Newsweek - 3.2M Followers - This is how Iran plans to endure Trump's war - Story by Tom O'Connor • 23h •

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3.2M Followers

This is how Iran plans to endure Trump's war

Story by Tom O'Connor • 23h • 

8 min read

Iranian officials are grappling with a grave ultimatum as the country battles an unprecedented joint U.S.-Israeli military intervention that has slain the Islamic Republic’s absolute ruler and scores of senior commanders.

President Donald Trump has offered amnesty to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) members who choose to lay down their arms. He has called on Iranian citizens to lead the charge in ousting their government.

Despite overwhelming setbacks, however, Iran has yet to indicate any high-profile defections or instances of the kind of mass protests that rocked the nation in January, the deadly crackdowns against which served as the catalyst for Trump’s march toward confrontation with the Islamic Republic.

And with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei slain, an interim Leadership Council has been swiftly established, led by newly named Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, alongside President Masoud Pezeshkian and Chief Justice Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehe, demonstrating a lasting capacity to maintain command and control in the face of the most serious test for the Islamic Republic since its founding in 1979.

Not even reports that Arafi may have also since been killed may be enough to yet unleash the momentum necessary to unravel the still deeply entrenched Islamic Republic.

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For some time now, the regime has operated through a form of collective leadership which includes the president, the speaker of parliament, the head of the judiciary, Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi of the IRGC, and a representative of the regular army.

“This leadership group, characterized by pragmatism and institutional experience, is fully capable of consolidating authority,” Ali Alfoneh, senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute, told Newsweek.

“With the obstinate Ayatollah Khamenei gone, the collective leadership is seeking engagement with President Donald J. Trump along one of two paths,” Alfoneh added.

“Negotiating an arrangement similar to the one pursued by the Venezuelan government or entering a prolonged confrontation that could increasingly disrupt regional energy infrastructure and drive up gasoline prices in the United States.”

People gather in Revolution Square to mourn the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli operation a day before on March 1 in Tehran, Iran.

‘The Perfect Scenario’

The Islamic Republic has a history of displaying resilience amid existential crisis. Just a year after the Islamic Revolution brought late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power, neighboring Iraq, led then by President Saddam Hussein, launched a full-scale war that dragged on for eight bloody years between 1980 and 1988.

While both sides suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties then, with the U.S. conducting strikes on Iranian targets at sea, the sheer scale of U.S. and Israeli superiority brought to the battlefield today pose an even more penetrating threat in the form of widespread destruction of Iranian military capabilities and the targeting of leadership.

There may be limits, however, to what aerial operations alone can do in terms of imposing collapse upon the Islamic Republic.

During the first and second Gulf wars that targeted Iraq, the U.S. also deployed hundreds of thousands of ground forces, ultimately leading an invasion to successfully topple Hussein in 2003, followed by a prolonged period of insurgency by Sunni and Shiite Muslim militias.

But there is little evidence to suggest that Trump’s action now – the largest military build-up in the Middle East since the Iraq War, which includes tens of thousands of U.S. personnel and two carrier strike groups- is geared toward supporting a land invasion in what otherwise already bears much of the hallmarks of a Third Gulf War.

Farzan Sabet, managing researcher of the Sanctions and Sustainable Peace Hub at the Geneva Graduate Institute, argued that, while regime change remained on the highest range of Trump’s options, he may simultaneously seek more limited outcomes.

“At the very low end, there is a clear scenario where he’s happy with the extent to which the Islamic Republic’s military capacities have been degraded, and he declares victories and moves on, as long as the Iranians don’t do major follow-up attacks that he’s compelled to retaliate against,” Sabet told Newsweek.

In “the mid-range,” Sabet argued, is “what the Trump administration in kind of a la the Venezuela scenario is looking to potentially do, something I call ‘regime modification.'”

Rather than pursue a sustained effort to uproot the socialist administration of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who was seized along with his wife in a U.S. Delta Force raid in Caracas in early January, the White House established a working relationship with his deputy and successor, acting President Delcy Rodríguez, a model Trump may seek to replicate in Iran.

“So, the hope is that by decapitating the leadership—and we’ll see how far that goes, whether the high-level deaths stop at what happened on Saturday or we actually see much more attrition at the higher levels of these Islamic Republic elite—there is a hope that maybe the new leadership formation that comes into power is then more amenable to make major concessions,” Sabet said.

“Of course, the price for a deal will have gone up compared to what it was in Geneva last week,” he added referring to Iran-US nuclear talks which took place just two days before the Saturday operation, “but willing to give kind of major concessions across the board of issues including nuclear missiles and Axis of Resistance.”

Trump told The New York Times on Sunday he had “three very good choices” regarding who should lead Iran and also stated that “what we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.”

Yet the Iranian government’s response to what Sabet called a “fairly devastating opening” to the war that has claimed not only Khamenei, but much of the nation’s military and defense hierarchy that is still reeling from the 12-Day War launched by Israel against Iran last June, is designed to counter any attempt to divide and conquer.

“The Islamic Republic was able to reconstitute both its political leadership, given the vacuum that was left by leader, and its defense leadership—or defense response anyway if not the defense leadership—fairly quickly,” Sabet said. “We kind of know why, because they were expecting something like this to potentially happen, although they didn’t prepare well enough to prevent it from happening.”

Iran’s Strategy

The Iranian defense strategy is part of the so-called “Mosaic Doctrine” forged through lessons learned during the 12-Day War as well as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, dictating the delegation of operational autonomy to local units in order to continue operations even in the event of leadership loss.

In addition to Iran striking Israel and U.S. bases in the region, Gulf Cooperation Council member (GCC) states Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are taking blows to a civilian and energy infrastructure, a tactic through which Sabet said Tehran was hoping to leverage “the influence of the GCC states with the U.S. and Trump administration in particular, that they would then lobby for a quick de-escalation of the conflict and actually a U.S. demand for a ceasefire to end the conflict relatively fast.”

He also identified a “use it or lose it” mentality being applied by Iran to its remaining missile capabilities, which the U.S. and Israel are rapidly seeking to diminish.

During a press briefing early Monday, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani assessed the U.S. and Israel have “degraded many dozens of few hundreds that they had” in terms of Iranian missile stockpiles.

Reports of attacks conducted by Iraqi militias against U.S. positions in the region, as well as Hezbollah’s intervention against Israel, also appear to be raising the stakes as Tehran’s Axis of Resistance, battered from two-and-a half-years of conflict, attempts to expand the scope of the war.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi movement, may also complicate the calculus of Washington and regional powers, having wreaked havoc on global shipping in past rounds of confrontation.

As the U.S.-Israel coalition and Iran’s Axis of Resistance attempt to outlast one another in their most serious showdown yet, a unified opposition to the Islamic Republic has yet to emerge, with key players such as Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah overthrown in 1979 and the National Council of Resistance of Iran, led by Maryam Rajavi’s Mojahedin-e Khelq dissident movement, both based primarily abroad and now openly discrediting one another.

Some of the most organized rebels within Iran itself belong to Kurdish movements, though they have garnered criticism from internal and external Iranian opposition factions, as well as the Iranian government, over concerns of potential separatism.

A host of other armed groups exist within Iran, including other ethnic groups organized among Arab, Azeri and Baloch communities, as well as the Khorasan branch of the Islamic State (ISIS), which has historically sought to capitalize on Iranian government weakness.

In the midst of ongoing conflict and a fragmented opposition architecture within Iran and abroad, the kind of popular uprising called upon by Trump, Pahlavi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to manifest.

“The idea that if airstrikes hit the security forces, Iranian masses, who lack organization and a structured leadership, could rise up and somehow change the regime sounds very far-fetched,” Arash Azizi, a historian and lecturer at Yale University, told Newsweek.

“It’s not entirely impossible. Perhaps if the strikes go on for longer, more regime leaders are killed, people do rise up in various parts of the country, the remaining elements of the regime at some point see no choice but to hand power to a recognized opposition force inside or outside the country,” he added. “But this remains a very tall order.”

A plume of smoke rises after an explosion amid ongoing U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iran on March 2 in Tehran, Iran.

Persistent ‘Misreading’ Of Iran

Mostafa Najafi, a Tehran-based security analyst, argued that Trump had miscalculated in his estimation of the Islamic Republic’s vulnerability.

Rather than folding under severe pressure, he argued that, “at the operational level, all branches of government—from the executive and legislative to the judiciary and national security institutions—retain full capacity to administer the country and maintain stability”.

Iran’s armed forces- both the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the regular army- operate within an established and disciplined chain of command dedicated to “the defense of national security and the prevention of any attempt by foreign actors to exploit transitional circumstances”, he said.

“Unfortunately, there appears to be a persistent misreading in Washington of Iran’s internal dynamics and national resilience,” Najafi told Newsweek.

“The assumption that eliminating the country’s top leadership could replicate a ‘Venezuela-style’ scenario reflects a misunderstanding of the structural, historical, and social distinctions that set Iran apart.”

“Likewise, the notion that regime change in Iran can be achieved through aerial bombardment is less a serious strategic assessment than a political fantasy—one that certain regional actors, including Benjamin Netanyahu, may attempt to market to Donald Trump,” Najafi said.

“Iran’s political and social architecture does not lend itself to collapse under external military pressure; in fact, such pressure often produces the opposite effect, strengthening internal cohesion.”

Najafi argued that was precisely the phenomenon occurring now among large shares of the Iranian population.

“The Islamic Republic maintains a substantial and deeply committed support base prepared to bear significant costs in defense of the political system,” Najafi said. “Moreover, field observations suggest that even segments of society that previously expressed frustration with the government are recalibrating their positions in the face of foreign military action. Historically, external threats have tended to narrow internal divisions, at least temporarily.”

“In sum, the realities unfolding inside Iran diverge considerably from the assumptions held by some policymakers in Washington or Tel Aviv,” Najafi added. “Iran cannot be analyzed through simplistic analogies or template-driven regime change models. Its institutional depth, social complexity, and historical experience make external miscalculations not only likely, but potentially costly.”

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