Trump must help Iranians bring down the Islamic regime – opinion

Unless the US or someone else wants to send a large military force on the ground into Iran to destroy the regime, the remaining available option is to assist the Iranian people in their own efforts.

By Jonathan Spyer, Middle East Forum

With diplomatic talks between the US and Iran set to take place in Muscat, Oman, today, the prospects for de-escalation between the two countries appear slim to non-existent.

Tehran is clear that it is prepared to discuss only its nuclear program and has so far refused the White House’s demands to put its ballistic missile program, support for regional proxies, and internal repression on the agenda.

With diplomacy on the verge of faltering, preparations for an American military strike are proceeding apace. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group has now reached Middle Eastern waters and the area for which United States Central Command is responsible.

Additional military assets—F15E strike aircraft, THAAD and Patriot PAC 3 batteries, and tanker aircraft—have also been deployed. Action against Iran could come at any time. President Trump will keep the regime guessing until the last moment.

Substantively, however, historical precedent and reality don’t suggest that a one-and-done US airstrike or special forces operation in the vein of Venezuela could rapidly destroy the Islamic regime in Iran.

Trump’s stated preference for ‘swift and decisive’ military action that delivers this collapse is no easy feat when the Iranian ayatollah has more than one million armed fanatics under his control.

These are true believers who haven’t hesitated to murder many thousands of unarmed Iranian civilians in the past few months.

Sporadic acts of armed resistance against the Islamic regime have already begun. The choice available to the US and its allies is either concerted, strategic action along a variety of lines and over an extended period of time or no action at all.

If the latter course is chosen, the murderous regime of the mullahs is likely to survive. The former course doesn’t guarantee success for America either. But it makes it possible.

If a single, spectacular act cannot bring down the nearly 50-year-old regime in Tehran, what course might be adopted?

Unless the US or someone else wants to send a large military force on the ground into Iran to destroy the regime, the remaining available option is to assist the Iranian people in their own efforts.

Once this is understood, a number of options become feasible.

Firstly, the single most significant factor currently absent on the Iranian scene is a divide within the Iranian security forces. Potential fissures exist. Perhaps the most significant is between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Artesh, the conventional armed forces of the country.

Any work that can be done in reaching and incentivizing commanders of the Artesh to defect from the regime would be of immense value.

The regime lacks legitimacy and is teetering. Increasingly it remains in power because of the naked exercise of force.

The US and other anti-regime countries possess the capacity to reach and incentivize Artesh commanders to do their bidding.

Secondly, ongoing actions from the air (and if possible, via covert action on the ground) to disrupt the regime’s own efforts to suppress unrest are both feasible and advisable.

Killing senior IRGC commanders, destroying bases, and striking the regime’s IRGC military and civilian infrastructure would all serve the dual purpose of weakening the regime’s capacity to respond to protests and building the morale of the protestors themselves.

Thirdly, the regime understood what it was doing when it prioritized shutting off the internet last month. A people that can’t communicate with the outside world or with one another can be slaughtered in silence.

It is therefore of paramount importance to take the necessary measures to enable communication.

Independent satellite internet services are vital here. State-directed efforts to ensure the presence of Starlink terminals and other technical means on Iranian soil have a crucial role to play.

Offensive cyber actions to disrupt the regime’s own abilities to manage and rule Iran should be undertaken. The US is the world leader in this field.

Finally, there should be practical assistance on the ground to provide both medical facilities and weaponry for a growing Iranian insurgency. The need for protesters to seek medical assistance in state medical facilities is a key vulnerability.

This problem could be remedied through direct assistance from America or any other anti-regime country.

Sporadic acts of armed resistance against the Islamic regime have already begun. At present, they appear to be mainly restricted to peripheral parts of the country and to involve Iran’s ethnic minorities, in particular its Kurds.

The determined but small Kurdish paramilitary groups mustn’t and can’t be left to fight the regime alone. An insurgent counterforce needs to be built in the same way that the US and regional powers built the insurgency that challenged the Assad regime in Syria and the coalition of ground units that destroyed the ISIS ‘caliphate.’

In some ways, the situation in Iran currently resembles Syria 15 years ago, when the Assad regime sought to drown a civil uprising against its rule in the protestors’ own blood.

Instead, Assad’s brutal measures generated an insurgency that eventually consumed his regime. Iranians don’t have 15 years to wait, of course, and the regime they face is more sophisticated and better organized than Assad’s authority.

The Iranian regime’s bloody footprint extends across the world, but it lost control of events after Hamas’s 7 October pogrom in 2023.

Yahya Sinwar’s diabolical rampage inadvertently hastened the downfall of Iran’s regional terror shield as Israel engaged in an existential battle for the Jewish state’s survival.

It is now for the courageous people of Iran—who have long detested the regime’s prioritization of terrorism—to remove it and usher in a new Middle East. To do so, the West needs to step up and support the efforts of the Iranian public. Time is of the essence.

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