood the streets. The country’s political opposition remains weak, and it is famously fragmented.
Iranians, of course, do desperately want a better future, and they have been willing to protest under very difficult conditions. For an autocracy, the country has high levels of civic engagement. It is therefore possible that Iranians will succeed where other populations haven’t. But history suggests most of the country’s people will not heed Trump’s call, and that even if they do, they will have a hard time winning.
In February 1991, as the American military laid waste to the Iraqi armed forces, U.S. President George H.W. Bush made an appeal. Speaking on international television, Bush called on “the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” They didn’t act immediately. But as soon as America stopped the bombing, thousands of Kurds and Shiites across the country rose up against the Sunni-dominated government, hoping that Saddam’s battered regime and weakened military could finally be defeated.
It wasn’t. Instead, after the protests began, Saddam’s forces deployed helicopters, artillery and ground troops against their own citizens. They then slaughtered upwards of 50,000 Iraqis in less than five weeks. The uprising was put down, and Saddam held onto power for another 12 years.
The Iraqi experience is, unfortunately, typical of what happens when presidents have tried in the past to use aerial firepower to change governments. The United States knocked out 90 percent of North Korea’s power generation during the Korean War in hopes that it would help topple Kim Il-Sung. It didn’t. Washington plunged North Vietnam into darkness during the Vietnam War; that, too, failed. Even Bill Clinton’s 1998 bombing of tiny Serbia didn’t give the opposition movement space to drive Slobodan Milosevic from power. It took another 16 months, and a fraudulent election, before he was forced to leave office.
“Never,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who studies air power and regime change, replied when I asked whether what Washington was doing in Iran had succeeded elsewhere. “Bombings have never led people to take to the streets and topple their leader.”
There are two main reasons why air power has such a terrible record. The first, Pape said, is because bombings often prompt citizens to turn against the domestic opposition — no matter how much they hate the leader. “Even the hint that you are siding with the attacking state is used by rivals to stab you in the back,” he told me. To understand why, he asked liberals to consider how Americans might respond if Iran killed Trump and then encouraged the Democratic Party’s supporters to seize power; conservatives might imagine what would have happened if Iran did the same to Barack Obama. Just because you don’t like your country’s leaders, it doesn’t mean that you want to side with an external enemy who deposes them. The second reason is that bombings by themselves rarely fully decimate a government’s repressive capacity. “In order to save the pro-democracy protesters, you’ve got to be right there,” Pape told me. “You have to have troops on the ground.”
In Iran, both lessons hold value. Iran analysts frequently debate whether outside attacks could prompt a rally-around-the-flag effect, given how unpopular the government has been. Most analysts think that reactions will vary widely, and Iranians are known to be quite nationalistic and weary and wary of international interventions. As a result, experts said that even many Iranians who loathe Khamenei will not want to do what America is asking of them — especially given rising civilian casualties from the U.S. attacks.
To be sure, not everyone will feel squeamish. “There are those who, just out of sheer desperation, were hoping for a U.S. military intervention,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. They might be happy to take to the streets, as Trump asked them to. So might some of the people who are unhappy with the attacks but want a new government. Yet these Iranians could run into the second problem: the regime’s substantial capabilities. The Iranian state has multiple institutions that are capable of and responsible for mowing down demonstrators. It has large weapons stockpiles that it has spread out across the country, in part because it expected U.S. hits. That means no matter how far America and Israel go in dropping bombs, they will struggle to truly neuter its security forces.
“The U.S. would basically have to do what it did in Afghanistan and Iraq over the course of several years in the course of a couple of months,” Vaez told me. “I just don’t see how that would be possible.”
There’s one final obstacle to a popular revolution: Iran’s opposition is disorganized, weak and riven. "The Islamic Republic may have abjectly failed at providing its people with a functioning economy and decent standard of living, but it has been very effective at locking up its opponents. The country has a politically active diaspora, but it is particularly plagued by infighting—especially between those who want former Iranian crown prince Reza Pahlavi to take control of the country and those who oppose him. As a result, opposition forces will have a hard time coordinating and then overwhelming whatever regime institutions still exist. “
Already today, the regime has deployed militias on the streets in order to keep order and prevent upheaval,” Vaez said. Especially after watching thousands of people die at the regime’s hands in December and January — and then scores more die in U.S. and Israeli attacks — he was skeptical the Islamic Republic’s foes would be ready to come together and hold mass protests.
Bombing campaigns may never have incited a successful uprising, but there are cases where foreign air power has helped topple a dictator. In Libya, NATO began striking Muammar al-Gaddafi’s forces after Gaddafi began brutalizing his people. It proved critical. Around six months after the campaign began, rebel forces drove Gaddafi’s government from power.
Those rebel forces existed before the NATO bombings began. But it is a more optimistic precedent for those hoping this campaign will bring down the Islamic Republic. And at least some people are relatively bullish about the country’s future. Iran may not have an armed, organized opposition, but it does have deeply committed regime opponents. “Iranians are willing to make tremendous sacrifices to get rid of their leaders,” Behnam Taleblu wrote in a recent article outlining how a bombing campaign could open the door to an opposition takeover. He cited the death toll from the most recent protests, which some observers place at north of 30,000, as evidence of just how much demonstrators are prepared to give and how hard suppressing them has become. If the bombing campaign continues and extends to local police headquarters and lower-level commanders, Taleblu was optimistic that ordinary Iranians could, indeed, get rid of any regime remnants. “The Iranian people have the drive and determination needed,” he concluded.
So far, the American and Israeli attacks are certainly overwhelming. Decapitation strikes may have a poor track record at inciting regime change, but few governments have killed quite so many officials in quite so short a period as Jerusalem and Washington have in the attack’s first 36 hours. In addition to assassinating Iran’s leader — something the American campaigns in the Korean War, the War, and the first Gulf War never accomplished — Washington has taken out many of his top deputies. Ali Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, is dead. So is Iran’s defense minister, the chief of staff of the armed forces, and the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. And bombs have killed enumerable officials lower down the chain of command. It’s impossible to say how, exactly, Iranians feel about all this on average. But videos have come out showing many people celebrating Khamenei’s death.
“We’re in a different place,” said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “This is a moment where you start thinking about dreams.”
But it is still early days, and celebratory clips are not proof that a government-toppling uprising is near. (There have also been videos of Iranians mourning the supreme leader.) Even Taleblu told me that, although the United States and Israel were off to a good start, it was too early to say how things would play out. In fact, almost every Iran analyst I spoke to hedged when asked what might come next. The only thing they agreed on was that the country would be transformed. “The regime as we know it is no longer going to exist,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program. “It’s going to evolve into something else.” Too much of the government has been destroyed for it to carry on as it was.
But that doesn’t mean it will change for the better — or that ordinary Iranians will have a say in what follows. It is possible, perhaps even more likely, that America and Israel have identified or will identify a cooperative regime insider who they will help take charge, as happened in Venezuela. (Alternatively, they might try to install someone from outside the country.) It is also possible that one of the Iranian regime’s many contingency plans will prove effective, and that the country is about to be governed by a new supreme leader. Those contingency plans could fail, but a different regime official or commander might unify the system’s surviving elements and ruthlessly consolidate power. Or the regime might fracture, and different groups will violently compete for control — as happened in Libya's post-Qaddafi civil war.
Either way, Iranians will have to fight to have their voices heard. And in a moment of great chaos, facing great danger and disruption, protesting for democracy is unlikely to be their first concern.
“I think people are just trying to digest and think about what’s coming next,” Vakil said. “They are going to be focusing on their own survival.”
English (US)