Achieving a civilian takeover will be easier said than done

“IT’Stough to make predictions, especially about the future,” Yogi Berra long ago informed us, which is why my initial piece for this issue made no mention of the gathering clouds of war with Iran. No one knew when, or even if, war would break out.

At least those questions have now been answered, though what is to come remains highly uncertain. All last week, various news outlets reported that President Trump wanted Israel to attack first, an absolutely absurd request from Israel’s point of view, as it would provide limitless fuel to those of right and left claiming nonsensically, as we shall see, that Israel controls American foreign policy. Happily, that did not come to pass, as the initial American and Israeli strikes were closely coordinated and simultaneous.

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S lead negotiator with the Iranians, Steve Witkoff, told Fox News last week that Trump was unable to understand Iran’s refusal to accept America’s demands for strict limits on its ballistic missile program and on its funding of terrorism, given the overwhelming firepower that the United States had mustered nearby. What he failed to understand is that the late and unlamented Ayatollah Khamenei operated according a theological-ideological calculus utterly foreign to Western definitions of rationality.

Haviv Rettig Gur, Israel’s foremost policy analyst, outlines that framework in a must-read article at the Free Press, “This Is How the Islamic Republic Falls.” That doctrine is called muquwama in Arabic. And it begins with “a sustained, never-ending campaign of violence accompanied by a willingness to absorb catastrophic levels of damage.”

It involves the sacralization of sacrifice as a means of obtaining divine favor and thereby allowing the pious weak to overcome the arrogant strong. In this view, “damage inflicted on the resistance is validation, and destruction is not defeat, but devotion.” The tens of thousands of children sent to their deaths as human minesweepers in the Iraq-Iran War, with a key to heaven around their necks, provides a classic example of sacrifice as devotion, sanctified by Al-lah.

Another key strand of muquwama, added by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, is its internationalization. He referred to Iranian nationalism as nothing less than “idolatry,” and sought to expand Islamic domination everywhere, no matter what the cost to Iran itself or the well-being of its citizenry.

While muquwama is powerful because it is undeterrable by conventional measures of defeat, it carries within it the seeds of its own defeat in “the fury of peoples it has destroyed in order to sustain itself.” When the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei addressed the Iranian people in January and spoke of the hundreds of thousands of martyrs who had built the Islamic Revolution, he was at the same time informing them what he was prepared to do to preserve the Islamic Republic.

But the vast majority of Iranians were not prepared for that sacrifice. After the 12-Day War with Israel last June, support for the principles of the 1979 Revolution had fallen to 11 percent, according to the best available public opinion polling. And nearly 70 percent wanted the regime to stop calling for the destruction of Israel. The chants of the huge street crowds — “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran” — reflected a total rejection of the regime’s expansionism, which has come at such a huge cost to the lives of ordinary Iranians.

ACCORDINGLY, both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu called for regime change at the outset of their campaign. Trump famously told demonstrators last December and January that help was on the way. Though that promise was delayed, he reiterated over the weekend that when the joint American-Israeli campaign is over, the Iranian masses would likely have the best chance in their lifetimes to depose a hated and oppressive regime. And Netanyahu, just has he had done last June during the 12-Day War, addressed the Iranian people as friends, not enemies, and pledged Israel’s support for their struggle.

Achieving a civilian takeover, however, will be easier said than done. There is no unified Iranian opposition, and virtually all military force remains in the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and their vicious Basij militias.

President Trump has repeatedly ruled out putting American boots on the ground. The United States at most can degrade assets of the IRGC, which functions as a financial conglomerate, as well as a military force, from the air. Minimally, that will require a sustained campaign directed at the IRGC, which dominates Iran’s telecommunications network, the energy sector, the ports, and the black markets.

Gregg Roman, of the Middle East Forum, writes that the United States and Israel must deny the Islamic Republic “the oxygen it needs to reconstitute its leadership... And they must relentlessly strike the intelligence ministries, with which the regime monitors citizens using Chinese technology, and the command centers of the vicious Basij militias, which serve as the arm of the IRGC to enforce sharia law.”

The IRGC, which might well seize full power from the mullahs, has at minimum a $100 billion stake in the Iranian economy. Because it is structured as much like a multinational conglomerate as like a conventional military, it must be attacked as such. That requires, writes Rettig-Gur, designating its entire axis as a transnational criminal organization, followed by intercepting ships, blacklisting banks through which it transfers money, and disrupting currency auctions in Iraq that launder IRGC revenue. The impact of all those actions is to force the regime to choose between continued funding of its war machine and feeding its people.

And we must make sure the Iranian population know who is reaping the benefits. The IRGC is no longer the weak and oppressed of Khomeini’s founding ideology. Its leaders have grown extraordinarily rich. Their children study abroad and live lavish lifestyles in Dubai. One Iranian official’s daughter was recently married in a revealing wedding gown, even as the regime is busy forcing women to wear hijabs. A photo of that wedding went viral in Iran. So must the banking records and property deeds of IRGC’s commanders.

Finally, urges Rettig-Gur, those seeking to take down the regime must provide the fed-up citizenry with communications infrastructure necessary to organize and the decentralized financial tools outside the regime’s economic grip.

WHETHER THESE STEPS will be sufficient to topple the regime entirely is impossible to know. But the destruction of Iranian military assets thus far will have a major impact on the global struggle between the United States and China. The United States did not spend tens of billions of dollars assembling an armada from which to attack Iran for the benefit of Israel, but rather to weaken China and deter it from moving to take over Taiwan. And Israel’s degradation of Iran’s military assets last June and yesterday has served America well in that regard. Zineb Riboua of the Hudson Institute tells the story in “The Iran Question Is About China.”

One of China’s greatest strategic weaknesses is its dependence on foreign sources for oil and natural gas. That is why it has invested so heavily in the Maduro regime in Venezuela and in protecting the mullahs in Iran. Just last week it was announced that China would supply Iran with supersonic cruise missiles capable of damaging America’s largest aircraft carriers. In addition, China has shipped 1,000 tons of a crucial ingredient in missile propellant to Iran to enable it to rebuild missile stocks destroyed by Israel last June.

The United States meanwhile is the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas, in part due to the Trump administration’s reversal of his predecessor’s restrictions on their production.

Due to stringent international sanctions on Iran’s oil industry, Chinese purchase of Iranian oil, albeit at a steep discount from market prices, has been Iran’s virtually only source of foreign currency in recent years. But the cooperation between the two countries does not end there. Under a comprehensive 25-year agreement signed in 2021, China committed to investing $400 billion in Iran’s energy, banking, telecommunications, and infrastructure sectors.

In addition, Chinese companies have provided Iran with the same ability to suppress internal unrest that China itself employs, including facial recognition technology and the ability to cut off citizens from external Internet.

The damage to international shipping caused by Iran’s proxy, the Houthis, benefits China vis-à-vis its global competitors, primarily the United States. Chinese-flagged ships passed through the Red Sea unimpeded, even as Chinese satellites helped the Houthis with intelligence to target commercial vehicles of other nations.

Moreover, the cost to the United States of keeping a carrier strike group deployed to keep shipping lanes open, and the use of one-quarter of its high-end interceptor inventory, were dollars not spent on submarine production, Pacific-basing, or Taiwan contingency planning — all needed for the defense of Taiwan. Taiwan is of crucial strategic value to the US, as it produces well over 90 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips.

Anxiety generated by Iran’s military power has driven America’s traditional Gulf allies far closer to China and placed them less reliably in the American camp. Saudi Arabia sells more oil today to China than any other country, and China brokered a Saudi-Iran normalization agreement.

In large part, the loss of faith in America’s protective umbrella, which the Chinese expertly exploited, followed from the perceived fecklessness of the United States with regard to the Iranian threat under presidents Obama and Biden. That loss of faith should have been reversed by President Trump’s bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites last June and yesterday’s launch of Operation Epic Fury

Operation Epic Fury is the first American military campaign that threatens to sever China from its Iranian asset. Just as the capture of Nicolas Maduro cut off the supply of Venezuelan oil to China, so too has the American-Israeli assault on Iran threatened to cut off China from Iranian oil. It would be easy for either America or Israel to destroy the Kharg Island oil terminal through which almost all of Iran’s oil flows.

In addition, as Riboua puts it, the imminent collapse of the Islamic Republic “removes the single greatest drain on the American strategic bandwidth,” and allows America to greatly increase its military resources in the Pacific and focus on the defense of Taiwan.

But the job of removing Iran as a strategic threat is far from complete, though hopefully it will continue to advance in coming days. That threat has never been solely nuclear. In January, Riboua notes, the IRGC launched ballistic missiles from shipping containers aboard a cheaply purchased cargo vehicle, which means that Iran now possesses a mobile, survivable, and largely undetectable strike platform.

Arms control cannot manage a threat to American carriers from unmarked hulls in vast oceans. For that it will be necessary to destroy the Iranian navy entirely, and also Iran’s alliances with regional proxies. The latter Israel has largely done, and it will surely be the major participant in the former.

All in America’s interest. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Tucker.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1102. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)