We live in strange and interesting times. If a dozen years ago one had staged a scene in which a fortune teller predicts that war with Iran will come, and its author would be Donald J. Trump, it would have read as satire or farce. Now that war is upon us the raw reality feels only slightly less strange than fiction.
Why have the US and Israel waged war on Iran? The idea that Iran posed some imminent threat or that this was a necessary step in the dismantling of Tehran’s nuclear program are both implausible. My best guess (and in this I am far from alone) is that this new conflict is a product of January’s US raid on Venezuela. The swift impact of that operation has made Trump eager to use force again, and he saw political advantage in staging a strike on Iran that would be perceived as consequential.
What next? Difficult to say. Setting aside the many legal and moral uncertainties surrounding this operation, the very basic question of how this can end is dizzyingly open-ended. Violence and destruction on the scale we are witnessing surely must effect some change in Iran, but exactly what kind of change is anyone’s guess.
All of this is made more fraught by the fact that Trump himself does not seem to have ever asked the question “what next” of himself. Or rather, if he did , he immediately answered it nonsensically, concluding that the Iranian people will end this war for him by “rising up” and replacing their government with one better suited to US aims. Trump is certainly ignorant enough to believe that regime change in Iran, the dream of successive American administrations since the tenure of Jimmy Carter, could be achievable through the application of air power alone. But it is a measure of just how much the foreign policy machinery of the United States of America has been degraded that no one intervened to tell him how silly it was to broadcast such notions to the world before he stepped in front of a camera.
What Trump does not understand about Iran is that though millions of people in that society hate the repressive regime of the ayatollahs, even more people (many of them comrades of the 30,000 Iranian protesters recently murdered by the government of the Islamic Republic) hate the prospect that Iran could become a puppet of the U.S. just as much. The ayatollahs came to power in 1979 because they embodied the one institution in Iranian society that had retained its independence from both the Soviet Union and the U.S. Iranian security forces were unwilling to fire on demonstrators in 1979 because many of them believed the Shah to be an American puppet, and they could not in good conscience hurt their fellow Iranians in the Shah’s name.
The Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone. The ayatollahs have been brutal and oppressive in their control of Iranian society and culture, but they remain, in the eyes of a critical mass of the Iranian people, independent and authentically Iranian. If Iran’s citizens are faced with a choice between following the US and following the ayatollahs (effectively the choice that Trump is laying before them), the ayatollahs are likely to win out.
For this reason, no matter how much of Iran’s military power is degraded by the very sophisticated ordinance being deployed by the US and Israel, regime change is not likely to result. As in the time of the Shah, the security forces are the only element of Iranian society possessed of the material force necessary to effect a true transfer of political power. Many of the most capable elements of the Iranian military, such as the Revolutionary Guard, are ideological “true believers” in the Islamic clerical regime. Even those units that are not so zealous in their belief are likely to side with the current government no matter how fluid the strategic and political situation becomes, out of fear that to do otherwise will surrender all of Iranian state and society to the control of the US and Israel, an outcome virtually all Iranians would abhor.
The only way that Trump and Netanyahu could overcome such inertia would be by deploying ground forces within Iran, and that is almost certainly an impossibility. Iran has 91.5 million people as compared to the 25 million souls who lived in Iraq when the US invaded that nation in 2003. Iranian society is riven in even more complex ways by ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian divisions than the society of Iraq, and the population possesses vastly larger reserves of social, cultural, and material capital.
A ground occupation in Iran would become much more violent and confused than what the US encountered in the Iraq war, and would likely last even longer. Everyone on both sides of this conflict knows that, and so everyone will feel free to discount the possibility of a US ground invasion in calculating what their next move should be. Given such hard limitations, it is very difficult to infer what kind of concessions the US could wrest from Iran’s leadership that would give them the wherewithal to “declare victory” and bring this conflict to an end. Even harder is predicting what kind of pressure could bring whatever remains of Iran’s leadership to the point of surrendering such concessions.
Given that regime change is unlikely and a US occupation of Iran is virtually impossible, predicting how all of this will end is a heavy lift. One hopes (prays) that even Donald Trump knows that the use of nuclear weapons as a form of intimidation is both morally and politically anathema, and would send the entire world down a very dark path. Barring that kind of disastrous outcome, the questions of how and when this war will end are difficult to answer. Perhaps the only question more difficult (as a matter of abstract principle, at least) is why this war started in the first place.
