Now, contemplate Iraq greater than 20 years after the U.S.-Iraq struggle. Iraq remains to be an authoritarian state ruled by political events with deep institutional ties to Tehran. Iranian-backed militias function brazenly on Iraqi soil – some holding official positions throughout the Iraqi state.
The nation the U.S. spent $2 trillion and 4,488 American lives to remake is, by any cheap measure, throughout the sphere of Iran’s affect.
As a global safety scholar specializing in nuclear safety and alliance politics within the Center East, I’ve tracked the sample of U.S. army success throughout a number of circumstances.
However the army final result and the political final result are nearly by no means the identical factor, and the hole between them is the place wars fail.
Two and a half millennia in the past, Thucydides recorded the Athenian empire at its most assured in his “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Athens then destroyed Melos and launched the Sicily Expedition with overwhelming power and no coherent idea of governance for what got here subsequent.
The lesson, then and now, just isn’t that empires can not destroy. It’s that destruction and governance are completely totally different enterprises. And complicated them is how empires exhaust themselves.
The U.S. army can destroy the Iranian regime. The query that the Iraq precedent solutions – with brutal readability – is what fills the facility vacuum when it does?
Order 1 dissolved the ruling Baath Social gathering and eliminated all senior occasion members from their authorities positions, purging the executive class that ran its ministries, hospitals and faculties. Order 2 disbanded the Iraqi military however didn’t disarm it. Roughly 400,000 troopers went residence with their weapons and with out their paychecks.
Washington had simply handed the insurgency – the Sunni-led armed resistance that might flip right into a decade-long struggle – its recruiting pool. The logic behind Bremer’s de-Baathification was intuitive: You can’t construct a brand new Iraq with the individuals who constructed the previous one. The logic was additionally catastrophic
L. Paul Bremer prepares to board a helicopter in Hillah, Iraq, throughout a farewell tour of the nation on June 17, 2004. AP Picture/Wathiq Khuzaie
Political scientists have lengthy noticed that nations are held collectively not by ideology however by organized coercion. That’s, by the bureaucratic equipment, institutional reminiscence and skilled professionals who preserve the lights on and the water working. Destroy that equipment, and also you shouldn’t have a clear slate. You might have a collapsed state, and collapsed states don’t stay empty of management.
They fill, they usually fill with whoever has essentially the most organizational capability on the bottom. Iran had been constructing that capability in Iraq because the Nineteen Eighties, cultivating Shia political networks, exile events and militia teams throughout and after the Iran-Iraq Conflict and past with the specific objective of guaranteeing a post-Saddam Iraq would by no means once more threaten Iranian safety.
Tehran didn’t must construct infrastructure in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, as a result of it had spent the earlier twenty years constructing it. When the previous order collapsed, Iran’s networks had been prepared.
The opposition the U.S. had cultivated in Iraq – Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi Nationwide Congress – had Washington’s ear however no Iraqi constituency. They’d not ruled the nation, or constructed networks inside it.
The lesson is that army success created the exact situations for political disaster, and that chasm is the place American technique has gone to die – in Iraq and in Libya, the place the Obama administration helped result in regime change in 2011, however the place political instability has endured since. And maybe now in Iran.
The vacuum just isn’t impartial
The basic misunderstanding on the coronary heart of American regime-change technique is the belief that destroying the prevailing order creates house for one thing higher.
It doesn’t.
It creates house for whoever is greatest organized, greatest armed and most keen to fill it. In Iraq, that was Iran.
The query now’s who fills it in Iran itself.
In Iran, the group that meets all three standards – organized, armed and keen – is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Revolutionary Guard just isn’t merely a army establishment. It controls an estimated 30% to 40% of the Iranian economic system and runs development conglomerates, telecommunications corporations and petrochemical companies. And it has cultivated a parallel state infrastructure for many years.
The succession confirmed it: Mojtaba Khamenei, with deep ties to the Revolutionary Guard, was named supreme chief on March 8, 2026. It’s a Revolutionary Guard-backed dynastic succession that represents most continuity with the previous regime, not regime change.
You can’t dismantle the Revolutionary Guard with out collapsing the economic system, and a collapsed economic system doesn’t produce a transition authorities; it produces a failed state. Washington has already run that experiment in Libya.
You can’t go away the Revolutionary Guard in place with out leaving the regime’s coercive core intact. There isn’t any clear surgical choice of dropping bombs, killing sure individuals and declaring it a brand new day in Iran.
The Iranian opposition in exile, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq; the monarchists who assist the return of the late-shah’s son to guide the nation; and the assorted democratic factions all current the identical drawback Chalabi did in 2003: Washington entry, no home legitimacy.
Revolutionary Guard troops march in a army rally in Tehran on Jan. 10, 2025. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto through Getty Photographs
The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq is listed as a terrorist group by Iran and is extensively despised contained in the nation. The monarchist motion has not ruled Iran since 1979, and its corrupt, despotic chief was overthrown within the revolution. The democratic reform networks that had been constructing momentum inside Iran weren’t saved by the U.S. strikes. The regime had already crushed the motion in January, detaining and killing 1000’s.
A long time of analysis on rally-around-the-flag results affirm what frequent sense suggests: Exterior assault fuses regime and nation even when residents despise their leaders. Iranians who had been chanting towards the supreme chief are actually watching international bombs fall on their cities.
Iraq in 2003 had 25 million individuals, a army degraded by 12 years of sanctions, and no energetic nuclear program. Iran has 92 million individuals, proxy networks that might not disappear if Tehran fell – the truth is, they might activate – and a stockpile of over 880 kilos of extremely enriched uranium that the Worldwide Atomic Vitality Company has been unable to totally account for because the 2025 U.S. and Israeli strikes.
The query Washington hasn’t answered
Who governs 92 million Iranians?
President Donald Trump has mentioned whoever governs Iran should obtain Washington’s approval. However a veto just isn’t a imaginative and prescient.
Approving or rejecting candidates from Washington requires a functioning political course of, a reliable transitional authority and a inhabitants keen to just accept an American imprimatur on their management — none of which exists.
Washington has a desire; it doesn’t have a plan. If the target is eliminating the nuclear program, then why does Iran nonetheless maintain an unverified stockpile of weapon-usable uranium eight months after the 2025 strikes? The strikes haven’t resolved the proliferation query. They’ve made it extra harmful and fewer tractable.
If the target is regional stability, why has each spherical of strikes produced a wider regional struggle?
Washington has no reply to any of those questions – solely a idea of destruction.
Farah N. Jan, Senior Lecturer in Worldwide Relations, College of Pennsylvania
This text is republished from The Dialog underneath a Inventive Commons license. Learn the unique article.
