How Regime Change In Iran Could Unfold — Without Repeating Iraq And Afghanistan Mistakes

*Updated July 6, 2025 at 5:45 p.m. with reports of Ali Khamenei’s public appearance

-Analysis-

Ever since Israel launched 12 days of strikes on Iran last month, much of the international media has been obsessively stoking fears over what the possibility of regime change in Tehran could bring. Subsequent U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites took the number of misconstrued articles opposing regime change to frenetic new heights.

Each new day brings another headline with the same lame and threadbare arguments: if Israel and the United States are contemplating regime change in Iran, expect the gates of hell to open! The Washington Post alone has published more than seven articles warning against regime change in Iran. (Saturday night’s first public appearance of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei since the war in Israel prompted widespread coverage)

Time magazine featured an article headlined: In Bombing Iran, Trump Looked Past 80 Years of U.S. Regime Change Mistakes. An NBC News report observed in turn that “successful Western-back regime change is rare – while calamities have abounded,” citing Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as grim examples. 

Now, while this may satisfy certain audiences, such reasoning is superficial. Basing forecasts largely on emotional motivations and a conviction that the past inevitably shapes the present risks leaving out both basic logic and current geopolitical realities.

Worse, the argument is being made just when U.S. airstrikes against nuclear facilities in Iran have fundamentally changed the strategic equation. The debate now is no longer about the feasibility of regime change in Iran, but whether or not it is necessary! NBC’s report offers no constructive solutions on dealing with the scenario of the Tehran regime’s continuation.

This type of argument relies on a particular narrative and selective interpretation of history that reduces complex interventions to simplified failures, and completely ignores the specificity of the Iranian context today. Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan after 2001 and Libya in 2011 were all flawed projects, not because regime change was inherently bad or unfeasible, but because those missions lacked strategic coherence, were plagued by poor planning and disregarded realities on the ground once the regime change had actually taken place.

Paralysis emboldens regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran

To cite these examples as irrefutable evidence that regime change should never be attempted again is neither analysis nor taking stock of the past, but intellectual paralysis.

And this paralysis emboldens regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran. These are regimes that are both repressive at home and markedly hostile abroad, financing terrorism and posing a variety of threats to regional and global security. Such fatalistic analyses only encourage them to consider themselves invincible, and to pursue their repression with greater intensity.

Iraq and Afghanistan: Lessons, Not Excuses

Consider Iraq. The military overthrow of Saddam Hussein was swift and successful, and popular with many Iraqis, especially the Iraqi Kurds. But what followed was a series of own-goals and mistakes. The disastrous policy of Ba’athist purges stripped Iraqi institutions of experienced managers and security hands, forcing thousands to join the insurgency for a living.

The situation was made worse by the failure to anticipate the opportunism and exploitation of Iraq’s post-war disorders by Iran’s Shia rulers. American and British commanders allowed Shia militias affiliated with the Iranian regime, like the Badr Corps, to enter Iraq across the Iranian border and infiltrate the country’s new security structures. Naturally, a series of such mistakes plunged Iraq into chaos.

Afghanistan fared no better. After the Taliban were overthrown, the United States and its allies failed to understand that the group was not just a loose collection of extremists, but a deep ideological movement with a religious and tribal backbone — and was backed and sheltered by Pakistan. Indeed, Osama bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, ostensibly a U.S. ally. Yet the United States never pressured Islamabad.

As a result, the Taliban bided their time, rebuilt themselves and eventually, with Iranian help, regained power in Afghanistan. Remember, the Tehran regime had no interest in seeing Iraq and Afghanistan becoming models of stability and prosperity for the Iranian people.

The real problem in both cases was not regime change, but a lack of strategic vision and planning for the “post-regime change future.” These were costly lessons, but are no excuse for today’s inaction. History is not a closed, static study. Like science, it progresses through evolution’s trial and error.

Why is Iran different?

Iran is not Iraq. It is not Afghanistan. It is not Libya. Iran has an educated society with a long history of understanding and convergence with the West, and Israel, and a largely youthful population alienated from its clerical rulers. Unlike Saddam or the Taliban, the Islamic Republic has no legitimacy among a majority of Iranians and is maintained not by popular support, but brute force.

There have been four major uprisings in Iran since 2009, all of which were crushed with extreme violence. This is not a nation that has surrendered, but one still striving to win its freedom, especially if the balance of power shifts in the people’s favor.

The Iranian military has the capacity to change the regime

Returning to recent events. U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities sent the regime a clear message. The attacks were not merely punitive, but an emphasis on responding to red lines that have been repeatedly crossed. In the new circumstances, regime change is no longer a taboo or an ideal or a proposition, but an inevitable strategic decision.

Practical path 

Critics say that Iran’s opposition lacks the organizational structure to lead the post-regime transition. That may be true, but options exist. The weakness of the Iranian opposition is a problem, but no excuse for inaction.

The Iranian military itself has the capacity to change the regime. Members of the army and even younger officers in Revolutionary Guards are very much divided in their loyalty to the ruling mullahs, especially if the regime is weakened. Many could be encouraged to act to save Iran and its remaining infrastructures, instead of risking their lives and those of loved ones to defend a reactionary clerical oligarchy.

These officers could be encouraged with covert support, intelligence coordination and various incentives to establish a transitional government in an orderly, non-chaotic manner, paving the way for future elections. This would be an internal military transfer, without foreign occupation. No need for foreign troops here or a 10-year ‘protectorate,’ but a calculated recalibration of the internal balance of power.. 

Such a transition would be far more orderly, legitimate and stable than the current situation, where a combination of a creeping nuclear crisis, gradual or rapid internal collapse, and a subsequent power vacuum could cook up another failed state recipe.

Unending 1953 coup narrative.. 

Western opponents of regime change, as usual, keep citing the precedent of the 1953, U.S.-backed “coup” against Mohammad Mosaddeq, the popular prime minister who nationalized Iran’s oil industry. He is often erroneously described as a democratically elected leader, in a false narrative that distorts the roots of the current Iranian regime’s hostility to the West. We may clarify the facts a little here, for Westerners’ sake:

Contrary to this Western media narrative, Mosaddeq was not elected “by popular vote,” but proposed to the monarch by parliament or the Majlis, pursuant to the constitution of the time, and confirmed in his position by the Shah. Had the Shah rejected the nomination, parliament would have had to nominate someone else. But when Mosaddeq himself illegally dissolved the assembly through a sham referendum and refused to accept a legal order dismissing him, it was those actions, not the CIA’s intervention, that were the real coup or act of lawlessness.

Regime change in Iran is not just a moral imperative but increasingly a strategic one.

The clerics who later led the Islamic Republic never had an interest in Mosaddeq, even if he is cited when it suits them. For a start, they feared his closeness to Iranian communists, and discreetly worked toward his fall and the Shah’s return in mid-1953. 

The 1979 revolution was not then, as claimed, a people’s reaction to foreign meddling in Iran’s democratic sovereignty, but very much a fulfillment of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary agenda. He, not Mosaddeq’s overthrow, is the cause of 40 years of ostensible anti-Americanism in Iran.

The Current Situation

The debate over regime change in Iran is no longer purely academic. It is happening now, following the U.S. strikes, in the corridors of power in Tehran and in the whispers of the opposition in Iranian cities.

Time, the Washington Post or the New York Times, and those who promote the repetitive view of regime change as a recipe for failure, would have us believe that all options for an overthrow are doomed to fail because of past mistakes. But the mistakes were the result of poor execution, not because the goals were inherently illegitimate or impossible to achieve. If we allow mistakes to become a blueprint, we are effectively handing the field to regimes like the Islamic Republic, which are hellbent on repression at home and violence abroad.

Regime change in Iran is not just a moral imperative but increasingly a strategic one. The sooner we emerge from the shadow of mistakes made in Iraq after Saddam, by learning from them and creating a smarter path or roadmap, with wiser planning, the better the results obtained. And those would not be just for Iranians, but for millions of people living in the region, and beyond.