Malekzadeh: Why ‘bunker busters’ won’t end Iran’s nuclear ambitions

On Sunday at approximately a m Tehran time seven B- stealth aircraft attacked the Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordo Natanz and Isfahan strikes enabled as much by the belief that Iran had this coming as the particular device of the American bombers A drawling President Donald Trump put it in stark terms shortly after the operation ended For years Iran has been saying death to America death to Israel They have been killing our people blowing off their arms blowing off their legs with roadside bombs That was their specialty Convention drives coverage of Iran in the United States from stock images of anti-American murals to the enduring menace of Iranian-backed militias Now there is an emerging consensus that overthrowing the governing body in Tehran will accomplish what Israeli and U S missiles and air assaults have not an end to Iran s nuclear campaign and that country s destabilizing aspirations for regional hegemony not to mention an end of the oppressive Islamic Republic itself A series of headlines analysts and politicians have in contemporary days presented regime change as a natural certainty nothing less than a magic bullet This too is seen as Iran s due Very scant of these expert voices have taken the next step by asking Then what Where does the magic bullet land Sovereign imperatives await the next group to come into power Democratic or otherwise the regime that replaces the current regime will be laser-focused on Iran s survival And there is very little reason for Israel or the U S to think that a reconstituted Iran will become more conciliatory toward either country once the war ends The reality is that nationalism not theocracy remains what the historian Ali Ansari calls the determining ideology of Iran There is a robust consensus among scholars that politics in Iran begins with the idea of Iran as a people with a continuous and unbroken history a nation that looms out of an immemorial past Nationalism provides the broad political arena in which different groups and ideologies in Iran compete for power and authority whether monarchist Islamist or leftist No passing phase And that means that the patriotic defense of Iran isn t a passing phase produced under the duress of bombs but the default position the big idea that holds Iran together hardened over the last two centuries of Iranian history and the trauma of the loss of territory and dignity to outside powers including the Russians the British and the Americans Getting rid of Islamic rule won t change this dynamic it is almost sure to guarantee that something worse will come along sending Iranian politics in unexpected and more corrosive directions Americans after all need only look to their current administration or past interventions in the Middle East for examples of how populist responses to foreign invasions real or imagined can lead to unthinkable outcomes Trump just guaranteed that Iran will be a nuclear weapons state in the next to years particularly if the regime changes Trita Parsi of the U S -based Quincy Institute wrote Saturday night This is especially true if a new regime is democratic Related Articles In US the Iranian diaspora contends with the Israel-Iran war and a fragile ceasefire The Latest Trump says US and Iranian authorities will talk next week as ceasefire holds This is what could happen next after an Israel-Iran ceasefire Early US intelligence summary suggests US strikes only set back Iran s nuclear operation by months Trump is trying to script the perfect ending to war in Iran Will the rest of the world go along The promised liberation of the Iranian people through devastating bombing campaigns presents the worst-case scenario for Israel and the U S as no future elected regime would survive unless it sustained and perhaps surpassed the Islamic Republic of Iran s current belligerence There is tragedy here Ordinary Iranians like the majority people want peace and measure preferably through diplomacy and dialogue The unprovoked attacks of the last week and their subsequent justification by not only the U S but also nearly all of the European Union a disastrous sequence that began with Trump s wanton violation of President Obama s Iran deal in have convinced an increasing number of Iranians that the restraint of arms nuclear or otherwise is national suicide Insofar as the Islamic Republic can claim that it is the only Iranian establishment in more than years to have lost not an inch of soil it continues to cling to power Of lesson such legitimacy comes with a dual edge This regime may survive in the short term but if and when it does fall it will be because its leaders failed to keep Israeli and American arms out munitions that have already killed more than of their fellow citizens in less than a week according to the Washington-based group Human Rights Activists One of the the bulk common conventions when it comes to Iran typically presented as a gesture of grace is to draw a distinction between its cabinet and the people to lay blame on the mullahs and not the country s long-suffering citizens for their country s status as a rogue actor Phony friendship As a way to appeal to Iranians of the righteousness of his cause Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his surrogates have deployed tropes of civilizational greatness that would make even the preponderance ardent Persian chauvinist blush On Thursday the Israeli prime minister reported that the time had come for the Jews to repay an ancient debt I want to tell you that years ago Cyrus the Great the king of Persia liberated the Jews And in contemporary times a Jewish state is creating the means to liberate the Persian people Regime change by this logic is a project of recovery and revivalism a surefire way to make Iran great again Iranians are proving to be less nuanced and unconvinced The distance between the Iranian state and society has in the last week been reduced to almost nothing Across the range of experience and suffering from imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureates and formerly imprisoned Palm D Or winners to working-class laborers left behind by the revolution the overriding sentiment in contemporary times in Iran is clear These clerics may be scoundrels but they re our scoundrels our issue to solve Nearly years into an unwanted dictatorship Iranians have developed a refined ceiling for identifying bad faith They know who has Iran s interests at heart and who is trying to save his own skin Iranian American Shervin Malekzadeh is a professor of political science at Pitzer College and author of the forthcoming book Fire Beneath the Ash The Green Movement and the Struggle for Democracy in Iran - Los Angeles Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency