Why the current Iranian regime should be dismantled – Part 1

Ridding Iran of its nuclear ambitions should be seen as only the first stage towards regime change.

After a long period of US-Iranian discussions to try and reach agreement on curtailing Iran’s uranium enrichment programme – which could lead to them developing a nuclear bomb – finally the USA lost patience and stepped back from the negotiating table. And only 24 hours later, Israel launched a fierce series of targeted strikes at Iran’s nuclear sites, which have continued throughout this week.

As part of this, Israel has also killed 20 of Iran’s top military leaders (chart above) and a number of vital nuclear scientists, and for the first time made noises about regime change and also taking out Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. There were rumours initially that the USA had resisted this move, but with harsher comments later from Trump, ‘We know where the supreme leader is hiding but we are not going to take him out – at least not for now’, it appeared they were warming more to the idea.

Of course, alongside barrages of return missile fire at Israel - a small number of which have got through their 3-layered Iron Dome defence shield – there has been a strong barrage of words and threats from the Iranian regime. In one newscast, a military leader urged the population of Israel to leave, as if it was the only safe option. But given that there have only been 25 Israeli lives lost so far from the handful of missiles getting through – for a comparable scale, 900 soldiers have lost their lives so far in Gaza, in addition to the 1,200 killed on October 7^th – and with Israel well equipped with bomb shelters, sirens and the Iron Dome, there’s little imperative for them to leave. So, we can only assume this Iranian military message was aimed more at internal consumption, perhaps to balance out from their own far heavier losses and much of the population of Tehran already fleeing for safety. Trying desperately to paint the picture that Israel was experiencing the same.

But that would be far from the truth. While Israel has already decimated the Iranian military leadership, Israel has suffered only a handful of soldiers mildly injured. The most recent threat from Iran has been to the 50,000 US Servicemen and personnel currently stationed around the Gulf. Again, a desperate attempt to try and stop the USA also joining in, even if only minimally – yet with a major strike in terms of importance – by dropping the bunker-busting bombs necessary to take out Fordow, Iran’s deeply entrenched uranium enrichment site.

Problem is, this practice of extreme threats and hyperbole by Iranian leaders – ‘We will bring the rage of Allah with a thousand firestorms on your head’ – has become so repetitive and tiresome, that now leaders in the West just shrug and yawn. In the initial Israel 1947 Independence War, Azzam Pasha of the Arab League raged, ‘This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars.’ And similar fiery rhetoric has followed from various Arab leaders from Ayatollah Khomeini to Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, and now Ali Khamenei. Much to no avail.

One can only head-scratch as to how on earth Iran hope to have any serious impact on 50,000 US troops stationed in the Gulf, when in over a week of war, they’ve hardly managed to scratch a handful of Israeli soldiers. Their main method of reprisal so far has been hypersonic missiles, but with Israel repeatedly hammering their missile launch sites, these have lessened day by day. The realistic threat to US troops from them aiding Israel’s war effort with bunker-busting strikes would be minimal; and on top Iran would face massively increased firepower from the USA if they struck at US troops, when already Iran’s military and defence network have been brought to their knees from Israeli strikes alone.

Much of Iran’s military leadership taken out, their air defences all-but eradicated – so that Israel’s Air-Force has free reign over the skies over Iran - and their missile defences and firing capabilities heavily depleted, it’s a sorry picture. In just over a week, the war is all but over before it has started, bringing back echoes of the ‘Six-Day-War’ - or with the daring-do and precision-nature of many of the strikes, ‘Raid at Entebbe’. Will we see a film of this too one day, or are films depicting Israeli bravado no longer politically correct? Film makers turning their backs on such a project would indeed highlight how far adrift we’ve come: a small nation of only 9 million bringing to its knees a despotic, Jihadist nation of 90 million in just over a week, in the process saving the rest of the world from possible nuclear Armageddon – normally, this would be classic film material.

Indeed, nobody even seems to be offering Israel praise. The media obsession once again appears to be with civilians killed – even though it should be obvious to anyone above room temperature IQ that with all of the strikes being aimed with such precision at military leaders, army and government installations, and nuclear sites and scientists, civilian casualties will be minimal. But it seems now that, as we’ve seen with the Gaza war, false, inflated stats of civilian casualties are pumped out – first by Hamas, now their Ayatollah paymasters – and the media simply repeat them without questioning their reliability.

Though while the current Iranian regime might be tottering, that final suggestion of regime change should never be made lightly, given the history of past regime changes in the Middle East. Both Iraq and Libya ended disastrously, with combatting factions fighting over the resultant power vacuums for years, and ten years of war and strife in Afghanistan simply ended up full-circle again with the Taliban, albeit a slightly watered down, more moderate version. The only hopeful recent example has been Syria, where the sudden collapse of Assad’s regime has left a coalition more interested in the peace and welfare of the Syrian people than continuing to battle it out. There is even talk of them joining the Abraham Accords to aid that stability and progress – but perhaps still too early a ‘settling down’ to know whether that peace and stability will hold in the long-term.

Reading various experts on what the future might hold if there was regime change in Iran, the one area to avoid is leaving a ‘power vacuum’, not only because the remaining factions will battle it out for power while the people suffer – as the old Greek proverb goes, ‘When two bulls fight in the swamp, it’s the frogs that suffer’ – but because nobody knows what faction they’ll finally end up with. As Andrew Fox wrote in a recent analysis, Iran could end up split between different factions who would continue sparring for control, with no cohesive unity; or, indeed, it could be taken over by an equally (or more) extreme religious-military junta, along the lines of the current Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Those are the two worse-case scenarios.

But the better-case scenarios would see moderates step in and guide towards a more tolerant, secular government, along the lines of the current Jordanian government. Indeed, if a monarch-headed government was seen as once again acceptable or palatable to the Iranian people, then waiting in the wings is Reza Pahlavi, the ex-Crown Prince, who has already spurred on Iranians and a number of key security personnel, ‘The regime is weak and divided… seize the moment.’

This scenario is also being pushed by Netanyahu, who has made it clear that any regime change must come from Iranians rising up from within rather than Israel forcing it. But there are many other indicators that the time might be ripe for this. Over the last six or seven years, there have been increasing demonstrations against the Iranian regime, with the government’s brutal clampdowns costing over 2,000 lives. Rather tellingly, the advent of the internet and smartphones has brought home to Iranians, particularly their youth, that they simply don’t have the same freedom as their Western counterparts.

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(This Part One, as usual, is being offered free to readers. But Part Two, which will appear tomorrow, will be for paid subscribers only. So make sure you are ‘paid’ subscribed for that, as it examines not only more of the current agitation within Iran that could lead to regime change, but in turn looks at a number of previously unexplored options and solutions. Also, don’t forget, as a paid subscriber you also get 4 free books – something not offered by any other Substack site).

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John Matthews is an experienced writer and journalist. The author of 24 books, including two centred around WW2 and the holocaust in the name of J.C. Maetis (his father’s original Jewish name) his first experience of writing about the Middle East came as a war correspondent covering the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, which led to his second book, ‘The Crescents of the Moon’. He has since written on the subject for a number of journals, including The Times, Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The Spectator. He was also in the run-up to the millennium editor of European Brief, the main magazine for the European Parliament, editing the likes of Tony Blair, Al Gore and Henry Kissinger on subjects ranging from the fall of the Berlin Wall and European unity, climate change and nuclear fusion to, once again, the Middle East. He lives in London with his wife and family.

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