No. of Recommendations: 12
But that's not a correct lens. The regime has been decapitated. The mullah council is gone, the top generals are gone and the new "Supreme Leader" is at best in a coma missing major body parts. You're going to immediately push back here and tell me "but the regime is still in charge!" But one needs to add additional context:
-It took 7 months of bombing to get rid of Libya
-it's only been 12 days here
-Not every move has played out yet
in Iran's case, the Basiji thugs running around on their motorcycles are keeping the citizens in line while what's left of the IRGC tries to maintain some semblance of control.
It's still early....but we've already fired our main shot. The Iranian regime's plans for continuity and maintaining control were severely tested, as we eliminated a lot of their leadership in the first few days. And they passed that test.
It didn't take 7 months of bombing to "get rid of Libya." It took seven months of bombing before Gaddafi was finally killed. And once he was killed, the regime fell literally immediately, because there wasn't any regime in Libya other than Gaddafi. There was no institutional regime, just his personal power. We now know that isn't happening in Iran the same way as it happened in Libya, because unlike Libya there is actually a structure to the Iranian government that's capable of transitioning beyond the death of any individual leaders.
This is not a case where "what's left of the IRGC tries to maintain some semblance of control." There's no indication that the IRGC has lost any of its institutional capabilities - they are still very firmly in charge of the country, and the loss of their leadership does not appear to have affected their control at all. All of the publicly discussed intelligence reports find that they have full control of the Iranian populace, not a "semblance" of control. Similarly, I'm not sure where you're getting "coma" notion from - the Administration has said that the younger Khameini was wounded, but not that he was put into a coma.
Now there's a Marine Expeditionary force headed to the Gulf likely with a very specific island destination in mind.
And what does that do? We could bomb Kharg Island. Or seize it, though the combination of "boots on the ground" and putting an additional spike into oil prices are going to be quite unpleasant for Trump politically, so who knows if he actually gives the go ahead for either. Neither diminishes Iran's capacity for asymmetric warfare. Trump might be 100% correct when he notes that we have "unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition and plenty of time" - but that's been true in other conflicts, like when we were in Iraq or Afghanistan. "Unparalleled firepower" doesn't mean "you win" - it just means that you have an insurmountable edge in conventional battles, so your opponent is forced to engage in asymmetric warfare. That puts them at a disadvantage, but (again) as we've seen in other conflicts, you can win with asymmetric warfare. And that's going to be especially the case here, because Iran is completely capable of keeping the Straits mostly shut down even with their conventional military destroyed.
It's still early days, yes. We might at some point in the future "totally destroy the terrorist regime of Iran." But these early indications aren't great, right? The most plausible timelines for destroying the regime didn't happen, and they've already passed. The regime didn't collapse when their leadership was decapitated. The regime didn't get taken over by a more pragmatic successor. The decapitation strike didn't engender a civil war, which also differentiates this situation from Libya (where the civil war had actually already started a month or so before the bombing campaign). Having survived all that, there are far fewer plausible scenarios for the regime to be destroyed going forward....
....with the tactics we're taking now. Obviously, if we did a full on ground invasion like Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom, we could absolutely destroy the regime. But that doesn't seem to be on offer. We could put in a smaller, but still sizable, ground force invasion and perhaps accomplish the goal of destroying the government and clear the path for another conquering force (say, the Kurds) - but I don't think that's on offer, either.
What does seem to be on offer appears to be at most: i) more aerial power; ii) limited and discrete "expeditionary force" boots on the ground; and iii) perhaps supporting other people's boots on the ground (like the Kurds). It's not literally impossible for those things to work, but they're pretty unlikely. We're not going to be able to bomb our way out of this situation.
