Lessons from a mindless ‘war of choice’

There is a particular kind of strategic trap arrogant powerful leaders repeatedly fall into. A war launched with limited objectives achieves early tactical success, but gets defined over time by the one goal it cannot achieve. In Vietnam, it was the collapse of the government in Hanoi. In Iraq, it was the creation of an obedient political order. In Afghanistan, it was to dismantle the Taliban as a political force. In the current US–Israel war against Iran, that ambitious objective is ‘regime change’.

Despite their overwhelmingly superior firepower, the aggressors have not managed to engineer a collapse of the Islamic Republic. On the contrary, the regime has consolidated around a harder line and gained from a surge of nationalistic sentiment in the face of foreign aggression.

The first phase of the war was framed as a campaign against the Iranian leadership and its military infrastructure. The assassination of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was meant to be a decisive decapitation strike. Iran’s key command structures were targeted, its scientists and military officers killed, its alleged nuclear facilities bombed again. In the early hours of the conflict, it was still possible to argue that the campaign was directed primarily at the regime.

Many Iranians who have long resented the Islamic Republic might initially have seen hope in the strikes, seen the attack as a direct challenge to a government that has suppressed dissent and curtailed freedoms. But that sentiment evaporated fast. On the very first day of the war, the attack on an all-girls elementary school in Minab killed 186 students and their teacher. As the war progressed, the Trump administration’s reasons for going into it shape-shifted and the target list expanded to oil facilities, desalination plants, civilian aircraft and infrastructure, even UNESCO heritage sites. It was now evident to ordinary Iranians, even those who hate the regime, that this was no war to liberate them.

This transformation is politically decisive. Regime change is not simply a military outcome but a social and political process. It requires a fractured ruling elite, a mobilised opposition capable of seizing power and a population whose anger is directed at its own rulers rather than foreign aggressors. The US has managed to turn their ire onto itself.

The installation of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader illustrates this failure. His father’s killing was expected to produce institutional chaos that might destabilise the Islamic Republic. Instead the system adapted quickly. Leadership did change but the regime survived. In fact, the new leader assumed power under conditions that will reinforce his authority rather than weaken it. Wartime succession often strengthens regimes because leadership transitions occur under the banner of national defence. The younger Khamenei is now a symbol of continuity under siege.

What the US and Israel underestimated was Iran’s memory of foreign meddling in their affairs. For more than a century, Iranians have experienced repeated attempts by outside powers to reshape the country’s politics in order to exploit its resources.

The Tobacco Protest of 1891–92, when the monarchy granted a British company control over Iran’s tobacco industry and a mass boycott then forced it to cancel the concessions, was one of the country’s first demonstrations of organised popular resistance to foreign economic domination.

In 1953, the US and Britain jointly orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after he nationalised the country’s oil industry. The coup restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power and ushered in decades of authoritarian rule backed by Western governments, conditions that produced the anger and resentment that eventually fuelled the 1979 revolution and reshaped the country’s political destiny.

Even after the revolution, external pressure continued to bear upon Iran’s national trajectory. In the 1980s, the US supported Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, a brutal eight-year war that claimed hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives. In later decades, waves of sanctions imposed by Washington crippled the Iranian economy, imposing enormous hardship on its citizens.

That historical context explains why the current war is producing the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of isolating the regime from its society, the conflict is reinforcing the regime’s central narrative that Iran is a nation under constant external threat. Sovereignty and self-determination, powerful themes in Iranian politics, are once again in sharp focus, and even Iranians vocal about their demand for political reform and greater freedoms are unwilling to support the destruction of their country in the name of liberation.

Many in the Iranian diaspora who were initially supporting the US military campaign are feeling disoriented by the turn this war has taken. They had believed a limited war might accelerate the collapse of the Islamic Republic, an outcome they so desired, but the wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure, the loss of civilian lives in Iran is not a price even they are reconciled to pay. Even those who once symbolised resistance to the regime find themselves in a moral bind as their country bleeds.

Inside Iran, large crowds have taken to the streets, not to protest the government but to protest the war. Their demonstrations are expressing anger with the foreign aggressor and solidarity with the state.

For the US and Israel, the result is a paradox. The war has inflicted severe damage to Iran’s military, nuclear and civilian infrastructure. Yet it has also politically strengthened the regime. In the eyes of ordinary Iranians, the Islamic Republic is today not just the apparatus that rules the country but the people who defend the country against foreign aggression.

This outcome also underlines the incomprehension characteristic of so many Western interventions in West Asia. Military superiority does not automatically translate into political transformation. Bombing campaigns may degrade capabilities and kill leaders, but they cannot manufacture legitimacy or determine how a society interprets external violence.