For the first time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which swept the mullahs to power, the collapse of Iran’s tyrannical regime is a realistic prospect.
Israel’s dazzling mix of air strikes, sabotage and assassination by agents on the ground has already dealt a succession of heavy blows to the Islamic Republic and its geriatric leadership.
And if, as President Donald Trump is hinting, America goes all-in against Iran, the force it unleashes will collapse not only the regime’s key nuclear bunkers – concealed hundreds of feet below whole mountains – but the Islamic Republic itself.
Yet kicking down the door is easier than creating a sustainable peace, as Washington found to its enormous cost after toppling Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein in 2003. Iraq and the wider region became a quagmire. American and British troops, attempting to impose some kind of order, were besieged and killed by Saddam loyalists and Iranian-inspired militias.
The deranged Islamic State (IS) group appeared and, amid the chaos, rampaged across Iraq and Syria. Radicalised by the conflict, British and European Muslims attempted to join IS or stayed at home to launch terror attacks. All this fuelled the migration crisis as millions tried to flee the Middle East. The cost to the US and its backers as they tried to reassemble the fragments of what had been destroyed was incalculable.
Trump’s more cautious advisers will be making just this point as, in the next few hours, the Commander in Chief calculates America’s next steps.
They have every reason to fear that the collapse of Iran would have a similar destabilising effect, sparking armed conflict, political chaos, disrupted trade and restricted oil supplies for years, perhaps decades to come. Perhaps even the return of IS terrorism or forces like it.
Russia, China, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey – not to mention the US and Israel – will all be scrambling for influence, power or control of the Iranian oilfields in a new version of the Great Game.
The first place to feel the chaos if the mullahs fall will be Iran itself, which faces the prospect of internal disintegration – the Balkanisation of an ancient nation into territories controlled by fractious warlords.
Iran has a population of more than 90 million – three times that of Iraq – and with an even more complicated ethnic make-up.
While Persian speakers are the majority, Iran contains many other ethnic groups. If the Islamic Republic collapses, the unifying role of a shared faith – Shia Islam – could disintegrate with it.
The non-Persians in Iran – including Azeris, Kurds and Balochs – could break away from Tehran’s control. It’s a real threat. The ayatollahs already accuse the small, independent and oil-rich state of Azerbaijan to the north of aiding Israeli air strikes in the hope it will one day gain control of Iran’s populous Azerbaijan province. A third of Iranians are Azeri.
Bigger neighbours such as Russia and Turkey would be profoundly unhappy were Iran to collapse into component parts, as did Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Turkey is worried that Iran’s Kurds could follow the example of the troublesome Iraqi Kurds, who set up their own autonomous regime just over the southern border. Ankara fears that its own 28 million Kurds could be inspired to rebel and join a populous Kurdish state carved out of Iran, Iraq and Turkey itself.
Ankara has long wished to assert itself as the dominant force in the region and will attempt to take advantage of any power vacuum.
There is trouble to the south-east of Iran, too, where members of the war-like Baloch tribe straddle the border with Pakistan.
Baloch insurgents have taken up arms against both Tehran and Islamabad in their own pursuit of independence and have attacked, for example, Chinese contractors building infrastructure in Pakistan.
The collapse of Tehran’s authority brings the risk that terrorism will spread to Iran’s neighbours and the wider region.
It includes the potential resurgence of IS which – inspired by a medieval vision of Islam – still dreams of destroying nation states in order to create a single Ummah, or holy Muslim empire, in the Middle East.
It is worth noting that the mullahs, for all their horrific faults, have been resolute in suppressing IS and the Arab nationalism that drives such groups. Supporters of the fallen ayatollahs, too, could turn to terrorism. Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards already have a track record in car bombing and assassination. They could be expected to target not only a new Iranian government but also opponents abroad.
Such men could easily escape a new Iran – and bring their old hatreds to the West. It is only a few weeks since our own security services foiled a Revolutionary Guard plot to blow up the Israeli embassy in London.
The US and Israel are not alone in hoping the mullah’s regime will fall, of course.
Millions of ordinary Iranians, particularly the young, educated citizens of Tehran and Isfahan, would rejoice to see the end of an Islamic Revolution which has proved every bit as incompetent as it is viciously oppressive.
Most Iranians alive today were born after the 1979 revolution against the Shah’s corrupt pro-Western regime. Millions are now sceptical of the mullahs’ hypocrisy and contemptuous of their failures, including the regime’s inability to protect its own people.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and bully boys have already suffered severe losses in the Israeli bombardments – and will suffer more in the days to come.
It is no longer clear they have the numbers, the organisation or morale to suppress citizen protests as they have done so brutally before this latest conflict.
Yet the Iranian people, too, should be careful what they wish for.
Back in 1979, naive commentators imagined that Iran, freed from the shackles of the Shah, would become some form of popular democracy. History has delivered a cruel verdict.
However desirable the idea of a new freedom-loving Iran might seem, let’s not allow optimism to carry us away.
For a start, it is nationalism not Western-style democracy that’s more likely to bind Iranians together as they struggle to rebuild.
Among the majority, there is immense pride in the antiquity of their nation and a civilisation going back to Imperial Persia before 500BC – 1,000 years before the Prophet Muhammad was born.
While it’s likely that ‘democratic’ elections would be staged, they would serve largely as a ritual.
As after 1979, it will be the men with guns, charisma and ruthless political skills who decide what democracy means.
Even the issue of nuclear technology – the pretext for Israel’s current bombardment – could rear its terrifying head again.
Any new leadership would be all too aware that the mullahs’ failure to build and test a bomb left Iran strategically defenceless against Israel and the US – unlike, for example, such nuclear-armed powers as North Korea and China.
The new rulers might well decide to get their own nuclear weapon as insurance. The technical knowledge to build one will still be lurking there.
Trump could probably topple his bete noire in the space of a few weeks – much like his predecessor George W. Bush in 2003. Yet there is no prospect that the US would want to pick up the pieces of a defeated and devastated Iran by occupying it. The disaster of Iraq has seen to that.
Nor will Trump – whose prime focus remains domestic – want to pay the vast economic price of conflict and chaos that could last not just for years but decades. The President came to power promising an end to ‘forever wars’. Now, in the Middle East, he is being sorely tested.
Mark Almond is the director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford.
