Iran Regime Change A Fantasy Without US Boots On The Ground

“First, an armed bombing campaign has never in history incited a successful uprising against the government,” Daniel Block, senior editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, told Canadian Broadcasting.“It's incredibly difficult to actually bomb out all the state's repressive capacity.”

For the US and Israel to provide a chance for success, Block added,“You need to have troops on the ground.”

Short memories could explain Washington's failure to understand why workaday Iranians decline to act. In February, 1991, then-US President George H.W. Bush – having liberated Kuwait from an Iraqi invasion – urged the population of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a dictator who was an ardent practitioner of violent oppression.

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 air calling on Iraqis to“Fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

Kurdish citizens in northern Iraq began assaulting Saddam associates. So did even more numerous Shiite Muslims in the south. Believing that all this was a sign that the Saddam era was over, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the top US military commander in Iraq, permitted remnants of the Iraqi army to fly helicopters all over the country on supply runs.

Saddam's loyalists used the helicopters, along with their own armed vehicles and cannons, to put down the rebellions. Some 60,000 Shiites were slaughtered along with 20,000 Kurds.

Rather than focusing on avoiding a similar blunder, Trump and his advisors seem fixated on a different faulty decision made in 2003. President George W. Bush, the first Bush's son, ordered an invasion of Iraq on the false accusation that Saddam, still in power, had secretly developed weapons of mass destruction. No such weaponry was ever found.

The invasion turned into an eight-year occupation overflowing with attacks on US and allied forces by both Iraqi Islamic nationalists and Iranian-trained militiamen and terrorists.

Trump interprets that experience, as well as America's 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, as“forever wars” to be avoided. That means letting the Iranians themselves do the messy work of regime change. If they fail, it's their fault.

In any case, Trump has not promised to overthrow the Iranian government, but rather,“to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

“We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally... obliterated. We're going to annihilate their navy,” Trump said in a video from his Florida beachfront mansion and resort, from where he launched the war.

In Washington, Secretary of State Marco Rubio translated the stew of words as meaning: Iran will never be allowed to develop either nuclear weapons or long-range missiles that can carry them.

While promising to defang the Iranian military's ambitions, Trump also said he is willing to talk about things, further throwing into doubt any ambition he might have had to oust the Islamic government from power.