Israel’s decision to authorise its military to kill any senior Iranian official on its assassination list has raised significant new questions about its so-called decapitation strategy and what it is intended to achieve.
Privately, Israeli officials have briefed their US counterparts that in the event of an uprising, Iran’s opposition would be “slaughtered”. That appears to be at odds with Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to pursue regime change by targeting senior figures in Iran’s political and security apparatus.
Even before the outbreak of full-scale war, however, Iran experts and analysts – and some former Israeli officials – were sceptical that Iran’s clerical regime could be toppled by such strikes.
So far the targeted attacks have killed the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, the security chief Ali Larijani and the intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, among others.
At the heart of the issue is the structure and resilience of Iran’s regime – and how both the regime and the Iranian public respond to such attacks.
Before the US and Israel launched their attacks three weeks ago, experts had assessed that the regime was stagnating in the face of protests and that some kind of change appeared inevitable. That dynamic has now changed.
“This isn’t a personalised regime,” said Sanam Vakil, an Iran expert at Chatham House. “There are institutional layers under every individual and I suspect that the response to decapitation strikes would be to simply [promote] from within – although that risks bringing up unknown and untested individuals. Given the Israeli success rate you could imagine there are perhaps lower-rank individuals not so amenable to moving up the system in what is dangerous work.”
Thus far, Vakil does not judge Israel’s decapitation strategy to have been successful. “At the moment it seems to be buying time, and I’m not sure what the US is trying to achieve, but there exists a potential for air to be blown back into the system to rejuvenate a regime that was becoming a spent force, where the people moving up have seen their mentors and their bosses and family members killed.
“It is not an approach that produces Jeffersonian democrats but hardened resistance fighters. It breeds more resistance,” she said.
Israel’s history of assassination does not point to much success. Over the years it has killed numerous senior leaders in Hamas and Hezbollah, including Hamas’s spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin in 2004, and Hezbollah’s general secretary Hassan Nasrallah. Yet while Israeli campaigns have diminished those groups, both have rebounded.
Jon B Alterman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, is another sceptic, citing the example of Hamas, which he said “as a political movement absorbed its martyrs and lives to fight another day”.
He wrote in a recent post: “Unfortunately meaningful improvement through decapitation is unlikely. Each situation is unique, and each involves an element of chance. Still, the track record for advancing ambitious political goals – which is what the United States has – through a limited military effort is poor.”
While he cited the example of the killing of Osama bin Laden as an example of how a non-state group could be degraded significantly by the removal of a leader, Alterman said the Israeli attempt to decapitate a state was “unprecedented”.
“One of common myths in the US government post-9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq was that you simply had to remove the ‘dirty dozen’ [of senior regime figures] in Iraq,” he told the Guardian. “I thought it was ill-conceived then and ill-conceived now. An issue that has not got sufficient attention is that if you eliminate the people who have credibility with the nasty guys, there is nobody with influence to make the nasty guys stop.
“It also feels like the resilience of the regime is being underestimated. Maybe it is possible to create an internal split, but I don’t know any evidence of moderate democrats waiting in wings.”
For Alterman, the most likely outcome of the decapitation strategy “is an internally unstable Iran” that is more likely to carry out acts of violence outside borders, either via cyberwarfare, proxies or terrorism.
Complicating the issue is that a successful popular uprising is not even necessarily the most likely outcome of a destabilised regime.
In a January essay for the American magazine Foreign Affairs, Afshon Ostovar, a Middle East expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, predicted that any coup would more likely come from within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the strongest actor in the country, and would be aimed at preserving existing institutions, a potential dynamic that still holds.
Steven Simon, a security expert at Dartmouth College and a former US national security council staffer, wrote in War on the Rocks: “The scenario that deserves more attention than it is getting[is] not Iranian collapse but Iranian persistence; wounded, revanchist, and ungovernable by the tools that won the war.”
Vakil said: “There also something perverse about this. What Israel and the US are pursuing, that makes me so uncomfortable, is that there is no agency or choice or justice for Iranians in this process.”
