Unthinkable (27 page)

The regime has demonstrated time and again that it is able to thwart
any internal threats with ease. In 1999, 2000, 2003, and 2007, there were large-scale student protests in Tehran and other cities against the regime's political and social controls. All were brutally but effectively crushed by the regime's security forces in just days. The 2009 Green revolt was several orders of magnitude larger and more dangerous, but it took only a few weeks for the regime to smash it. When the Greens attempted to reassert themselves in 2011, feeding off the energy of the “Arab Spring,” the regime was able to confuse, disperse, and scatter them in days. No significant demonstrations or marches even coalesced.

The regime is skilled at crushing domestic opposition. It identifies potential opposition leaders and imprisons them. It monitors and disrupts social media and controls broadcast and Internet communications. It intimidates major political figures to prevent them from supporting opposition groups. It polices its various military forces through a traditional network of layered intelligence and security services, each one watching all the others. And it ferrets out foreign intelligence operations in Iran. As Suzanne Maloney notes, “The Islamic Republic has survived every calamity short of the plague: war, isolation, instability, terrorist attacks, leadership transition, drought and epic earthquakes.”
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RISKY BUSINESS.
In addition to the hurdles to regime change, there are also some significant dangers involved. The regime will likely fight back, and fight back as hard as it can, against whatever internal opposition exists, particularly any supported by the United States. The regime is also likely to lash out directly against the United States.

Efforts to promote democracy, to work with opposition figures, or to provide assistance to ethnic and religious minorities resisting the central government by force could prompt the regime to crack down harder. That has been the regime's pattern of behavior. When the Iraqi army invaded Iran in 1980, at a time when the Iranian military was in disarray, most of Iran's Revolutionary Guards were in northwest Iran, crushing a separatist revolt by Iran's Kurdish community. It's noteworthy that the regime kept the Guards in Kurdistan until the revolt was put down, even while
the Iraqis were advancing unchecked through oil-rich Khuzestan. The more that the United States tries to support internal groups opposed to the regime, the more we may bring down Tehran's wrath upon them. Our efforts to fund democratic activists in Iran during the Bush 43 administration provoked a crackdown on them. Although the amount of money the United States provided amounted to a fraction of what a sustained democracy program would require, the Iranian regime responded ferociously. Iranian intelligence officials grilled Iranian activists about this money, and often used the suspicion that someone was accepting such funds as grounds to arrest and interrogate them.
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Many Iranians became wary of any activities that could even be linked indirectly to the United States.
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Fariba Davoodi Mohajer, a women's rights advocate, argued that U.S. support for civil society became “a ready tool for the Iranian government to use against totally independent activists. It's been very counterproductive.”
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If new American efforts were to take off and a mass movement develop, the clerical regime's response could cause thousands of deaths, far more than those killed in 2009. Its rhetoric and actions against the reform movement in the past indicate that the Iranian leadership sees violence as a legitimate response to peaceful demonstrators. Evidence from previous revolts suggests that military units would fire into crowds, and the regime would not hesitate to carry out mass trials to stay in power.

Such internal brutality creates an ethical question: should the United States try to help Iranians who want to overthrow their government if doing so might provoke widespread killing by the regime? Some may answer that if oppressed people want to run the risk of opposing their oppressors, it should not be for the United States to question their courage. Others may feel that it is unconscionable to encourage people to take actions likely to lead to large-scale killing, especially if the chances of success are low.

The other risk created by this policy is practical and strategic. Tehran's tendency to lash out whenever it has felt that its control over the country is threatened has extended to foreign affairs as well. As best we can tell,
the 1996 Khobar Towers blast was an Iranian response to an $18 million increase in the U.S. covert action budget against Iran in 1995. Although that covert action program posed little threat to Tehran at the time (and $18 million was a paltry sum for the United States), the Iranians apparently saw it as a declaration of covert war and may have destroyed the Khobar Towers complex as a way of warning the United States of the consequences of such a campaign.
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Similarly, Iran's response to the cyberwarfare attacks being launched against it over the past four to five years (and which Tehran believes originated with the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom) has been to launch corresponding attacks of its own against whatever targets it can: American banks and Saudi oil infrastructure.
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Finally, Iran has retaliated with assassination attempts, including an attempt to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States and attacks on Israelis for what it believes to have been Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists.
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If the United States threatened its grip on power with a dedicated campaign, Tehran would likely take several steps. First, it would increase its support for guerrilla and terrorist groups around the region to encourage and enable them to attack America and its allies. Afghanistan would be a likely theater for an Iranian response given Tehran's ties to the Taliban and other anti-American groups. Iran might try to go after U.S. personnel in Iraq as well, but since the withdrawal of American military forces in 2011, these are smaller and less inviting targets. The Iranians might opt to hit U.S. diplomats, military officers, and even private citizens elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe. They might step up their attacks on U.S. allies—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, and others—as well. They might also encourage groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hizballah to be more aggressive toward Israel. Tehran almost certainly would continue its cyberattacks on the United States, perhaps even escalating them if there is anything more that they could do in this area that they have not already tried, like shutting down the power or water infrastructures of major American cities. Finally, the Iranians might even decide to mount terrorist attacks against the U.S. homeland, and in the
future they may be better prepared for such operations than they were in 2010 with the half-baked Arbabsiar plot.

Despite these reasons to be skeptical of a regime change strategy, there are also arguments in its favor. The first and most obvious is that helping indigenous Iranian oppositionists to change the regime in Tehran could be done at a relatively low cost. If a new Iranian regime made improving relations with the United States a priority, regime change might address more than just the nuclear impasse, conceivably resolving all of America's problems with the Islamic Republic.

The most important rationale in favor of supporting regime change, however, is the emergence of a legitimate, indigenous opposition within Iran. Before 2009, the outside world recognized that at least some Iranians were unhappy with their political, social, and economic circumstances. It was not apparent whether this dissatisfaction was confined to a tiny segment of Iran's middle- and upper-class populations. The events of 2009 changed all that. Millions of Iranians poured out into the streets of dozens of Iranian towns and cities, voicing their opposition not just to what they saw as a fraudulent election but to the Islamic Republic itself.

The Green Movement is an imperfect vehicle for regime change. Its failures in 2009 and 2011 have made it seem ineffective to many Iranians. Moreover, the leaders of the Green Movement were inevitably just the most unhappy of the losing candidates from the 2009 election, Mehdi Karrubi and Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Both of these men are former regime officials and more interested in reforming the regime to save it, rather than overthrowing it altogether. They are the leaders the movement rallied around, but not necessarily those that the Iranian people might have chosen if they could have had a wider range to pick from. Still, there remain signs of popular disenchantment with the regime—and difficulties that the regime is experiencing holding down dissent—that suggest that even since 2009, the latent potential for large-scale unrest persists.
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We need to be careful. We don't know how many Iranians supported the Greens or would like to see the regime overthrown. However, we know that roughly 70 percent of the country voted for Mohammad Khatami in 1997, and Khatami was the most change-oriented president ever elected in Iran. And we know that he was elected because Iranians
wanted
change. We also know that several million Iranians took to the streets to demand radical political change in 2009. In a country of 75 million, that may not seem like much, but revolutions are inevitably the work of small minorities. In one of the great books on the Iranian Revolution, Charles Kurzman points out that historically most successful revolutions have been conducted by less than 5 percent of a population. The Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 may have been the most popular protest event in history as it encompassed more than 10 percent of Iranians. Consequently, the size of the protests in 2009 accords with historical norms of successful revolutions.
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The basic ingredients of regime change exist in Iran.

Over the past ten to fifteen years, the Iranian regime has experienced growing problems with restive minority groups in the country. The Arabs in Khuzestan (the far southwest), the Kurds in the northwest, and the Baluch in the southeast have all chafed against their status. All believe that they are the victims of prejudice and official discrimination. Many Kurds seek to secede from Iran altogether. Other groups may, too. The regime has had to fight a terrorist campaign by Arab Iranians, and guerrilla wars waged by the Kurds and Baluch.
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There may be other ethnic and religious minorities in Iran willing to take action against the regime, as well.

Moreover, the paranoia of the Iranian regime could be an asset as well as an obstacle to a policy of regime change. Because of its obsessive fears with internal opposition, and especially foreign-aided internal opposition, the clerical regime often overreacts to the slightest hint of domestic unrest. This tendency has helped undermine its own popularity, alienate key internal constituencies, and create foes where none existed. It has probably also caused the regime to punish many innocent people who might otherwise have been allies. Tehran's overreactions have earned it
opprobrium from foreign powers as well. Its overreaction at Khobar Towers could easily have resulted in a massive American conventional military strike against Iran had it not been for Mohammad Khatami's election in 1997.
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While America's ability to hurt Iran through covert action may be modest, the Iranian regime's ability to hurt itself by overreacting to threats of covert action is enormous. American efforts to support regime change in Iran may not have to accomplish much more than piquing the paranoia of the regime, and then allowing it to destroy itself.

Because the United States has not seriously tried to bring about regime change in Iran since 1953, the biggest obstacle of all might be figuring out how to go about it. For decades, experts (including this author) have warned that regime change is a terrible idea, and so the United States never pursued it. Moreover, the Iranian regime has had a frighteningly good track record crushing internal revolts and smashing American intelligence programs directed at it.
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Knowing what to do, even where to start to think about how to overthrow the Iranian regime, is a considerable challenge.
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Because doing so has proven so difficult in the past, the United States and its allies would have to explore a range of options to undercut the regime's grip on power, including some that for good reason have been considered verboten for decades. Even just to explore the possibilities created by the emergence of a large, indigenous opposition, the United States is going to have to advance over unknown terrain. Helping Iranians who want to oppose their own regime would require a great deal of scouting, trial and error, and thinking outside of our traditional “box.” Because the circumstances in Iran have changed so dramatically since 2009, we ought to be willing to question whether old taboos still apply or if there are new, smarter, better ways to challenge them. The real question is whether each specific operation has a high enough probability of success, a low-enough
probability of failure and attendant harm, and a reasonable expectation that even partial success would be useful.

A critical component of any strategy would be to make connections with the Green Movement. There are many opportunities to connect with Iranian activists. Iran today is a land of labor protests and political demonstrations. The challenge is to establish ties, overt or covert, with important trade unions and student organizations with national networks connected by social media outlets. There are many unhappy mullahs in Iran because Khomeini's ideas were considered heretical by most traditional Shi'i clerics and many others feared that bringing religion into politics would only alienate people from religion. Some of them might be induced to condemn the moral shortcomings of the Islamist regime. We have also seen Iranian diplomats and nuclear scientists defect to the West. We could intensify our efforts to convince others to do the same.