The USA army completed each function it set when it went to battle in Iraq in 2003. Decapitation: Saddam Hussein was once captured, attempted and hanged. Air dominance: general, inside of days. Regime cave in: The Iraqi executive fell in 21 days.
Now, believe Iraq greater than two decades after the U.S.-Iraq battle. Iraq continues to be an authoritarian state ruled by way of political events with deep institutional ties to Tehran. Iranian-backed militias function brazenly on Iraqi soil – some conserving authentic positions inside the Iraqi state.
The rustic the U.S. spent US$2 trillion and four,488 American lives to remake is, by way of any affordable measure, inside the sphere of Iran’s affect.
As a global safety student that specialize in nuclear safety and alliance politics within the Center East, I’ve tracked the trend of U.S. army luck throughout a couple of circumstances.
However the army result and the political result are virtually by no means the similar factor, and the distance between them is the place wars fail.
Two and a part millennia in the past, Thucydides recorded the Athenian empire at its maximum assured in his “History of the Peloponnesian War”: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Athens then destroyed Melos and introduced the Sicily Expedition with overwhelming drive and no coherent concept of governance for what got here subsequent.
The lesson, then and now, isn’t that empires can’t wreck. It’s that destruction and governance are solely other enterprises. And complicated them is how empires exhaust themselves.
The U.S. army can wreck the Iranian regime. The query that the Iraq precedent solutions – with brutal readability – is what fills the facility vacuum when it does?
The army and political ledger
In April 2003, American L. Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad as the pinnacle of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which served as a transitional executive, and issued two orders that will outline the following twenty years.
Order 1 dissolved the ruling Baath Birthday celebration and got rid of all senior celebration participants from their executive positions, purging the executive magnificence that ran its ministries, hospitals and colleges. Order 2 disbanded the Iraqi military however didn’t disarm it. Roughly 400,000 squaddies went house with their guns and with out their paychecks.
Washington had simply passed the insurgency – the Sunni-led armed resistance that will transform a decade-long battle – its recruiting pool. The common sense in the back of Bremer’s de-Baathification was once intuitive: You can’t construct a brand new Iraq with the individuals who constructed the outdated one. The common sense was once additionally catastrophic
L. Paul Bremer prepares to board a helicopter in Hillah, Iraq, all the way through a farewell excursion of the rustic on June 17, 2004.
AP Photograph/Wathiq Khuzaie
Political scientists have lengthy noticed that international locations are held in combination now not by way of ideology however by way of arranged coercion. This is, by way of the bureaucratic equipment, institutional reminiscence and educated execs who stay the lighting on and the water working. Damage that equipment, and also you don’t have a blank slate. You will have a collapsed state, and collapsed states don’t stay empty of management.
They fill, and so they fill with whoever has essentially the most organizational capability at the floor. Iran were construction that capability in Iraq for the reason that Nineteen Eighties, cultivating Shia political networks, exile events and armed forces teams all the way through and after the Iran-Iraq Battle and past with the specific objective of making sure a post-Saddam Iraq would by no means once more threaten Iranian safety.
Tehran didn’t wish to construct infrastructure in Iraq after the U.S. invasion, as it had spent the former twenty years construction it. When the outdated order collapsed, Iran’s networks have been able.
The opposition the U.S. had cultivated in Iraq – Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi Nationwide Congress – had Washington’s ear however no Iraqi constituency. They’d now not ruled the rustic, or constructed networks inside of it.
The lesson is that army luck created the appropriate stipulations for political disaster, and that chasm is the place American technique has long gone to die – in Iraq and in Libya, the place the Obama management helped result in regime replace in 2011, however the place political instability has continued since. And possibly now in Iran.
The vacuum isn’t impartial
The elemental false impression on the middle of American regime-change technique is the belief that destroying the prevailing order creates area for one thing higher.
It does now not.
It creates area for whoever is very best arranged, very best armed and maximum keen to fill it. In Iraq, that was once Iran.
The query now’s who fills it in Iran itself.
In Iran, the crowd that meets all 3 standards – arranged, armed and keen – is the Islamic Progressive Guard Corps. The Progressive Guard isn’t merely an army establishment. It controls an estimated 30% to 40% of the Iranian financial system and runs development conglomerates, telecommunications firms and petrochemical companies. And it has cultivated a parallel state infrastructure for many years.
The succession showed it: Mojtaba Khamenei, with deep ties to the Progressive Guard, was once named superb chief on March 8, 2026. It’s a Progressive Guard-backed dynastic succession that represents most continuity with the outdated regime, now not regime replace.
You can’t dismantle the Progressive Guard with out collapsing the financial system, and a collapsed financial system does now not produce a transition executive; it produces a failed state. Washington has already run that experiment in Libya.
You can’t depart the Progressive Guard in position with out leaving the regime’s coercive core intact. There is not any blank surgical choice of shedding bombs, killing positive other people and mentioning it a brand new day in Iran.
The Iranian opposition in exile, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq; the monarchists who fortify the go back of the late-shah’s son to steer the rustic; and the more than a few democratic factions all provide the similar drawback Chalabi did in 2003: Washington get entry to, no home legitimacy.
Progressive Guard troops march in an army rally in Tehran on Jan. 10, 2025.
Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto by the use of Getty Pictures
The Mujahedeen-e-Khalq is indexed as a 15 May Organization by way of Iran and is extensively despised within the nation. The monarchist motion has now not ruled Iran since 1979, and its corrupt, despotic chief was once overthrown within the revolution. The democratic reform networks that were construction momentum inside of Iran weren’t stored by way of the U.S. moves. The regime had already overwhelmed the motion in January, detaining and killing 1000’s.
A long time of study on rally-around-the-flag results ascertain what commonplace sense suggests: Exterior assault fuses regime and country even if voters despise their leaders. Iranians who have been chanting in opposition to the superb chief are actually staring at overseas bombs fall on their towns.
Iraq in 2003 had 25 million other people, an army degraded by way of 12 years of sanctions, and no lively nuclear program. Iran has 92 million other people, proxy networks that will now not disappear if Tehran fell – in truth, they might turn on – and a stockpile of over 880 kilos of extremely enriched uranium that the Global Atomic Power Company has been not able to completely account for for the reason that 2025 U.S. and Israeli moves.
The query Washington hasn’t spoke back
Who governs 92 million Iranians?
President Donald Trump has mentioned whoever governs Iran will have to obtain Washington’s approval. However a veto isn’t a imaginative and prescient.
Approving or rejecting applicants from Washington calls for a functioning political procedure, a sound transitional authority and a inhabitants keen to simply accept an American imprimatur on their management — none of which exists.
Washington has a desire; it does now not have a plan. If the target is getting rid of the nuclear program, then why does Iran nonetheless grasp an unverified stockpile of weapon-usable uranium 8 months after the 2025 moves? The moves have now not resolved the proliferation query. They’ve made it extra unhealthy and no more tractable.
If the target is regional steadiness, why has each spherical of moves produced a much broader regional battle?
Washington has no resolution to any of those questions – just a concept of destruction.
