Iranian Regime Consolidating, Cracking Down
The regime is not a -changin'.
WaPo (“U.S. intelligence says Iran’s regime is consolidating power“):
Despite more than two weeks of relentless airstrikes, U.S. intelligence assessments say, Iran’s regime likely will remain in place for now, weakened but more hard-line, with the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps security forces exerting greater control.
The United States and Israel have significantly degraded Iran’s missile capability and navy, removed the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and wiped out scores of top military and intelligence leaders. But the war’s costs are mounting — at least $12 billion so far and 13 U.S. troops killed. Iran’s viselike grip on the Strait of Hormuz has slowed shipping traffic to a trickle, creating a historic oil disruption.
Western officials and analysts who study Iran said they see little near-term prospect of a “regime change” end to the 47-year-old Islamic republic or the rise of a more democratic government. The latter is a goal cited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and sometimes by President Donald Trump, who has said he’ll know the war is over “when I feel it in my bones.”
U.S. intelligence assessments issued since the war began predict Iran’s regime will remain intact and possibly even emboldened, believing it stood up to Trump and survived, according to two people familiar with the assessments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. U.S. Arab allies in the Persian Gulf, meanwhile, are angered and alarmed at being the targets of retaliatory barrages of Iranian ballistic missiles and drones.
One European official said the likeliest postwar scenario is a “rump IRGC regime” in Tehran that will retain some nuclear and missile capability as well as the support of regional proxies, though the regime will be “degraded enough that we’re in a better place than we were.”
Trump has been receiving “very sobering briefings” on the U.S. intelligence, said one of the two people familiar with the assessments. And he was told of the likelihood of a more entrenched IRGC before he gave the go-ahead to jointly launch the war with Israel, this person said.
“It wasn’t just predictable,” they said. “It was predicted. He was told in advance.”
But at least no harm was done to US interests in the region, right?
U.S. allies in the Gulf say they are furious with the Trump administration as the conflict roars into a third week.
“They started this war for Israel and then left us to face the attacks by ourselves,” said a senior Arab official from the Gulf. In the lead-up to the conflict, he said, Trump administration officials told allies that any military confrontation would be quick, but now it’s clear Iran wants to draw out the conflict to inflict pain on its neighbors.
“We don’t have a plan for a long war. We need to finish it as soon as possible,” the official said. As the conflict has drawn on, the rate of Iranian retaliation has slowed, but Iran has steadily widened targets in the region.
U.S. allies in the Gulf have deployed attack helicopters and warplanes to shoot down Iranian drones targeting their territory but have not taken offensive action against Iranian territory, fearful that such a move would spur Iran to target more Gulf civilian infrastructure.
Trump on Monday expressed surprise at the breadth of Iran’s retaliation. “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait,” he said. “Nobody expected that. We were shocked. … They fought back.’’
Nobody save, perhaps, for our intelligence services, CENTCOM planners, and anyone who has paid attention to the conduct of the Islamic Republic since its 1979 formation. Regime survival has always been the top priority, with spreading the Revolution a distant second.
The destructive power of Iran and its terrorist proxies have been significantly degraded, which is certainly a good thing. But the plan for that turning into regime change seems to have been hope that the Iranian people themselves, who are unarmed, would use the chaos to take power. Hope, I am reliably informed, is not a strategy.
Iran’s remaining decision-makers are confused, paranoid and having difficulty communicating with one another, said one Western security source, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments.
Nonetheless, officials and analysts say, there are no overt signs of cracks or defections within Iran’s power structure. A classified prewar intelligence assessment by the National Intelligence Council concluded that even a large-scale assault on Iran launched by the U.S. would be unlikely to oust its entrenched military and clerical establishment.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, founded in 1979 by revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to safeguard the new Islamic republic, has steadily gained power in recent decades, including over vast swaths of Iran’s economy.
“The IRGC has got economic power,” said Richard Nephew, a senior adviser on Iran in the Biden and Obama administrations who is now a scholar at Columbia University. “They’ve got political power. They’ve got the domestic repression apparatus. They are essentially now the centerpiece of the power system inside the country.’’
Far from cowing the IRGC, the war likely has only steeled its resolve, he said. That’s not to say that some months from now the water and energy shortages and economic crisis in Iran don’t renew the popular protests, but the regime’s crackdown in January “has demonstrated it’s not going to let that happen the same way it did before,” Nephew said.
Not shockingly, the IRGC does not want to go from a position of great power to being hunted in the streets by an angry mob. Given that they are armed and trained and the potential mob is not, they have something of an advantage.
WSJ (“Iran Unleashes New Crackdown on Its People to Head Off Uprising“):
Iran’s rulers have unleashed a new crackdown against domestic dissent, arresting people suspected of collaborating with foreign entities and threatening would-be protesters with death to hold back the risk of an uprising.
Iranian security forces have been battered by U.S. and Israeli attacks. Bombing raids have shattered the headquarters and command posts of Iran’s police, the paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the plainclothes Basij militia.
But Iranians say security forces are using fear to keep a tight grip on the streets. Armed men ride around on motorcycles brandishing their weapons to intimidate people, residents say, particularly at night, when city dwellers rarely leave their homes.
The men, usually in plainclothes and with their faces covered, also have set up a network of security checkpoints around cities such as Tehran where they routinely stop and search cars.
At least 500 people have been arrested since the start of the war, facing accusations that include sharing information with international media or with enemy forces with the purpose of helping them identify targets, Ahmad-Reza Radan, the commander of Iran’s police force, said Sunday on state television.
Many were detained for taking photos or videos of sites hit by airstrikes. Others were accused of being monarchists, a reference to supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah, the most prominent opposition leader abroad. State-run media said 11 suspected monarchists resisted police and were killed.
Among those detained were a mother and her teenage son who are accused of celebrating the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a U.S.-based group that monitors the country. An Israeli strike on Khamenei’s compound killed him in the opening salvo of the war.
Several civil society activists were also detained. Among them is Leila Mir Ghaffari, who had been detained several times before, including during the women’s rights protests of 2022, according to two activists familiar with her situation.
“The system is messaging very clearly that any kind of dissent or mobilization at a popular level will not be tolerated,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. “Iran is facing an existential crisis, and I think it’s very clear that they will use whatever means to suppress the internal dimension of the threat.”
Now, there’s certainly a bright side to this.
“I believe the regime still has the capacity to use force, but the scale and intensity of repression also reflect deep insecurity and a shrinking base of legitimacy,” said Omid Memarian, an Iran expert at DAWN, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “Maintaining constant control becomes harder in wartime, because economic disruption, physical destruction and public anger accumulate simultaneously, and at some point, they might explode.”
But that’s hardly enough to overcome the massive collective action problem of organizing unarmed civilians to take on a massive secret police force fighting for their survival.
A near-total internet blackout, introduced when the war started, is still in place, making it difficult for people to stay informed and communicate, let alone mobilize. Internet connectivity has been further restricted since Sunday, according to NetBlocks, an independent organization that tracks internet flows.
Iranian authorities are hunting down users and suppliers of illegal Starlink terminals, which are used by Iranians to bypass the official restrictions. Police last week arrested a 37-year-old man accused of running an illegal Starlink sales network, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.
That’s quite daunting.
Writing at AlJazeera, Muhanad Seloom, an international relations profesor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, takes the contrary view: “The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why.“
Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan. Iran is retaliating across the region. Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire. US senators have called it a blunder. Cable news has tallied the crises. Commentators have warned of a long war.
The chorus is loud and, in some respects, understandable. War is ugly, and this one has imposed real costs on millions of people across the Middle East, including the city I live in.
But this narrative is wrong. Not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.
While I don’t think I’m doing that—and, indeed, would very much like to replace the Islamic Republic with a regime we could work with—I’m curious to know what it is I’m missing.
When you look at what has actually happened to Iran’s principal instruments of power – its ballistic missile arsenal, its nuclear infrastructure, its air defences, its navy and its proxy command architecture – the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.
I’m definitely not discounting that. And, indeed, I very much applaud it. But, unless it results in a better state of the peace, I count that as mere tactical success. In the paragraphs that follow, he catalogs but the very real costs of the war and the destruction it has wreaked on regime capability and capacity.
And I think he’s right here:
The campaign has moved through two distinct phases. The first suppressed Iran’s air defences, decapitated its command and control, and degraded its missile and drone launch infrastructure. By March 2, US Central Command announced local air superiority over western Iran and Tehran, achieved without the confirmed loss of a single American or Israeli combat aircraft.
The second phase, now under way, targets Iran’s defence industrial base: missile production facilities, dual-use research centres and the underground complexes where remaining stockpiles are stored. This is not aimless bombing. It is a methodical campaign to ensure that what has been destroyed cannot be rebuilt.
I don’t at all think that US and Israeli military planners are simply blowing shit up with no plan. This is a blueprint that we have followed with great tactical success going back at least to OPERATION DESERT STORM. We are the best in the world at executing it, and it’s not even close.
The rub, alas, is the question: And then what?
After several paragraphs arguing that the war has substantially degraded both Iran’s nuclear program and its proxy network (I think it’s too soon to tell, but assume that this is the case), he gets to the payoff:
The most politically potent criticism is that the administration has no endgame. Trump’s own rhetoric has not helped: the oscillation between “unconditional surrender” and hints at negotiation, between regime change and denial of regime change, feeds the impression of strategic incoherence. Only 33 percent of American respondents in a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll said the president had clearly explained the mission’s purpose.
But the endgame is visible in the operational phasing, even if the rhetoric obscures it. The objective is the permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.
Call it strategic disarmament. This is closer to the approach of the Allies to Germany’s industrial war-making capacity in 1944-1945 than to the US war on Iraq in 2003. The analogy is imperfect: Strategic disarmament without occupation requires a verification and enforcement architecture that no one has yet proposed, but the operational logic is the same.
The WWII analogy is far less than perfect; it’s apples and footballs. Yes, we severely set back the capacity of the Nazi regime to wage war. More importantly, though, we replaced the Nazi regime with one to our liking, soon turning West Germany into a Cold War ally.
Winning a war without changing the government often means a sequel down the road. See: WWI and WWII or Gulf War I and Gulf War II.
No one is proposing to occupy Tehran. The question is what happens when the bombing stops, and here the critics raise a legitimate concern, which Murphy articulated concisely after a classified briefing: What prevents Iran from restarting production?
The answer requires a post-conflict framework that does not yet exist in public: a verification regime, a diplomatic settlement or a sustained enforcement posture. The administration owes the American public and its regional partners a clear account of what that framework would look like.
Oh, probably JCPOA. Oops.
But, of course, this is Seloom projecting his preferences onto the war. There is zero indication that either President Trump or Prime Minister Netanyahu would find such an outcome acceptable.
So the woke military is running its decades old playbook, while being commanded by un-woke imbeciles?
Is that a valid takeaway?
Imbeciles is being kind.
@Daryl: The Army developed a cadre of first-rate planners starting in the early 1980s with the School of Advanced Military Studies. All of the longstanding services followed suit. The combination of that and the investment in exquisite technology beginning in the Carter administration and accelerating under Reagan (the so-called Offset Strategy) was first unveiled in DESERT STORM.
Basically, we use stealth bombers and stand-off missiles (notably, the Tomahawk that also debuted in that conflict) to take out enemy air defense and command-and-control capabilities. From there, we have air dominance and basically destroy targets to our heart’s content, using ground forces only if the mission goals require it.
We are quite concerned that this playbook won’t work against China. They learned the lessons of DESERT STORM quite well and have invested in exquisite stand-off tech of their own, the so-called Anti-Access, Area Denial capability. I don’t know that we’re prepared to sustain that kind of casuality rate again.
I think the “there is no plan” narrative needs qualification.
Sure, there is no plan to achieve a desirable end state regarding Iran.
But I bet there were other considerations for starting this war.
Netanyahu needs to stay in power or he’ll go to jail on corruption charges. Which means that he has to keep the ultra-hardliners in his coalition government on board. Which means, in turn, that he has to keep some sort of conflict going – either with the Palestinians on the West Bank, Hezbollah, or Iran.
Similarly, the Epstein revelations have hurt Trump significantly. So, he has some real incentives to be looking for a distraction and rally-around- the-flag effect.
Thus, I think it is rather likely there was some sort of plan, both in Israel and the US. But unfortunately a plan aimed at domestic audiences, while only the part aimed at Iran never amounted to more than wishful thinking.
This is what you get when you have national leaders who are only in it for themselves. Neither Trump or Netanyahu are, properly speaking, serving their countries.
Another (obvious) downside to personalist approaches to government.
The shitty thing is that we knew this already. Somehow, we seem to have forgotten not just the lessons of 1930s but even the lessons of the 18th and 19th centuries, for crying out loud.
@James Joyner:
Warfare is changing. It’s no fun being an REMF in the drone era.
“WaPo Gift”
I appreciate that knowledge.
And China is continuing to learn that a) they can take Taiwan, like Putin took Ukrainian territory, and Trump won’t raise a finger and b) after welching on the JCPOA and then bombing Iran two separate times during ongoing negotiations America cannot ever be trusted again.
@drj:
He can have personal objectives while still following standard Israeli strategic policy, so-called “mowing the grass.” It’s Israel, not the U.S. attacking civilian infrastructure, because Israel would be happy with Iran as a “failed state” – something the U.S. very much does not want.
The “black rain” on Teheran was Israel’s work, not America’s.
Who do these guys think they are, ICE?
@charontwo: Pretty much. By the end of the Bush 43 administration and accelerating considerably during Obama’s, we were using UAVs as our primary weapon. Others have figured out how to mass-produce them cheaply. The Ukrainians were the first significant beneficiary of that, but now the Iranians are using them against our regional partners and us.
@charontwo:
That unseen human operator is rapidly being eliminated. A human operator has limited attention and requires feedback, which can be defeated by signals jamming. And satellite geolocation can be jammed/spoofed. New examples of drones with autonomous functions are upon us — drones able to navigate inertially and visually, detect and avoid countermeasures, and identify and hit targets. The realities of Russia’s war on Ukraine seem to be overriding concerns regarding autonomous weaponry.
@charontwo:
@James Joyner:
Drones have a long history I won’t get into. The modern part begins in the 80s or 90s, when Israel* began to use them for observation and targeting. Later the US adopted them as well, and then expanded their use.
American ideas of drones were remotely piloted aircraft. They carried missiles and bombs as well as cameras, and cost millions each. They allowed attacks on remote areas, more cheaply than sending fighter aircraft, and without risk to personnel.
Iran’s innovation is in thinking of drones as long range cruise missiles, or remote artillery. That’s why they can make them so cheap: they’re disposable, one-use ordnance rather than weapons platforms.
Thinks of them as a poor man’s Tomahawk missile. Less precise in some ways, and far less capable as regards the warhead payload. But far, far less expensive, too.
* In the Beginning, there was Irony, with whimsy and malice and mischief.
Sigh.
The clowns in charge of the US right now are fundamentally incapable of making rationale decisions based in reality. They have spent so long marinating in an environment that allows them to deploy reality-warping magic thinking (and get cheered/rewarded for it – at least on their preferred social media sites) that they seem incapable of making rational choices.
The theory, best I can figure and being most charitable to the Administration, seems to have been that they had this rare opportunity to knock out the Supreme Leader and a bunch of top figures and that, with the context of the recent widespread uprisings, that would create enough instability to allow for regime change. It isn’t an incoherent thought – if you don’t think too hard or know anything about Iran itself.
Unfortunately, here in reality, uprisings only work if (a) the people with guns are the ones doing the uprising or (b) the people with guns are unwilling to massacre civilians to prevent the regime change. Neither is true in Iran as amply demonstrated by how those recent demonstrations ended – with about 35,000 civilians being massacred.
If they actually wanted to achieve a goal, they would have needed to address the IRGC’s near monopoly on internal force and their demonstrated willingness to kill their own civilians t9 maintain it. But they didn’t because that would be difficult and boring and too much like actual work.
Its the underpants gnome approach to regime change. Don’t worry about how to take control of the media apparatus or sideline the IRGC or who is the alternative leader/structure if you do actually create a vacuum. Just presume the absolute best.
Does the article offer any metric along which we can say Iran’s regime is weakened? Or is that just to soften the news for readers that this has accomplished nothing other than a swift and orderly transfer of power?
Is Iran an exception to the general rule that a population will rally around the government when attacked by an outside force? There were protests (and slaughter of the protesters) before this attack, so I wouldn’t rule it out completely, but generally external attacks increase nationalism.
@SKI:
If Bibi and Trump wanted to maximize the chances for a better Iranian regime, they should’ve struck when the regime’s most fearless opponents were raging in the streets, not two months after the most courageous and willing were slaughtered.
Instead, our corrupt and incompetent far right Israeli/American failureship duo (and that Saudi snake, Crown Prince Voldemort) has worsened the predicament of both Iran’s domestic opposition and its pro-Western Arab neighbors.
We were told we all should celebrate Khamenei the Elder’s demise notwithstanding other complaints about the way the US, Saudi Arabia, and Israel do business. That assessment now seems premature, as indicators suggest this rump regime will be worse.
It’s face: a vengeful, widowed, grieving father angry about his family’s martyrdom. Trump is reported to have laughted at intel on Mojtaba’s alleged homosexuality. It’s not funny: hell hath no fury like a bitter, closeted, aging queen scorned. Trump should know — he worshipped Roy Cohn.
Mojtaba will be buttresed by others who’ll also view their survival as a sign from Allah they’re placed to oppose Zionists, Americans, and collaboraters within Iran and on its borders.
The dead Khamenei apparently viewed his heir as too hardline (!) and too weak/effete to contain the system’s most extreme elements. No doubt that’s why the mullahs put aside their aversion to heredity succession and Gay Pride to pick Jr anyway. Frightening, given how batshit Khamenei 1.0 was. I’d bet the January massacres, shockingly extreme even for Iran, symptomized the 86-year old elderly Ayatollah’s diminished capacity to exert control over IRGC nutters.
Had he died naturally, as he would have soon enough, there *might* have been a chance for slightly less whacked-out, less anti-American Iranian reformists like Masoud Pezeshkian, Mohammad Khatami, Hassan Rouhani to bid for control. Too late on that for now.
Having somehow done “regime change” in the wrong direction, President Trumpflation should do what Israel should’ve done after a few months in Gaza: declare the acute threat neutralized and pack it in. Iran did not pose much of a military threat to the homeland three weeks ago, even less so now, for now, with its grass mowed. Trump can wish the Iranian diaspora whoopsy-daisies and good luck.
@DK:
1. I’m pretty sure that Bibi and Trump have different priorities/motivations.
2. More importantly, the opportunity to have a large group of the leaders in the same place at the same likely didn’t exist at that time (or at least not with sufficient time after the intel was developed). Having that intel opened the door to the opportunity to try ot decapitate the regime.
So, while I agree that it would have been better, if they were going to go down this road, to do it at the start of the protests, saying they should have demonstrates the same problems with their strategic planning – it ignores reality.
There is no way Israel could or would have packed it in until they recovered the hostages and or their remains. Criticize their indiscriminate destruction and counter-productive violence (I certainly have) but there was never an opportunity for them to withdraw/end the conflict as long as Hamas and the other terror groups retained the hostages.
Similarly, Trump can’t just withdraw as long as the Iranians control the strait and can strangle the world economy – not without being tagged with the defeat – something he can’t politically swallow.
@SKI:
I didn’t say they should have struck in January just because. The key part: “if they wanted to maximize chances of toppling the regime.” Whatever the reasons for waiting until a gathering of Iranian leaders two months later, that gathering took place months after the regime’s most ardent opponents were already slaughtered. If they really wanted to decapitate the regime, they should not have waited for such a gathering, they should’ve have chosen targets during nationwide protests.
The delay indicates either poor strategy or that regime change was never the real goal.
Except Bibi’s government sabotaged hostage release ceasefires under Biden, thus prolonging the war. The same deal made under Trump to draw down indiscriminate bombing and release remaining hostages/remains could have been made earlier. The deliberate delay indicates Netanyahu never really cared about the hostages except as an excuse. And his government treated their families horribly.
Sure he can. The hundreds miles long Iranian coastline on the straight means war or no war, Iranians have more control there than the US. Unless Trump controls the Iranian coastline — which he does not and will not — then he has no power over the straight.
There’s a reason no attempt to topple Persia has been successful in 2,000 years, and why previous American presidents declined to try. Trump cannot alter geography to his liking.
And in fact, the Pentagon already has a regularly updated menu of off-ramps for Trump to pick from, which do not require Trump to wait.