A topic I only briefly covered in my previous post concerning the Operation Epic Error (oops, I mean, Fury, not Error), concerned what may or may not occur in Iran following the change in regime. Yes, I think it’s a given that the regime will fall. I knew that in the first hour. I just don’t believe it’s our business to decide which regimes are better or worse for another country. Imagine if we were subject to the same by other countries. Since it is regime change, the question becomes how this happens post conflict?
Remember during Iraq when the Bush Administration had it all planned out as to who would be the interim leader of the country? A guy named Chalabi, was the administrations favorite and we saw hi on the news constantly being referred to as just that: The handpicked interim successor to Saddam Hussein. Of course, as it turned out, Chalibi wasn’t very populast in Iraq. No one knew who he was other than a guy who had escaped Saddam’s Iraq years earlier. He had fooled the Bush people into believing he would be warmly welcomed back home. He was not and that was the first indication of the debacle that Iraq was to become, and in some ways, still is today. Here’s a brief description of the pick of the Americans to lead a post-Saddam Iraq:
Ahmed Abdel Hadi Chalabi was an Iraqi convicted fraudster and founder of the Iraqi National Congress who served as the President of the Governing Council of Iraq and a Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq under Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He is believed to have been an Iranian agent
We have a great history of picking them, don’t we? I could say a. lot about Afghanistan as well, but for now, I’ll leave that one for a future post. Is there a possible interim leader for Iran? All anyone is talking about is the former Shah’s son, the Crown Prince, Reza Pahlavi. Of course, His Royal Highness(HRH) is relatively unknown in his former country ass he fled with his family, the Shah, in 1979. Most Iranians living today have no memory of the Pahlavi dynasty and even though HRH has been on televivion saying he would form an interim government, I don’t see the Iranians trusting someone that is a complete stranger to them.
There’s the problem oftthe faithful of the current regime that remains as well. According to best guesses (and that’s all they really are), the current government has the support of as many as 90% of the country with more realisitc guesstimates being 80%. And, as I mentioned before, the current government has all of weaponary to make it difficult for any interim government to form. When there may be as many as 20 million loyalists out of a population of 94 million, that’s a potential very long term civil war with a lot more than the approximately 36,000 that have reportedly been massacred by Iran recently. The number could reach millions of casualties and of course, this would be asymmetric where it isn’t easy to know friend from foe.
Finally, there’s the problem of a civil war in Iran becoming a region-wide conflict as Irans neighbors enter the fray to calm the situation and to keep it from spreading. It’s like introducing a virus to kill another virus. Is ther a positive outcome? It’s not impossible but based on our history of regime change, no. All that we can hope for is an insurgency does not start, as it did in Iraq (you know that neighbor country of Iran that wanted to be free as well) and end up having the US leave, with a small (around 2500) contingent left in country to ensure the “stability”(heh) of Iraq. How many troops would we be leaving in Iran?
There’s a lot of questions to be answered and I only covered a couple of the obvious ones here.