Making it up as they go along

Where does the war in Iran go from here?

Operation Epic Fury was never framed as a limited operation, certainly not compared to the strikes on Iranian nuclear and missile assets last June. Then Trump seemed to be content with a performative action, sufficient for him to claim then that the Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities had been ‘obliterated’ and demonstrating that the US could hit important targets at will. But he concluded that operation quickly, inviting the Iranians to return to negotiations. This time, with negotiations underway, Trump not only abandoned them but also went much further and urged the defenders of the regime to lay down their arms and the Iranian people to take their chance to overthrow it.

What he did not suggest was that US forces would move to ensure that the regime was toppled. Many in his base are already unhappy with the US willingly getting itself entangled in another Middle Eastern war. They could show epic fury of their own if it looked like this would be a war of indefinite duration.

When the US and Israel began their attack on 28 February, I noted the prominence put by both Netanyahu and Trump in their announcements on the importance of regime change and the lack of any obvious means of bringing this about. I concluded:

The opposition may be pleased to see strikes against their persecutors but they will also be fully aware that if they try to make a revolution they are still on their own.

One might have thought that after the campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah there would have been some understanding that even when these groups have been ‘decapitated,’ leaving them rocked and uncertain, and their military assets have been severely degraded, they still have deep wells of leadership capacity and don’t give in easily. If, as some reports suggest, the Trump Administration is surprised that the Iranian regime is still operating despite the blows of the past week, they have no right to be.

In the latest issue of the New Statesman I tried to look at the conflict from the perspective of a regime fighting for its survival. The article can be found here.

My starting point was that the regime is fragile because it has governed Iran with cruelty, rigidity and incompetence. Its economy is in a mess, a consequence of the combined impact of sanctions, corruption and mismanagement. It would be surprising if there was no popular and compelling urge to shake off this oppressive clerical regime. Unfortunately the regime is determined to stay in control and it has the guns.

The Wider War