It is not yet certain whether Donald Trump will approve US involvement in Israel’s assault on Iran which began last week.
While Israel has inflicted severe losses on Iran and appears to have disabled its air defences, there is a broad consensus that, without US intervention, the goal of disabling Iran’s nuclear programme will be unachievable. To this end, a great deal of attention has been paid to the Fordow nuclear facility, close to the city of Qom, which is at the heart of the programme of uranium enrichment and much of which is located 80-90m underground.
In 2009, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that the facility held about 3,000 centrifuges which are central to the enrichment process. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal which Iran signed in 2015, uranium enrichment ceased at Fordow. But, when the US pulled out of that agreement under the first Trump administration, production restarted. Now the assumption is that only the so-called “bunker buster” bombs possessed by the US are capable of destroying the facility at Fordow. However, the US president’s announcement of a two-week deadline to decide if his country will join Israel’s attack speaks to uncertainty regarding its likely success and divisions within his support base.
Either way, the one-sided nature of the conflict so far – which has seen Israel inflict far more significant losses on Iran, both in terms of military leadership and civilian casualties, than it has sustained – raises the question of whether regime-change in Tehran is on the agenda. From the outset, Israeli leaders have expressly stated that this is not a key objective. However, they have made it equally clear that they would welcome the fall of the Islamic Republic should it happen. Indeed, Binyamin Netanyahu has called on Iranians to “stand up for their freedom”. As for Trump, his rhetoric has shifted dramatically over the course of the past several weeks, from an initial position which saw him urge restraint on Netanyahu, and talk up the prospect of success in negotiations with Iran on its nuclear programme, to his more recent darker utterances regarding the prospect of direct US involvement to put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. All of this, in turn, suggests Trump has been bounced into supporting Israel’s assault on Iran through Netanyahu’s pre-emptive actions last Thursday.
Israel needs Trump’s ‘bunker buster’ but will US enter the war?
Since Israel launched air strikes on Iran last Friday, the two states have traded missiles with mounting casualties on both sides.Iranian military leaders have been killed as have some of its nuclear scientists but the country’s citizens have borne the brunt of the air attacks.Israel has said its rationale for the middle-of-the-night attack that sparked the war was its need to ensure, for its own protection, that Iran’s nuclear programme is halted.How close Iran is to actually having a nuclear bomb is unclear but for Israel to obliterate entirely the nuclear threat it needs the US to join the war, to send its “bunker buster” mega bomb to destroy the Fordo uranium enrichment facility buried deep in the mountains.Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Declan Conlon.
While the likely course of US action on Iran remains unpredictable, it is clear that neither Israel nor the United States has a plan for – or indeed any coherent understanding of – what might follow from the fall of the regime in Tehran, beyond wilfully optimistic assumptions regarding its positive impact on the country and the region.
However, history teaches us that such optimistic assumptions are rarely well placed. The reality is that when we have seen external involvement in the affairs of Iran and the Middle East more generally, the results have never been straightforward and rarely positive.
[ Could Israel’s attacks on Iran create a nuclear contamination risk?Opens in new window ]
In Iran in 1953, the country’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mossadeq’s government nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which was a forerunner to BP), a move that was widely popular in the country but alarming to the UK and the US. As events unfolded, the Shah of Iran, fearing the worst, left the country. However, Mossadeq was removed from power in August 1953 and the Shah returned to preside over an increasingly repressive regime, until his removal during the revolution of 1979. As is so often the case with external interventions of this nature, Mossadeq’s removal had unintended consequences. The events of 1953 dealt a severe blow to liberal and democratic politics in Iran while the Shah was seen as little more than an American puppet – factors contributing to the revolution which ended his rule in 1979 and inaugurated the Islamic Republic of Iran.
More recently, the ill-conceived US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought years of violent conflict to the country, led to the sectarianisation of its politics and helped pave the way for the emergence of the so-called Islamic State, while strengthening the position of the Iranian regime in the region, along the way. Likewise, western intervention in Libya in 2011 did nothing to contribute to peace and stability in that country.
This is not to say that Iranians cannot mobilise in the face of a repressive regime; Iran has a long history of such mobilisation. As far back as the early 20th century, the “constitutional revolution” of the period from 1906 to 1911 saw mass demonstrations that forced the Shah to agree to a written constitution and the establishment of an elected parliament.
That mobilisation was motivated by a number of grievances, including disillusionment with the ruling elite, as well as resentment at foreign influence and interference in the affairs of the country. While many of the gains of this period were subsequently reversed, the constitution remained in place until the revolution of 1979. Decades later, mass mobilisation led to the end of the Pahlavi dynasty, which had ruled Iran since 1925 with significant western support.
However, the post-1979 period has also witnessed expressions of dissent from the governing orthodoxy in the country. In 2009, mass protests broke out when the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the presidential election of June 12th that year, despite widespread electoral irregularities and claims by opposition candidates that the vote was rigged. After the announcement of the results, supporters of opposition candidates took to the streets in protest. By June 15th, as many as two million people were on the streets of Tehran. The protests were ultimately suppressed with the deaths of dozens of protesters and the arrests of thousands.
Thirteen years later, unrest and protests broke out again on a mass scale following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, whose “crime” was the violation of Iran’s mandatory hijab law by wearing hers “improperly”. The protest movement that followed adopted the slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” but subsequently grew into open calls for the removal of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Once more the protests were violently suppressed, and 500 people lost their lives.
Popular mobilisation in Iran for more than 100 years has been driven by domestic actors in pursuit of domestic agendas and never by external forces. It is unlikely that Netanyahu’s call on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government will alter that record.
Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East politics in the UCD school of politics and international relations
