The Case for Regime Change in Iran, and How Not to Screw It Up

The Hegelian Hammer, and why Iraq was different

Those who oppose American involvement in Iran often cite the Iraq War. In their telling, and this narrative is believed by much of the educated public, there was a group of “neocons” who fantasized about bringing democracy to the Middle East, went to war on that basis without knowing anything about the region, and brought the US into a quagmire. As I explain in my first book, this story isn’t true. The people in the American government who pushed for war with Iraq were, before Saddam was deposed, uninterested in nation building and wanted to get out relatively quickly.

Nonetheless, citing Iraq has become a stand-in for the idea that you should never try to overthrow a foreign state, regardless of the circumstances. While cavalierly going around the world knocking off governments can’t be the right approach, the idea that existing regimes should continue forever no matter how brutal to their own people and threatening to the world also cannot be the answer. Such a rule would have never allowed the Soviet Union to collapse.

In response to charges that those in favor of regime change are leading us into another Iraq, one could point to North Korea as an example of what happens when an evil regime is allowed to exist indefinitely and has armed itself with nuclear weapons. It is an impoverished nation of 26 million people without any semblance of individual freedom, and little reason to believe things will ever get better as long as the current government is in power. Civil war would clearly be an improvement over the current North Korean regime, as there would be some hope of a better future.

Iran is not Libya, Afghanistan, or Iraq. It has a history of parliamentary democracy that goes back over a century, and even continues in a certain form to this day under the current regime. Moreover, you can tell something about a society under dictatorships by looking at what the government fears potentially overthrowing it. Saddam was obsessed with fending off Sunni and Shia Islamists. He was worried about Wahhabist ideology, and therefore tried to co-opt aspects of it late in his regime, and also faced constant threats from Shia extremists with ideological and organizational links to Iran. Aside from the Kurds, there was no democratic or broadly liberal movement in Iraq to speak of before the US arrived in 2003.

Iranians, in contrast, regularly go to the streets in the name of liberalism. These protests are not marginal. In 2009, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, marched under the banner of the Green Movement, demanding fair elections and civil rights. Thousands were imprisoned and perhaps hundreds were killed. In 2017–18, 2019, and especially in 2022 following the death of Mahsa Amini, demonstrations erupted across the country — cutting across class, geography, and gender lines. The number of dead was over a thousand in the 2019 riots.

Iranian women in October 2022

The 2022 protests were among the most sustained since the Islamic Revolution, with schoolgirls, oil workers, and ethnic minorities all participating. These were not fringe disturbances but widespread, nationally coordinated acts of defiance that shook the regime’s confidence. The Islamic Republic deploys riot police, internet blackouts, and mass arrests not to defend against foreign agents or religious extremists, but its own citizens demanding freedom. By 2022, the regime had to arrest nearly 20,000 people in order to reestablish control. Still, the mullahs have had to accommodate popular sentiments. The government has scaled back enforcement of laws on what women can wear, understanding the risks involved in being too strict in this area. As one of the Iranian vice presidents told Davos in January, “[I]f you go to the streets of Tehran, you will find women not covering their hair. It's against the law, but the government has decided not to put women under pressure.”

In 2020, I told a journalist for The Intercept that any attempt at overthrowing the Iranian government was bound to work out badly because former regime elements would be best positioned to organize in the case of civil war. This is still true, and the Islamists do not simply go away once the regime falls. That said, since that time, we’ve learned that some Iranians are willing to fight and die to be rid of their current government, and also seen what appears to be a relatively positive result in Syria, albeit after much heartache and bloodshed. Ukraine has similarly taught the lesson that modern people are still sometimes willing to fight and die on a mass scale in the name of freedom, a proposition that I used to doubt.

No outcome would be guaranteed in an Iranian civil war, but the US could once again play the role of the Hegelian Hammer. We don’t put troops on the ground or try to nation build, which was the real original sin of Iraq. Rather, through bombs and financial pressure, we tilt the playing field towards the types of actors we want to win. There will be factions who want to live in peace with Israel, adopt a market economy, and let women wear what they want. Those should be our allies, while those on the other side of these issues should exist in a state of constant fear for their lives, never able to accumulate stockpiles of weapons, and always worried that an American drone or Israeli car bomb might find them. Hopefully, those who respect women and Jews would eventually come out on top. There should be no illusion that former elements of the regime and the ideology that currently sustains it will just melt away. We would be going in knowing that a civil war is a likely outcome, but that sometimes civil wars are worth it.

In the end, something like this strategy eventually worked in Syria, where the US both stopped the Assad regime from crushing its opponents, and also made sure that Islamists would not take over the country. We didn’t have natural allies anywhere except among the Kurds, but stumbled towards a policy that ultimately helped ensure that a relatively tolerant leader would come to power due to the fact that we consistently opposed actors that we found unacceptable.

Iran has much better chances than Syria ever did of moving towards democratic capitalism, and we should be able to get to that end result with a lot less bloodshed. Unlike its Arab neighbors, Iran has a history of democratic institutions, with a significant portion of its population inclined towards liberalism, and even having shown a willingness to take some personal risks in the name of freedom.

The idea that the US will have to send in ground troops to deal with the aftermath of regime change is simply a fantasy cooked up by those who oppose intervention on principle. We watch countries descend into civil war without deploying our own soldiers all the time, even when we’re responsible for starting or intensifying the conflict, as we were in the case of Libya and to a lesser extent Syria. Bombing Iran presents an opportunity to remove a destabilizing force in the world and add a large and educated country to the club of civilized nations, all with little risk to American lives. We should take it.