The Gulf and beyond has been plunged into a war that nobody in the region – apart from Israel – wanted.
Countries further afield, such as Cyprus, have already been affected. France has placed its internal security forces on high alert. Others, especially those linked in any way to the US-Israeli attacks on Iran, will be reviewing the threat of terrorist acts on their soil, as UK Defence Secretary John Healey said he was doing on Sunday.
However, many thousands of kilometres away, anyone with history in the Middle East will feel connected to this disastrous conflict.
I see blasts and flames in Riyadh, a city where my family lived when I was a child. Missile attacks on the UAE, a country where I have enjoyed countless happy visits, including on this newspaper’s 15th anniversary. And Qatar threatened not just by projectiles but by two Iranian fighter jets – which they shot down. That is the land where my second son was born, and where only last month my wife and I enjoyed an idyllic al fresco dinner on the seafront at the home of a Qatari-Palestinian-Jordanian extended family. Now the family members stay inside, and the window panes of their house rattle whenever an incoming rocket is intercepted.
What is the end game in this war? Publicly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on the Iranian people to “overthrow the regime of fear that has made your lives bitter”. Others such as the former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy believe his country’s government may be happy to make a desert and call it peace. “Israel’s more interested in regime and state collapse,” he said earlier this week.
More importantly, what does US President Donald Trump want? So far, he has consistently stated his preference for two outcomes, typically not being bothered by the fact that they are inconsistent with each other.
“What we did in Venezuela, I think is the perfect scenario,” he said last Sunday, adding: “Everybody’s kept their job except for two people.” But he also told “the great proud people of Iran” in his address on Truth Social at the start of the campaign: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” That is an open call for regime change.
The US operation in Venezuela has apparently been successful so far precisely because it was not regime change.
Then-president Nicolas Maduro was kidnapped and spirited off by US forces, leaving a more pliant vice president to run the administration, but the “Chavismo” government remains in place. Even if Iran’s Assembly of Experts chooses a new supreme leader that Mr Trump feels he can do business with – and the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son Mojtaba is unlikely to fit the bill if he has been elected, as per recent reports – one cannot say that the Islamic Republic remains the same after the country’s relentless bombing, with so many high-ranking officials having been killed, not to mention the horrific deaths of more than 150 innocent children on the first day of the campaign.
There may come a point when any Iranian leader who concedes defeat to Mr Trump is instantly de-legitimised by having to make what may be seen as humiliating concessions in the face of so much death and destruction. And if all the significant pillars of the Islamic Republic are left in place, most especially the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – which is estimated to control 30-50 per cent of the country’s economy – how will that match with Mr Trump’s declaration that all he wants is “freedom” for the Iranian people?
So Venezuela is no template.
As for regime change, only a few days ago almost everyone in the region was against it. That sentiment cannot be guaranteed now. But it is a very risky goal.
“We hope the Iranian people can overthrow this government,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday – without giving any indication of how. There is no organised, broad-based opposition to be found.
Too often in the past, US politicians have seized upon any group of Iranians opposed to the current regime and assumed they were “the good guys”. Former US national security adviser John Bolton, for instance, has been a vocal supporter of the Mujahedin-e-Khalq – despite its unpopularity in the country for having been on the side of Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, the fact that it was previously designated as a terrorist group in many western countries, including America, and has often been labelled a “cult”.
Now the son of the last Shah, Reza Pahlavi, is the hope of some. But his popularity in the country is unclear, and his closeness to Israel, which is currently bombarding the country he would like to lead, may also count against him. In any case, he seems to lack Mr Trump’s support.
Regime change would also require dismantling the IRGC, and there is no sign of any group being anywhere near capable of that. Could that goal, in any case, be a mistake – given the devastating consequences of the de-Baathification of Iraq after the US invasion in 2003, which led to an institutional vacuum and huge instability?
The lesson that Mr Trump and his colleagues appear not to have learnt – surprisingly, given recent history in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya – is that regime change almost never works.
A 2020 paper on their history by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington concluded: “They are likely to spark civil wars, lead to lower levels of democracy, increase repression and in the end, draw the foreign intervener into lengthy nation-building projects.” Proponents of regime change have a vanishingly small list of countries where they can claim it has succeeded. That Panama, where the US toppled the dictator Manuel Noriega in 1989, is about the best they can do, is hardly encouraging.
Moreover, the US has its own history of regime change in Iran. Yes, the joint CIA-MI6 plan to oust then-prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 worked. But by strengthening the autocratic Shah, whose “progressive” reforms were viewed by many as involving the repression of many ordinary Iranians, they may have inadvertently paved the way for the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic Republic into being.
For all the talk of “annihilation”, “punishment” and “retribution”, the US – astonishingly – appears to have no plan for afterwards, if they do cause the regime to fall. They may claim it has nothing to do with them. But the world will know they are responsible for whatever follows.
