Okay okay, what is the bull case for the maximal aims of Team Trump here? The skeptical argument is rooted in history - the track record for "regime change" delivered solely via strategic bombing is, needless to say, not great. Of course, maybe they do just bomb the country for a week to blow up a decade of military progress, and that isn't per se a "loss", but I would not consider that a win either given the price paid and the enemies made. Let's table that scenario for now, even if it is probably the most probable, since it plays out in an obvious way. That leaves the US/Israel operation trying to overcome history.
How they do that is gonna be things like this - did Mossad actually hack the traffic cameras of Tehran, and how extensively can they do that? Because previous wars had their intelligence wins, but the infrastructure for this kind of stuff just wasn't there! The world has built a pedestrian panopticon that everyone relies on and bad actors can exploit. And of course this is just one of the intelligence legs - satellites, camera drones, etc all fill in the picture. Unlike in the past, you can argue (not the same as proving) that an enemy can gain near total capacity to observe their target.
This combines well of course with their strategy of "bop the leader" - the goal is not to dismantle every piece of the state, but break the will of the state and straight up kill all the leadership who aren't willing to play ball, such that at some point the next guy in line doesn't want to die and white flags. This is an approach that people have considered in the past, but in fact it has just been wildly impractical until today; you could never track, reach, and effectively explode these targets in any quantity. But if your intelligence advantage and strategic reach is total, maybe you can?
That assumes there is a viable candidate anywhere on the leadership hierarchy. If the US/Israel demands are "give up pursuing nuclear weapons", then sure, that guy exists. That is the equivalent of what was done in Venezuela. But regime change? The assumption here is that the regime is much more brittle than it appears, that you can kill ~50 guys and the government will vote itself away. Is that true?
People will point to the recent protests as an example of that - but they are not great evidence. The people protesting were absolutely not regime insiders, and we have scant evidence of any defections by relevant institutions. It is actually a sign of strength in some ways - the extent of how brutal the crackdown was shows the regime was able to muster extensive loyalty from its armed forces who did not blink. It isn't *zero* evidence, to be clear - it is exactly the kind of "building to the tipping point" event where everyone is obeying orders because they have to, they are stuck, but are harboring resentments and looking for their moment. But it is very hard to observe that from the outside.
Instead I think the case revolves more around data like this:
These numbers demonstrate that a general process of secularisation, known to encourage religious diversity, is taking place in Iran. An overwhelming majority, 90%, described themselves as hailing from believing or practising religious families. Yet 47% reported losing their religion in their lifetime, and 6% said they changed from one religious orientation to another. Younger people reported higher levels of irreligiosity and conversion to Christianity than older respondents.
That essentially large swaths of the population aren't really Muslim anymore. And if it comes from broad sectors of society, it is quite possible that large amounts of the actual government aren't either, right? This is the classic trap of authoritarianism - you teach people to lie as a matter of habit. Of course people lie to join the all-powerful government! Maybe time itself and the slow decline of the legitimacy of the regime has hallowed out these institutions enough that they just need the right push.
I'm not making a strong case for that here, to be clear - you would need to do a ton more work for that. Just that this is the "theory of change" one would believe. I do not think "we literally bomb them so much that protestors can swarm the army" is gonna work. That is a theory some believe, and I think they will be wrong. Instead it will be "protestors try to swarm the army and moderates tell the army to stand down now that their radical bosses are dead". And that the new world of red hat panopticon intelligence operations can deliver on heretofore unforseen levels of the killing of radical bosses.
Let us see if we get to test that theory?
