Any attempt at regime change is likely to repeat past mistakes
Air power, full-on invasion, arming the opposition: the result is usually the same, writes Philip Gordon
Your browser does not support the <audio> element.
Listening to president donald trump promise the Iranian people that “the hour of your freedom is at hand”, Americans and others around the world could be forgiven for feeling they were watching a film they had seen before. In calling on Iranians to “take over your government” and evoking a “prosperous and glorious future”, Mr Trump was following in the footsteps of many of his predecessors, who had also succumbed to the temptation of believing that American military power could be deployed to remove a contemptible and threatening Middle Eastern regime and replace it with something better.
In almost all cases the reasons for wanting to remove the offending regime are compelling. But past regime-change operations in the region also have something else in common: they failed to produce the desired result. And there is little reason to believe that if Mr Trump presses on with a military campaign to collapse the current Iranian regime the outcome will be much different from the costly chaos that ensued in every previous case.
Since the 1950s America has sought to oust governments across the broader Middle East numerous times, in places as diverse as Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and Syria. The methods used in these operations have varied widely—from supporting a coup to arming the opposition, using air power alone, or full-on invasion and occupation. But if the tactics were different the patterns they revealed were remarkably similar: American policymakers invariably exaggerated the threat, underestimated the costs and challenges of removing the regime, declared victory prematurely, failed to anticipate unintended consequences, and ultimately found themselves bearing massive human and financial costs.
The poster child for failed regime-change efforts is, of course, the Iraq war in 2003. Despite confident predictions of democracy, stability and prosperity, the conflict continued for nearly a decade, cost around $300m per day for much of that time, and resulted in the loss of thousands of American and Iraqi lives.
But even in the initially less controversial case of overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan after they backed the terrorists responsible for 9/11, the lessons are sobering: two decades of war, thousands of casualties and $2trn more spent—only to end up with the Taliban ultimately back in power.
Mr Trump is obviously determined to avoid such long and costly operations and does not appear to be considering American occupation to try to ensure stability in Iran. He did, though, say last week that he doesn’t have “the yips” about putting boots on the ground, opening up the ominous possibility of a slippery slope. It is probably also fair to assume that covertly arming Iranian Kurdish factions, as Mr Trump is reportedly considering, is not a recipe for bringing post-war stability to Iran, but very much the opposite.
Even without ground forces, regime-change operations carry costs and risks. In Libya, where America and its allies relied on air power, it took a full seven months of relentless bombing before the dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, was at last killed—and after that Libya descended into civil war and violence that spread, along with many weapons and refugees, to neighbours including Chad and Mali.
In Syria, attempts to oust the regime of Bashar al-Assad without ground forces proved even more catastrophic. Arming Mr Assad’s (mostly extremist) adversaries led not to his ousting but instead to counter-escalation, interventions by Iran, Hizbullah and Russia, a vicious civil war, humanitarian catastrophe and destabilising refugee flows. Mr Assad was only finally forced out more than a decade later, in December 2024, when armed former terrorists backed by Turkey marched on Damascus.
Another part of the familiar pattern is the tendency to declare victory prematurely. Six weeks after invading Iraq in 2003, George W. Bush declared “mission accomplished”—before watching Iraq descend into horrific violence. Seven months after nato intervened in Libya, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, took a perceived “victory lap” in Tripoli, before Libyan factions violently turned on each other. And in Afghanistan successive American leaders announced that we had “turned the corner”, before eventually accepting defeat.
The reasons why it is harder to put a better government in place than to remove a bad one are no mystery. Removing a regime creates a political and security vacuum that is difficult if not impossible to fill. Opposition groups previously united around the goal of removing the regime fracture when the regime falls, and understandably anxious people turn to political or sectarian kinship networks for safety. In such scenarios the result is often civil conflict, sometimes fuelled by meddling neighbours, and if anyone prevails it is the people with the most guns and willingness to use them.
It would be nice to believe, as Mr Trump apparently does, that this time will be different. But Iran is a country of over 90m people, deeply divided along ethnic, ideological and political lines. The opposition is severely fractured, has no obvious leader and is mostly unarmed, whereas the regime is replete with brutal, well-armed men with their backs to the wall. Under these circumstances, expecting “the Iranian people” to “seize control” of their government with no real theory for how they might do so successfully is truly a case of putting hope over experience.
We should all hope this terrible Iranian regime falls and is replaced by a more decent, tolerant and competent one. But hope is not a sound basis for policy. By thinking he can defy deep historical lessons from the region, and by launching a war with no congressional mandate or significant public support, Mr Trump is taking a massive and unnecessary gamble—not just with his presidency but with the lives of countless Americans, Iranians and others. ■
Philip H. Gordon is the Sydney Stein Jr Scholar at the Brookings Institution and author of “Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East”. He is a former White House co-ordinator for the Middle East and former national security adviser to the US vice-president.
Comments
Post a Comment