OPINION — The countries that get held up as models for this kind of US led attack are worth looking at closely, because they’re instructive in the wrong direction.
Iraq fell in twenty-one days in 2003, but Saddam Hussein was running a hollow state. His military had been gutted by a decade of sanctions, the 1991 Gulf War, and the no-fly zones. There was no grassroots ideological loyalty to the man — people obeyed out of fear, not faith. The moment the fear lifted, the structure dissolved. What followed was twenty years and trillions of dollars trying to hold the country together. Regime change worked militarily in three weeks and failed politically for two decades. Libya was a one-man personality cult held together by oil money and tribal patronage with no real institutional military and no ideology beyond Gaddafi himself. Remove the man and there was nothing underneath. The result wasn’t a democracy. It’s been a failed state ever since. Venezuela is a different category altogether because it hasn’t actually undergone regime change but rather the leader of the regime changed.
Iran is categorically different, and there are six reasons why that’s worth taking seriously and explains why the Trump Administration’s goals have shifted from Regime Change to Negotiating a Deal.
1. The first is that the regime is the ideology. The Islamic Republic isn’t just a government. It’s a theocratic revolutionary project that has spent nearly forty-seven years fusing religion, nationalism, and anti-imperialism into a single identity. For tens of millions of Iranians, particularly the rural poor, the deeply religious, and the Revolutionary Guard apparatus, the regime isn’t just who’s in power. It’s who they are. Saddam had fear. Gaddafi had tribal patronage. Khamenei has true believers. Unfortunately, you can’t bomb an ideology out of existence.
2. The second is the IRGC, and this is probably the most under-appreciated part of the whole conversation. Most coverage treats the Revolutionary Guard as a military institution, which it is, but that framing misses what actually makes it so durable. These are people who control ports, construction contracts, telecommunications infrastructure, black market oil exports. In fact, it controls somewhere between a third and forty percent of the entire Iranian economy. Before the conflict started, the IRGC had its own navy, air force, ground forces, intelligence apparatus, and foreign legion in the Quds Force. It’s not only ideology holding the institution together. It’s an enormous class of people with enormous personal financial stakes in the continuation of the current arrangement. When you kill a general in Iraq, the army wobbles. When you kill an IRGC commander, the institution absorbs it and hardens. Israel killed multiple top commanders in 2024 and 2025. The organization did not collapse. It adapted. There are some who think the IRGC’s recent comments indicated it has is following Venezuela’s lead; has seized power and wants to make peace with the US.
3. The third is geography and strategic depth. Iran is roughly four times the size of Iraq and three times the size of Libya. It covers one point six million square kilometers of mountains, deserts, and dispersed population centers. Critical military and nuclear infrastructure is buried under mountains, in tunnels reinforced with concrete and hundreds of feet of rock. Fordow was designed specifically to survive a nuclear strike. It is difficult to fully decapitate a regime that is geographically dispersed, has hardened underground command structures, and has spent forty years preparing for exactly this scenario. The ability of disparate groups to control vast swaths and for the country to degenerate into civil war is high. This administration seems to be cognizant of that risk and with total air supremacy has made substantial progress towards irreversible damage to the regime but there are challenges in what can be accomplished by air power alone.
4. The fourth is that the population is complicated in ways that get lost in Western coverage. Yes, there have been significant protests. Yes, millions of Iranians, particularly urban, educated, younger Iranians, despise the regime. But the assumption tends to be that they experience their government the way Iraqis experienced Saddam which was something purely imposed, something they’d shake off the moment an outside force gave them the opening. Iran fought the bloodiest war since World War II largely without allies, against an Iraq the West was quietly supporting. That experience left a scar that runs across ideological lines. You can find Iranians who genuinely despise the mullahs and who would still recoil from a US military intervention on Iranian soil. This stems not out of loyalty to the regime, but out of something older and harder to dislodge than political preference. They identify as Persian. A foreign airstrike doesn’t read as liberation in that context. It reads as confirmation of everything the regime has been saying since the 1970s. And Persians view themselves as the conquerors, not the conquered. Compare that to Iraq in 2003, where significant portions of the Shia and Kurdish populations welcomed the invasion, or Libya where rebels were already fighting in the streets asking for NATO intervention.
5. The fifth is the proxy architecture. Iran has spent decades building what it calls the Axis of Resistance which is a network of proxy forces spread across seven countries specifically designed so that Iran never has to absorb a full military attack alone. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq, Hamas in Gaza, assets in Syria. These are not just political allies, These are pre-positioned military capabilities Iran can activate without firing a single missile from Iranian soil. Israel did real damage to Hezbollah’s command structure and arsenal in 2024 and 2025, and that’s worth acknowledging directly. But degrading a node in a network isn’t the same as collapsing the network. Iran’s demonstrated response to losing a piece is to absorb it, adapt, and rebuild, not to negotiate from weakness. We are already seeing the damage and distraction that both Hezbollah and the Houthis have created by starting new fronts against the US and its allies. It is unclear how capable either force is or how long those forces can commit to further support. It is the unknown that makes the situation unpredictable. And is a reason to be thoughtful in our approach.
6. The sixth is that there is no ready-made replacement. One of the quiet lessons of Iraq and Libya is that regime change requires someone to hand power to. In Iraq there was at least a political infrastructure of exiled opposition parties. In Libya there were rebel militias with territorial control. In Iran the opposition is fractured, largely in exile, ideologically diverse. The opposition ranges from monarchists to secular liberals to the MEK, which is widely despised inside Iran and has zero military capacity inside the country. Without a credible successor, military strikes may not produce an acceptable regime change. These attacks could produce chaos, and chaos in a country of ninety million people with a sophisticated weapons program is far more dangerous than the regime itself. And, any successor viewed as a puppet of America will fail. The Persian culture will reject someone imposed on it. The people will have to broadly support any new political leadership. And, that has not happened. There are many reasons we do not see large numbers of Iranians trying to seize the momentum and overthrow the regime. It doesn’t matter. For this reason alone – lack of a popular uprising and rally behind a clear replacement, the regime is unlikely to change. And, Iranians were never going to accept a new leader picked by the United States and Israel. It has to be organic.
The honest historical lesson is this: the US has never successfully engineered lasting regime change in a country with these characteristics. Not through sanctions, not through airstrikes, not through proxy support. The question isn’t only whether the US has destroyed Iran’s nuclear program with these attacks, it almost certainly has degraded it significantly. The question is what comes after, and on that, history offers very little comfort. Which is why it appears this administration has not prescribed what will happen next preferring to keep all options on the table. If, as Trump encouraged in his public addresses, the population rises up and overthrows the clerical ruling class, then regime change will have been achieved and the follow-on becomes a test of who is the new regime and what kind of deal can the US reach with the new leaders. If the population fails to rise up and the regime, despite being damaged, survives (the most likely outcome), the option list gets very short, very fast. The best option is to reach a negotiated deal that keeps the Straight of Hormuz open while insuring Iran does not develop nor acquire nuclear weapons.
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