Eran Ortal is a well-known Israeli military theorist. He gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post that coincides with my own thinking on Iran:
“There is no precedent for regime change through an air campaign,” Brig. Gen. Eran Ortal told The Media Line.
Which, however, is not necessarily a pessimistic evaluation:
Ortal framed what comes next as two broad paths. In the first, he said, leadership losses and a communications breakdown combine with extreme public pressure to produce a rupture that ends the regime—an outcome he stressed airpower alone has not historically produced.
“Seeing Iranians celebrating the attack in the streets increases the optimism that this scenario could materialize,” Ortal explained. “This could create a domino effect that cannot be foreseen in which the disappearance of senior leadership, major communications disruption, and extreme public pressure destabilize the leadership, who then abandon their positions.”
If that cascade does not happen, Ortal said the likely endpoint may be a government that survives politically but is left strategically broken. “This will leave the regime without military capabilities, weak and neutralized and fully subordinate to American whims and future coercion,” he said.
So the question, really, lies between best case and good case. If the Islamic regime survives, it will be so weakened as to be unable to play the disruptive role with which we have become familiar.
Danny Orbach, a military historian, also spoke with the Post and made a similar point:
“The goal is not for the regime to fall, but to create conditions that will enable the Iranian people to topple it,” Professor Danny Orbach, a military historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told The Media Line. “If the Iranians don’t take advantage of the opportunity, the war might end with less ambitious goals achieved—the destruction of the Iranian navy, its missile arsenal, and the remnants of its nuclear program.”
That would be an excellent result. Orbach puts particular emphasis on naval power:
For Orbach, the campaign’s political bet is tied to a target set that tends to receive less attention than missiles and nuclear facilities: Iran’s ability to project power at sea. “The navy is more important than what most people think,” he said. “The navy is the ability to project power, especially through the threat of blocking the Hormuz Strait. Its destruction will humiliate them and turn them into a country that cannot project power.”
There is more at the link. The bottom line, I think, is that the nay-sayers are wrong. Best case, the Iranian people rise up, install a secular government, perhaps with the Shah at the head of a constitutional monarchy, and Iran rejoins the modern world, with positive consequences too numerous to count. That is what we and the Trump administration (but not the Democrats) hope for.
But what if that dream isn’t realized? If the Islamic Republic survives, it will be gutted. It will be unable to disrupt events in the Middle East, probably for many years. And its perverted grip on the Iranian people will be loosened. I doubt, for example, that an Islamic Republic hanging on by its fingernails, and unable to supply its citizens with water and electricity, will try to force women to wear a hijab.
It is possible, of course, that a popular revolt will not occur or will fail, and that some group other than the mullahs will take power–most likely, a military dictatorship. But that–a military dictatorship with no military–would be an enormous improvement over what we have seen since 1979. Internationally, any alternative to the “Death to America” regime couldn’t possibly be worse, and in any event, Iran’s military strength will be so degraded as to make a hostile regime almost a moot point for the foreseeable future.
So I am optimistic about the war, such as it is, in Iran. Our retribution against the mullahs is long overdue, and I think it can only have good consequences. Among those positive outcomes, the one we should all hope for and do what we can to encourage, is freedom for the people of Iran.
