End Game in Iran?

The regular Iranian army today has some 500,000 fighters. To that number you need to add the 125,000 in the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC). When Bashir Assad was overthrown in Syria last year, the army there had dwindled to no more than 100,000 fighters, who we saw were more than happy to quickly throw down their guns. That’s a very unlikely script for Iran.

Can Iran rejoin today's League of Civilized Nations without de-fanging those 625,000 fighters? The IRGC will be a particularly hard nut to crack as it’s fully integrated into control positions in Iran that are wider and deeper than mere military or para-military activities. It plays a leading role in Iran's domestic affairs, controlling banking, trade, and evading sanctions on Iran's ability to access hard currency. The Guard has infil-trated Iranian society across the board, and dislodging it will not be a matter of dropping bombs, of any size or with any frequency.

We have recent, unsuccessful experience in trying to get rogue Middle East states to rejoin the league of civilized nations. Some details here are worth recounting. The U.S. spent somewhere between 4 and 6 trillion dollars trying to get Afghanistan and Iraq to enter that league in a mission lasting some 20 years and ending in failure. One would have to say it failed entirely. Those countries today are rogue, unstable states, have been so for many years, and will likely continue to be so for many years to come.

In 2011, NATO intervened in the Libyan civil war. Gaddafi was toppled, but Libya today, nearly fifteen years later, remains a de-stabilized cauldron of warring factions.

This is an old story. In 1839, Britain tried to take control of Afghanistan. They failed. Forty years later they tried again, and failed again.

The West has not always lost in its faraway military adventures. In the Boer War, for example, it took three years (1899-1902), but the British eventually prevailed against the Dutch who had relocated to South Africa. About that same time, the U.S. ended another three-year war against Filipino insurgents who objected to Spain giving us control as price for ending the Spanish-American War. We held onto the Phillipines as a colony until 1946.

However, we are today very far removed from those times and places—- the Philippines and South Africa of 125 years ago. We wanted the Phillipines to access the markets in China and as a location for a naval base. The British wanted control in South Africa largely for access to diamonds and gold, which the Dutch settlers were unwilling to cede.

Those were typical 19th century wars of imperial ambition, of which there were quite a number. Japan, China and Russia were all involved in wars grounded in trying to extend their empires at the end of the 19th century. At mid-century Britain, exercising what it deemed its economic imperial rights, fought China in the Opium Wars. None of those wars involved either regime change or nation building, not to mention some amorphous goal of spreading democratic, liberal values.

Is there an example in the past fifty years, for instance, where the West has either successfully engineered positive regime change, or been instrumental in bringing a rogue state back into the league of civilized nations?

The Western Balkans (Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo) in the late 1990s were threatened, bombed and cajoled by NATO. Thirty years later, the situation there is at best semi-stable. Leaving aside political instability, none of those countries has a thriving, or even semi-thriving economy. We stopped the ethnic cleansing..... after all of it had taken place. What kind of success was that? Stopping bloodshed and suppressing ethnic conflict are valuable goals, but they don't answer the question of what happens next?

I have little confidence that the amateurs on Team Trump have given this matter any serious thought, much less have any kind of detailed, realistic plan. They seem to believe that the B2 bombs have done the trick. Such delusional thinking is just repeating Shrub’s foolish statement from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 that after six weeks of bombing of Iraq, the mission was accomplished. In case you’ve forgotten, we still have around 2,500 troops in Iraq, though their so-called combat role ended in 2021.

Iran for nearly fifty years has been one of the world's worst states, a diabolically successful sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. Degrading or seriously disabling its nuclear capabilities is good news for all of us. What happens next, what lasting good news from all of this should we reasonably expect? Honestly, I have no clue.

Iran is modern day Persia, one of the great ancient civilizations. You need only look at pictures of Persepolis, the ruins of which are still standing, 2,500 years after Alexander the Great sacked the city in the third century BC. It was the seat of the Archaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in the 5th century BC. Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Outside of Israel, Iran had the largest Jewish population in the region until the arrival of the Ayatollahs.

Can Iran becomes a New Persia, rekindling its long history as a civilized country? Unlike the Balkans and Iraq for instance, the middle class, though dwindling in recent decades, still makes up about a third of the Iranian population. The World Bank says that nearly half of the Iranian population has achieved some form of post-secondary education, and 90% of its population is literate. Compare that to Iraq, with its 70% literary rate and only 30% of its population today has completed high school.

While the historical record of regime change/nation building/military intervention by the West in the Middle East has a near zero success record, we can't be sure that history always repeats itself. If often does so, but not always.

Meanwhile, and we could be waiting quite a while for developments here, where are those 900 pounds of enriched uranium in Iran? We've heard that the U.S. and the Israelis knew there were 16 trucks lining up at the Fordo tunnel entrance in recent days, presumably to collect important items and re-locate them. What's that saying about closing the barn door after the horses have fled?