After raining thousands of bombs on Iran since Saturday, the United States and Israel are outsourcing the task of overthrowing the government in Tehran to civilians who are unarmed and otherwise ill-equipped to take on the heavily armed vicious forces they would face.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu both urged workaday Iranians to rise up — a now-or-never chance to unseat the Islamic Republic.
“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” Trump said in a video message on Saturday. “It will be probably your only chance for generations.”
Netanyahu, who during his 30-year political career has identified Iran as a prime source of regional antagonism, described the moment as “a once in a lifetime opportunity.” He added: “Soon, there’s going to be a moment that you’ll have to go to the streets to complete this act and to topple this regime.”
The sales pitch seemed to downplay a reality facing the Iranian population: no nationwide organization exists to take on such a task. Dissidents lack weapons and would be up against the 150,000-member Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the chief enforcer of obedience to the regime.
Just weeks ago, the Revolutionary Guard put its fearsome talents on display, killing tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting the regime. The ongoing U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign is, therefore, unlikely to pave the way for a civilian takeover.
Selective memory can explain Washington’s inability to grasp why everyday Iranians might decline to act. In February 1991, then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush — fresh off liberating Kuwait from Iraqi invaders in the first Gulf War — urged the population in Iraq to overthrow their dictator, Saddam Hussein.
Bush encouraged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein to step aside.” Western air force crews dropped leaflets from the sky calling on Iraqis to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”
Kurdish citizens in northern Iraq began assaulting allies of Huessein, as did more numerous Shiite Muslims in the south. Believing that all this showed that the Hussein era was over, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the top U.S. military commander in the region, permitted members of the Iraqi army to fly helicopters all over the country on supposed supply runs.
Instead, Hussein loyalists used the helicopters, along with armed vehicles and cannons, to put down the rebellions. The regime slaughtered some 60,000 Shiites, along with 20,000 Kurds.
Rather than focusing on how to avoid a similar nightmare, Trump and his advisors seem fixated on a later faulty decision: President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was based on false intelligence that Hussein had secretly developed weapons of mass destruction, and no weaponry was ever found.
The invasion and overthrow of Hussein turned into an eight-year occupation, punctuated by ambushes and car bombings of U.S. and allied soldiers. Iraqi Islamic nationalists and Iranian-trained militiamen and terrorists joined in. In the first three years of the occupation, more than 150,000 Iraqis died violent deaths, according to the United Nations.
Trump decries that experience, along with America’s 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, as “forever wars” to be avoided. The Iranians themselves ought to do the messy work of regime change, the logic goes. If they fail, it’d be their fault.
In any case, Trump seems to have partially walked back his initial desire to overthrow the government. Instead, he’s doubling down on the goal to “destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground.
While promising to defang the Iranian military, Trump also said he’s open to talks with the now diminished Iranian regime, further throwing into doubt any ambition he might have had to oust the Islamic Republic’s government from power.
Trump appears to be trying to apply the surgical policy he enacted at the start of the year in Venezuela. That was regime change on the cheap: U.S. troops raided Caracas, captured President Nicolas Maduro and ferried the leader to New York, where he is facing drug-trafficking charges. The government and institutions left behind are still functioning, albeit under the watchful eye of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a team of viceroys.
Critics argue that the Venezuela model isn’t applicable to Iran. The Revolutionary Guard, created more than four decades ago, is a multipurpose internal and external security force responsible for political control, border defense and the operation of Iran’s ballistic missile system.
The Revolutionary Guard is also in charge of the current effort to block the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow entrance to the Persian Gulf. Oil shipments through the Strait account for 31% of global supplies, with most of the traffic routed to Asian countries. And, for the moment at least, that gives Tehran a very different type of leverage.
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