The latest US-Israeli bombings in Iran differ from last year’s because one of the stated aims this time is regime change.
Engaged in the mass murder of civilians at home and fomenting violence abroad, the current Iranian regime has few friends internationally.
Many would be glad to see Iran undergo a far-reaching program of political reform. For many in the Iranian diaspora, regime change imposed from outside is better than none.
But the historical record of imposed regime change, particularly as undertaken by the United States, is patchy at best.
Things rarely go to plan, and the long-term consequences are often disastrous.
Some immediate examples spring to mind.
Still fresh in the public mind would be the shocking scenes of desperate Afghans trying to leave Kabul in 2021 as the United States conceded it could not permanently defeat the Taliban.
This admission came after two decades, thousands of deaths of US and allied troops and tens of thousands of Afghan deaths.
Many would also remember then-US President George W. Bush’s disastrous speech in May 2003 about America’s regime change efforts in Iraq, begun in March that year. Here, Bush addressed the press while standing in front of a huge banner that said “Mission Accomplished”; the implication was regime change had been achieved in just a few months.
In fact, what followed was another decade of US fighting to try to stabilise Iraq, with actions arguably not wound up until 2018 or even beyond.
Once again this came at a huge cost to civilian lives, with The Lancet estimating as early as 2004 that around 100,000 “excess deaths” had occurred as a result of the US attempt to effect regime change there.
Thereafter, Iraq was continuously wracked by violence and civil war. Notably, ISIS took advantage of its weakened state to establish its “caliphate” on Iraqi territory, leading to yet another wave of US intervention.
But US attempts to impose regime change have a much longer and equally unsuccessful history, as well.
The phrase “Bay of Pigs” has become a synonym for the inability to overthrow a government.
