THE-IRAN FIRST-BLOG

Americans have September 11, 2001, a date so embedded in the country’s consciousness that it no longer needs a year or an explanation. Say “9/11,” and everyone knows what you mean. Iranians have a September date too, although strangely we have never given it the same place in our collective memory: September 22, 1980. On that day Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. Iraqi aircraft attacked Iranian airfields, Iraqi troops poured across the border, Iranian cities came under attack and territory was occupied, beginning a war that would last eight years, kill and maim hundreds of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis, expose Iranian soldiers and civilians to chemical weapons, devastate cities and oil infrastructure, and leave wounds that still shape Iran’s view of the outside world more than four decades later. If you want to understand modern Iran—its suspicion of foreign powers, its obsession with strategic independence, its determination never again to appear militarily defenseless—you have to understand 9/22.

But 9/22 has another history, and it is far more complicated than the familiar story that Saddam Hussein woke up one morning, saw a weakened revolutionary Iran and decided to invade. Saddam certainly saw an opportunity. Iran’s military had been devastated by the revolution, purges, executions, resignations, and distrust of the old officer corps. The Shah was gone, the new government was fighting with itself, the American embassy hostages were still being held in Tehran, and Iran seemed internationally isolated. Saddam hoped to seize disputed territory, establish Iraq as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf, and perhaps destabilize the Islamic Republic itself. But there had also been an extraordinary series of contacts among Iraq, Iran’s enemies, regional governments and figures in the West before the invasion, and those contacts have produced a historical controversy that has never completely disappeared.

Among the most serious allegations concerns the Carter administration and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Authors including Said Aburish and Kenneth Timmerman subsequently argued that Saddam and senior Iraqi officials had contacts with American representatives before the invasion and that Brzezinski was involved in encouraging the Iraqis. Accounts have circulated for decades describing meetings in Jordan involving Iraqi officials and American intermediaries, including the claim that Brzezinski secretly met Iraqi representatives there. Former Carter officials have disputed important parts of this account, and the documentary record does not establish that Carter ordered Saddam to invade Iran. That needs to be said clearly. But there is also evidence that makes it far too easy simply to dismiss the entire question as an Iranian conspiracy theory. The Carter administration was deeply engaged with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the rapidly deteriorating strategic situation surrounding Iran during precisely this period, and the declassified record shows Brzezinski actively considering the consequences of Iranian instability and possible political collapse.

More intriguingly, after Ronald Reagan entered office, his Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, traveled through the Middle East and returned with extraordinary intelligence. In an April 1981 Top Secret/Sensitive memorandum prepared for President Reagan, Haig reported that his discussions in the region had led him to believe that Carter had given Iraq what Haig described as a “green light” for the war through Saudi Crown Prince Fahd. That memorandum does not prove that Carter planned the invasion; Haig was reporting information he had received after the fact, and Carter denied complicity. But it is nevertheless an extraordinary historical document. Within months of Saddam’s attack, the sitting Secretary of State of the United States was telling the President of the United States that he had received information from America’s own regional partners indicating that the previous administration had communicated approval for an Iraqi attack through Saudi Arabia. That is not something that can be wished out of the historical record.

The Saudi connection is itself important. Saddam was communicating with the Gulf monarchies before the invasion, and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states had powerful reasons to fear what had happened in Iran. The Iranian Revolution had overthrown one of the region’s strongest monarchies and openly presented itself as a model that could spread beyond Iran’s borders. To Riyadh and several other Gulf capitals, revolutionary Iran represented not merely another state but a potentially contagious political threat. Saudi and Gulf financial support would subsequently become enormously important to Iraq’s ability to sustain the war. Whatever precise signals Saddam received before September 22, he had good reason to believe that an attack on revolutionary Iran would not leave him isolated in the Arab world.

Then there is another part of this history that is especially uncomfortable for Iranians: Saddam was also talking to opponents of the Islamic Republic. Former Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar and other Iranian exiles tried to bring down Khomeini’s government, and Bakhtiar’s contacts with Baghdad have long been part of the historical record for this period. There were also allegations involving people associated with Reza Pahlavi and former members of the Iranian military establishment. One allegation attributed to Shahbazi claimed that these contacts involved sharing information about important Iranian military targets. Claims about Reza Pahlavi’s personal role and knowledge remain disputed and should not be presented as established fact, but the larger point is important: Saddam did not look at Iran in 1980 and see merely a military opponent. He saw a fractured country surrounded by governments hostile to the revolution and populated by opposition groups who believed that Saddam’s pressure might help them overthrow Khomeini.

This is why the war’s origins matter. We can argue endlessly about whether Carter personally gave Saddam a “green light,” what Brzezinski said or did not say in Jordan, precisely what the Saudis communicated, and exactly what Iranian opposition figures told Baghdad. Historians should continue arguing about those questions because the evidence is contested. But the broader picture is much harder to dispute: Saddam believed Iran was vulnerable, knew that powerful regional governments feared the Iranian Revolution, had contacts with opponents of the new Iranian regime, and had reason to believe that an attack would not produce a unified international response against him. He gambled that Iran could be broken quickly. It was one of the twentieth century’s great strategic miscalculations. Sounds familiar? Like Trump’s recent escapade in Iran! We never learn, do we?

Instead of destroying the Islamic Republic, Saddam helped consolidate it. Nothing unites a divided country faster than a foreign army crossing its border. Iranians who hated Khomeini could still fight for Iran. The revolutionary government suddenly possessed something it desperately needed: an external enemy. The war that Saddam expected to exploit Iran’s weakness instead gave the Islamic Republic a powerful source of legitimacy, mobilization, and national unity. The tragedy is that this disastrous miscalculation did not end quickly, because once the war began, almost everybody discovered an interest in it.

The United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, the Gulf monarchies, Israel, China and North Korea all became involved in different ways. Their interests were not identical, and imagining one coordinated conspiracy would be misleading. What emerged instead was something arguably more disturbing: an international system in which different governments repeatedly decided that their interests were better served by influencing the balance of the war than by ending it. Iraq received enormous military, financial, diplomatic, and technological support. The Soviet Union became one of Saddam’s largest arms suppliers. France became an important supplier of military equipment to Iraq. Gulf states provided enormous financial backing. Western companies sold equipment and dual-use technology. By the middle of the war, Washington itself had moved decisively toward Baghdad because the Reagan administration feared an Iranian victory more than it feared Saddam Hussein. Declassified American records show that U.S. support eventually spanned political, diplomatic, commercial, intelligence, and military spheres.

In hindsight, the American relationship with Saddam is particularly extraordinary. Iraq was removed from the American list of states supporting terrorism in 1982. Donald Rumsfeld, acting as President Reagan’s special envoy, traveled to Baghdad and met Saddam Hussein in December 1983, followed by another visit in 1984. Washington and Baghdad restored full diplomatic relations for the first time since 1967; American export credits helped Iraq, intelligence cooperation expanded, and dual-use American technology flowed into a country that was simultaneously developing missile, chemical, and other military capabilities. The National Security Archive’s declassified records show something even more disturbing: Washington knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran, including evidence by 1983 that chemical warfare had become a regular Iraqi practice, yet the strategic tilt toward Baghdad continued because preventing an Iranian victory had become the greater American priority.

Nor was the United States alone. European companies supplied technology and industrial equipment to Iraq, while the Soviet Union supplied enormous quantities of conventional weapons. Moscow had initially been cautious about Saddam’s invasion, but the Soviet leadership had its own reason to fear revolutionary Iran. The USSR contained large Muslim populations in Central Asia, Iran was supporting resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Tehran cracked down on the Soviet-aligned Tudeh Party and expelled Soviet diplomats, and Moscow increasingly saw Saddam as a useful counterweight. Billions of dollars of Soviet tanks, aircraft, surface-to-air missiles, artillery and armored vehicles flowed into Iraq. France, Germany, Britain, China and companies from numerous other countries became part of the enormous industrial and commercial machinery surrounding Saddam’s war effort.

The chemical-weapons story deserves particular attention because it reveals how morally compromised this international system became. Saddam’s forces repeatedly used chemical agents against Iranian troops and later against Kurdish civilians, yet Iraq’s ability to develop those weapons depended in part on imported equipment, chemicals, and industrial capabilities. The United States government itself possessed evidence of Iraqi chemical warfare while improving relations with Baghdad. Some officials in the American government objected, but the strategic calculation prevailed. Saddam was brutal, Saddam was using chemical weapons, and Saddam was an aggressor—but an Iranian victory was considered worse. The result was a policy whose consequences Iranians have not forgotten.

Yet even while Washington was moving toward Iraq, another extraordinary thing was happening: Iran was receiving weapons from America’s allies and eventually through secret American channels as well. Israel regarded Saddam Hussein as a major strategic threat and supplied Iran with American-origin weaponry. An aircraft carrying American weapons from Israel to Iran crashed in Turkey in July 1981, and Iranian and Israeli officials subsequently described additional shipments. What began as an almost surreal arrangement eventually became part of something much larger. The Reagan administration itself secretly sold arms to Iran, despite publicly treating the Islamic Republic as an enemy, and money associated with those transactions became entangled with the covert effort to support the Contra forces fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

The whole operation began to unravel dramatically in October 1986 when an aircraft supplying the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua. Two crew members died, but Eugene Hasenfus survived and was captured by the Sandinistas. Investigators began pulling on the threads, and those threads eventually exposed what became the Iran-Contra Affair: secret arms transactions with Iran, clandestine foreign-policy operations, and the diversion of proceeds toward the Contras despite congressional restrictions. Congressional investigations followed, officials were prosecuted, and America discovered that its government had simultaneously been cultivating Saddam Hussein’s Iraq while secretly selling weapons to the country Saddam was fighting.

Even more astounding is the revelation by many who have now left prison after serving 20 years for drug dealing that these planes coming back to the US from Nicaragua had cocaine in them. And that the Republican Party was distributing these drugs in ghettos in swing states and swing counties with the support of local law enforcement, having changed federal drug possession laws. Police would swarm neighborhoods and arrest everyone – leading to more African Americans being incarcerated than there were slaves before the Civil War. Electoral maps were completely redrawn, and Republicans won a majority of seats in the House of Representatives as a result. Today, over 20 years later, for example, in Florida, there are over 1 million US born citizens who cannot vote because of crack cocaine convictions. There was a revolution in Iran, and a revolution in America!

This contradiction becomes even more remarkable when North Korea enters the story. Iran desperately needed ammunition, missiles, spare parts, and replacement weapons, and North Korea became one of its important suppliers and intermediaries. Soviet and Chinese-origin equipment could reach Iran through North Korean channels, with Iran paying in cash and crude oil. Follow individual transactions and the war begins to look less like a conventional conflict and more like an international trading system: weapons could originate in the Soviet bloc, move through North Korea, be financed through European banks, insured by European companies, and eventually arrive in Iran, while the Soviet Union was simultaneously one of Saddam Hussein’s principal weapons suppliers.

That, to me, is the real story of the Iran-Iraq War. America, Europe and the Soviet Union supplied or supported Iraq in various ways; the Gulf monarchies helped finance Saddam; Israel, North Korea and others supplied Iran; America itself secretly sold weapons to Iran while increasingly supporting Iraq; banks financed transactions, insurers insured them, manufacturers supplied equipment, intelligence agencies maneuvered, politicians calculated, and arms dealers collected commissions. No single mastermind controlled all of this. In some ways, it was worse than that. An entire international ecosystem developed around a war in which almost everyone could find a strategic or commercial reason to keep one side from defeating the other.

And who paid for it? Not the strategists in Washington, Moscow, Paris, London, Riyadh, or the other capitals where these decisions were made. Iranian and Iraqi families paid the bill. It was paid by the young Iranian soldier choking on mustard gas, by the Iraqi conscript sent into another hopeless offensive, by the mother who never saw her son again, by the families driven from Khorramshahr and Abadan, by the children growing up while missiles fell on their cities, and by a generation on both sides of the border whose lives were permanently altered by decisions made far above them.

This is why September 22 matters, and why I believe Iranians should remember 9/22 in much the same way Americans remember 9/11. I am not suggesting that tragedies should compete with each other, or that one person’s suffering somehow diminishes another’s. Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered on September 11, 2001, and thousands more American servicemen and women subsequently died in the wars that followed. But Iran also has a date when its world changed. On September 22, 1980, a neighboring country invaded Iran, and what followed was eight years of death, destruction, chemical warfare, and international intrigue on a scale that is difficult for anyone who did not live through that period to comprehend.

It also explains something about Iran that Western policymakers repeatedly seem unable to understand. Iranian distrust of foreign powers did not materialize from thin air, nor is it exclusively the invention of the Islamic Republic. Iranians remember the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh. They remember foreign support for the Shah. They remember the turmoil surrounding the revolution. They remember Saddam crossing the border. They remember chemical attacks. They remember which countries supplied Iraq. They remember that the international community did remarkably little to stop Saddam’s chemical warfare. They remember that some of the same countries publicly condemning Iran were privately selling it weapons. And they remember that when Iran appeared weakest, Saddam Hussein concluded that the moment had arrived to attack.

You do not have to support the Islamic Republic to understand any of this. In fact, one of the great mistakes in thinking about Iran is constantly confusing Iran with whatever government happens to rule it. The young men defending Khorramshahr were defending Iran. The families being bombed were Iranian families. The soldiers exposed to chemical weapons did not cease being victims because we dislike the government in Tehran. September 22 belongs to Iran, not to the Islamic Republic.

One final historical irony is hard to ignore. Jimmy Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Whether Carter encouraged Saddam’s invasion remains disputed, and it would be wrong to present Haig’s later account or the Brzezinski allegations as conclusive proof that he did. But it is equally wrong to pretend those allegations and documents do not exist. Haig, Reagan’s Secretary of State, reported to Reagan that he had been told Carter gave Iraq a green light through Saudi Crown Prince Fahd; authors and former officials have argued over contacts involving Brzezinski, Iraq and Jordan; Iranian opposition figures had contacts with Baghdad; Saddam was receiving encouragement and financial backing from governments terrified of revolutionary Iran; and within a few years the United States itself was openly tilting toward the aggressor while secretly selling weapons to the country he had invaded. History is messy, contested and deeply uncomfortable, which is precisely why it should be remembered rather than simplified.

Americans have 9/11. Iranians have 9/22. September 22, 1980, should be remembered not because Iranians need another grievance, but because you cannot understand the Iran of today without understanding what happened when the country was weak, divided, and isolated, and Saddam Hussein decided that the time had come to attack. The resulting war lasted eight years, drew in much of the world, created fortunes, rearranged alliances, and killed or wounded an extraordinary number of ordinary people. For Iran, 9/22 was not simply the beginning of a war. It has become one of the defining experiences of the modern nation, and more than forty years later, we are still living with its consequences.

Here’s an animated movie I made on this: https://youtu.be/MdFNAHpgioA?si=wOIx_-a9ukSwHJ92

https://rationetubineus275962.substack.com/p/in-the-iran-war-plan-a-was-a-fantasy?r=xa10b

There is something fundamentally contradictory about the strategy apparently being pursued toward Iran. On the one hand, American and Israeli strategists seem to hope that ordinary Iranians will flood the streets, challenge the Islamic Republic, overwhelm its security apparatus and ultimately topple the regime. On the other hand, there has been serious discussion of arming Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, encouraging armed incursions from neighboring territory and exploiting Iran’s ethnic divisions as another means of weakening Tehran.

These two strategies do not reinforce one another. They undermine one another.

If you want Iranians to overthrow their government, you have to convince them that what comes afterward will be better. If instead you give them reason to believe that weakening the central government might lead to civil war, foreign intervention and the fragmentation of Iran itself, you have just given millions of Iranians an extraordinarily powerful reason to stay home.

This is where Western and Israeli intelligence thinking may be making a profound mistake. They appear to confuse opposition to the Islamic Republic with opposition to Iran.

They are not remotely the same thing.

Iran Is Not the Islamic Republic

The Islamic Republic is less than fifty years old. Iran is thousands of years old.

Governments have come and gone. Dynasties have risen and collapsed. Iran has been invaded, occupied, divided and reunited. Its borders have changed repeatedly. Yet the idea of Iran has survived.

That distinction matters enormously.

An Iranian can despise the Islamic Republic, oppose clerical government, resent the Revolutionary Guards, demand political freedom and want the entire governing system replaced — while simultaneously possessing an intense attachment to Iran as a country.

Indeed, many of the people most opposed to the Islamic Republic may also be among the most passionately Iranian.

This is precisely why encouraging ethnic armed groups to attack the Iranian state while simultaneously calling upon ordinary Iranians to revolt is such a dangerous strategic contradiction.

Put yourself in the position of an Iranian sitting in Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Mashhad or Tabriz.

You dislike the government. Perhaps you hate it. You have watched corruption, repression, economic stagnation and international isolation consume decades of your country’s potential. You might even be willing to stage a demonstration against it.

Then foreign powers begin bombing Iran.

Armed groups begin crossing the country’s borders.

Foreign politicians begin discussing ethnic minorities, autonomous regions, and the possibility that the Iranian state itself could fracture.

Your calculation changes.

The question is no longer simply:

Do I want the Islamic Republic to survive?

It becomes:

Do I want Iran to survive?

Those are very different questions.

And faced with that choice, an enormous number of Iranians who might happily demonstrate against the Islamic Republic could decide that preserving Iran comes first.

The Regime’s Greatest Propaganda Gift

If I were designing propaganda for the Islamic Republic, I could hardly imagine anything more useful than foreign governments supporting armed ethnic movements during a war.

The regime can now tell Iranians:

You thought this was about nuclear weapons?

You thought this was about democracy?

You thought foreign governments wanted to liberate you?

Look at what is happening. They want to destroy Iran.

Whether that characterization is fair almost becomes irrelevant. What matters is whether Iranians believe it might be true.

And the moment armed ethnic groups become part of the strategy, that fear becomes much easier to exploit.

Iranian historical memory makes this particularly potent. Iranians remember territorial losses to Russia. They remember Russian and British intervention. They remember the Anglo-Soviet occupation. They remember foreign involvement in the Azerbaijan crisis after World War II. They remember the 1953 coup. They remember Saddam Hussein invading Iran in 1980 and the terrible eight-year war that followed.

The fear that foreign powers might exploit Iranian weakness is therefore not some abstract conspiracy theory invented yesterday.

It is embedded in Iranian historical experience.

So when foreign intelligence services contemplate using ethnic armed groups against Tehran, they may believe they are creating another source of pressure on the regime.

What they may actually be creating is Iranian national solidarity.

Patriotism Changes the Equation

The simplistic theory of regime change looks something like this:

Economic hardship + political repression + military defeat = revolution.

But human beings do not behave according to such a simple equation.

There is another enormous variable:

What happens after the revolution?

People do not merely calculate what they might gain from overthrowing their government. They calculate what they might lose if the state collapses.

That distinction is particularly important in the Middle East after Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Iranians have watched states collapse around them.

They know what happens when political authority disappears, and armed factions compete for territory. They have seen cities destroyed, populations displaced, and countries turned into battlegrounds for regional and international powers.

So imagine telling an Iranian:

Go into the streets.

Challenge the government.

Help weaken the security forces.

Create political paralysis.

And by the way, armed Kurdish organizations are gathering near the border, foreign powers are supporting them, and nobody can guarantee what Iran’s borders will look like afterward.

Why would a rational person accept that bargain?

The expected benefit of revolution has just been overwhelmed by the potential cost of national collapse.

The Kurdish Question Makes the Problem Even More Dangerous

None of this should be interpreted as an argument against Kurdish rights.

Iran’s Kurdish population has legitimate political, cultural and economic grievances, and different Kurdish political organizations have very different objectives. Some advocate greater cultural rights. Some favor federalism or autonomy. Others emphasize self-determination. Kurdish politics is no more monolithic than Iranian politics generally.

But that nuance is precisely why using Kurdish armed groups as an instrument of foreign strategy is so dangerous.

An Iranian in Tehran does not have to believe that Kurdistan will actually declare independence.

He merely has to believe that it might.

The same applies elsewhere.

If Iran becomes sufficiently weak, what happens in Iranian Azerbaijan? What happens in Khuzestan? What happens in Baluchistan? What happens along the country’s other peripheral regions?

Suddenly the Iranian contemplating revolution is not comparing the Islamic Republic with some hypothetical liberal democracy.

He is comparing the Islamic Republic with the possibility of Yugoslavia.

That is an entirely different political calculation.

A Systems-Engineering Failure

Perhaps the most interesting explanation is not that American or Israeli intelligence officials are stupid. These organizations contain plenty of extremely capable people.

The problem may instead be institutional fragmentation.

One group asks:

How do we weaken the Revolutionary Guards in western Iran?

Answer: support Kurdish forces.

Another asks:

How do we destabilize the government?

Answer: encourage demonstrations.

Another asks:

How do we increase military pressure?

Answer: bomb military infrastructure.

Another asks:

How do we exploit internal divisions?

Answer: support dissatisfied ethnic groups.

Each answer can make sense independently.

Put them together, however, and the system behaves differently.

Bomb Iran.

Arm ethnic opposition groups.

Encourage Iranians to overthrow the government.

Create uncertainty about Iran’s territorial integrity.

Iranian nationalism rises.

People who hate the government become frightened of state collapse.

The population rallies around the country.

The revolution you hoped to stimulate becomes less likely.

That is not necessarily an intelligence failure in the narrow sense. The intelligence might be perfectly accurate.

It is a systems failure.

The individual pieces have been optimized while the interaction between them has been misunderstood.

As an engineer, I find this kind of mistake particularly striking because it appears constantly in complex systems. Improving every component independently does not necessarily improve the system. Sometimes optimizing one component destroys the performance of another.

Foreign policy is no different.

The Fundamental Misreading of Iran

There is a deeper problem underneath all of this.

Western policymakers have repeatedly underestimated Iranian nationalism.

They see Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmen and other communities and sometimes imagine Iran primarily as a collection of ethnic groups held together by a repressive central government.

But Iran is not simply an artificial modern state assembled by colonial cartographers.

Iranian identity is old.

Very old.

That does not eliminate ethnic tensions, regional grievances or separatist movements. But it does mean that ethnicity and national identity can coexist.

An Azeri Iranian can be fiercely Azeri and fiercely Iranian.

A Kurdish Iranian can demand extensive Kurdish rights while still seeing Iran as his country.

A secular Iranian can despise the Islamic Republic while being intensely patriotic.

That complexity matters.

And if intelligence agencies reduce Iranian society to a collection of demographic groups that can simply be activated against the central government, they are not practicing sophisticated intelligence analysis.

They are looking at a spreadsheet.

If You Actually Wanted Political Change

If the objective genuinely were to encourage political transformation inside Iran, the message would have to be almost exactly the opposite of the one implied by ethnic military intervention.

It would have to be unequivocal:

Iran will remain Iran.

Its territorial integrity is not negotiable.

Its borders will not be redrawn.

Foreign governments will not determine its political future.

No neighboring country will receive Iranian territory.

No ethnic group will be used as a foreign proxy to dismantle the state.

The argument would have to be that Iranians are changing their government — not that outsiders are dismantling their country.

That distinction could determine whether millions of people join an uprising or stay home.

Iran May Be Stronger Than Its Government

This is perhaps the biggest conceptual mistake of all.

The Islamic Republic may be unpopular.

That does not mean Iran is weak.

In fact, the Iranian nation may be considerably stronger than the Iranian government.

Foreign strategists who fail to understand that distinction risk producing exactly the opposite outcome from the one they intend.

Attack the government hard enough and perhaps you weaken it.

Threaten Iran itself, however, and you may discover something entirely different.

You may discover Iranian patriotism.

And once the conflict becomes framed not as the Iranian people versus the Islamic Republic, but as Iran versus foreign powers attempting to determine its future, the political landscape changes completely.

The person who demonstrated against the government yesterday may defend the country tomorrow.

The dissident may become the patriot.

The regime’s opponent may temporarily become the state’s defender.

And the government you were trying to isolate suddenly possesses something it could never manufacture by itself:

a national cause.

There is something almost incomprehensible about the idea that American or Israeli intelligence planners could contemplate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a leader of Iran after the collapse of the Islamic Republic. If the reports are substantially correct, the problem is much bigger than Ahmadinejad himself. It tells us something profoundly disturbing about how the people designing regime change in Iran understand the country, its people, its politics and, perhaps most importantly, power itself.

Start with Ahmadinejad.

What exactly is the theory here?

This is a man whose disputed reelection in 2009 brought millions of Iranians into the streets. Whatever one thinks about the precise extent of electoral fraud, the election produced the Green Movement and one of the greatest crises of legitimacy the Islamic Republic had experienced. Iranians marched demanding to know what had happened to their votes. People were beaten, arrested and killed.

And now we are supposed to believe that Iranians would flood the streets again, this time to overthrow the entire Islamic Republic, so that foreign powers could help return Ahmadinejad to power?

What are they smoking?

Even leaving 2009 aside, Ahmadinejad is a peculiar choice. He has been out of office for more than a decade. He does not command an obvious national political organization capable of taking over the machinery of government. He does not appear to have an army of governors, administrators, military commanders and political operatives waiting to assume control of the country. He is polarizing. His present political power is extremely limited.

In other words, he has a famous name but very little demonstrated power.

Then there is the Israeli dimension, which makes the whole proposition even stranger. Ahmadinejad became internationally notorious for some of the most inflammatory rhetoric about Israel uttered by any modern Iranian president. Yet somehow this is the person Israeli strategists might consider useful in constructing a post-Islamic-Republic Iran?

Perhaps there is some brilliant piece of intelligence unavailable to the rest of us. Perhaps Ahmadinejad has a vast underground organization nobody knows about. Perhaps divisions of the Iranian military are secretly waiting for his telephone call. Perhaps millions of Iranians have quietly rediscovered their affection for him.

But absent such evidence, the proposition looks less like sophisticated intelligence work and more like a fundamental misunderstanding of political power.

And Ahmadinejad is not an isolated example.

Look at the alternatives foreign policymakers repeatedly seem fascinated by.

There is the MEK. It has organization, discipline and international connections. What it does not appear to possess is broad legitimacy among Iranians. Its history, including its relationship with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, carries enormous baggage. Being organized is useful. Being organized, while much of the population wants nothing to do with you, is considerably less useful if your objective is to govern a country of roughly 90 million people.

Then there are the monarchists. They have a recognizable brand, substantial diaspora visibility, money, media exposure, and a famous name in Reza Pahlavi. But again the fundamental question is not how many television interviews someone can obtain in Washington, London or Los Angeles. The question is how much political machinery actually exists inside Iran.

Who are the provincial leaders?

Who controls the municipalities?

Who commands the loyalty of important elements of the security services?

Who can keep electricity flowing, airports operating, hospitals functioning and food moving through the country?

Who can assemble a government?

Who can persuade competing factions to accept its authority?

Who can prevent Iran from descending into civil war?

These are questions about power, not publicity.

And that brings us back to Ahmadinejad.

The three alternatives reveal three different versions of essentially the same mistake.

The MEK offers organization without broad legitimacy.

The monarchists offer an internationally recognizable brand without the demonstrated domestic machinery to govern Iran.

Ahmadinejad offers experience in office and name recognition, but lacks an obvious contemporary political base capable of taking power.

It is shit piled on top of shit, because none of these choices addresses the central problem: Who inside Iran possesses sufficient legitimacy, organization and institutional support to govern the country?

That is the question that matters.

And perhaps intelligence agencies are structurally poorly equipped to answer it.

The CIA and Mossad are intelligence services. They are extraordinarily capable organizations in the things intelligence organizations are designed to do. They penetrate networks. They recruit assets. They intercept communications. They sabotage facilities. They identify targets. They conduct covert operations. They discover secrets.

But none of those skills necessarily translate into an understanding of a country’s political sociology.

In fact, intelligence organizations may have an inherent bias toward exactly the wrong people.

An intelligence officer naturally values someone who is accessible, connected, cooperative, recruitable, predictable and perhaps controllable. A political society values something completely different. It values legitimacy, authenticity, constituency, organizational strength and the ability to represent competing interests.

The ideal intelligence asset and the ideal national leader may therefore be almost opposites.

This distinction becomes enormously important when intelligence operations metastasize into political strategy.

Finding someone willing to cooperate with you is not the same thing as finding someone an entire country is willing to follow.

And Iran presents an even larger problem because foreign strategists repeatedly appear to underestimate Iranian nationalism.

There seems to be an assumption that because millions of Iranians dislike the Islamic Republic, those same millions will automatically assist foreign powers trying to destroy it.

But the Islamic Republic of Iran is not the same as Iran.

An Iranian can hate the Islamic Republic and love Iran.

An Iranian can want political change and simultaneously oppose foreign intervention.

An Iranian can despise the clerical establishment and nevertheless fight anyone attempting to fragment the country.

That distinction is absolutely fundamental.

If the regime-change strategy depends upon Iranians flooding the streets while the country is being bombed, the leadership is being decapitated, and ethnic separatists are being encouraged around the country’s borders, then the strategy may contain a fatal contradiction.

The foreign planners are effectively saying:

Help us destabilize your state.

Trust us about what happens afterward.

Don’t worry about the armed ethnic movements around your borders.

Don’t worry about the possibility of national fragmentation.

Don’t worry about the MEK.

Don’t worry about the monarchists.

And, by the way, perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will run the place.

Why would a rational Iranian accept that bargain?

The strategic planners may think they are presenting Iranians with a choice between dictatorship and freedom.

Many Iranians may perceive an entirely different choice:

A government I dislike versus the possible destruction of my country.

Once the choice is framed that way, nationalism becomes more powerful than opposition politics.

This is hardly unique to Iran. Foreign invasion frequently strengthens national identity. People who bitterly oppose one another domestically can suddenly find themselves on the same side when they perceive an external threat to the country itself.

Iranian history should make this particularly obvious. Iran is not an artificial state assembled recently by colonial administrators drawing lines across a map. Iranian national identity is ancient, deeply embedded and capable of transcending governments, dynasties and political ideologies.

The Islamic Republic has existed for less than half a century.

Iran has existed in recognizable civilizational and political forms for thousands of years.

Confusing opposition to the former with indifference toward the latter is an extraordinary analytical mistake.

This is why the Ahmadinejad story matters.

It is tempting to laugh at it. Ahmadinejad? Really?

But it shouldn’t be funny.

If foreign intelligence services genuinely considered him an important component of a post-regime political order, the episode may reveal something far more serious than a poor personnel decision.

It suggests that the people designing the strategy may be optimizing for entirely the wrong variables.

They see contacts where they should see constituencies.

They see personalities where they should see institutions.

They see opposition groups where they should see political legitimacy.

They see regime vulnerability where they should also see Iranian nationalism.

And perhaps most dangerously, they mistake the ability to destroy a government for the ability to construct another.

Those are not remotely the same thing.

Bombing can destroy buildings.

Intelligence operations can eliminate leaders.

Cyberattacks can disrupt institutions.

Covert operations can weaken governments.

None of these things creates political legitimacy.

That has to come from Iranians themselves.

And if your strategy for overthrowing the Islamic Republic ultimately depends upon millions of ordinary Iranians voluntarily walking into the streets, risking their lives and bringing down their own government, then understanding what those Iranians actually want is not some secondary cultural consideration.

It is the entire strategy.

Which brings us back to the simplest question.

If your plan requires millions of Iranians to rise up against their government, why would you even contemplate replacing that government with the man millions of Iranians once rose up against?

That is not a minor contradiction.

It may tell us everything we need to know about why the strategy was doomed before it began.

There is a fundamental problem with Western intelligence in Iran that has received remarkably little attention. It is not primarily a problem of satellites, intercepted communications, artificial intelligence, drones, cyberwarfare or the ability to locate individual commanders. In many of these areas, American and Israeli intelligence capabilities are extraordinary. The problem is much more basic.

Who, exactly, is telling them what Iranians think?

This question matters because there is an enormous difference between knowing where an Iranian general sleeps and knowing what ninety million Iranians will do when their country is attacked. One is tactical intelligence. The other is strategic intelligence. It is entirely possible to be spectacularly good at the first and disastrously bad at the second.

That may be precisely what has happened with Iran.

The Intelligence Prostitution Problem

Put yourself in the position of a serious Iranian living inside Iran.

You have a family. You have a profession. You have a reputation. You have relationships extending back decades. You understand your country, its history, its contradictions and its people. You may despise the Islamic Republic. You may desperately want political change. You may have marched against the government yourself.

Now somebody asks you to become an agent of the CIA or Mossad.

Why would you?

The personal risks are enormous. More importantly, there is no reason to assume that the foreign government recruiting you will protect you indefinitely. Administrations change. Governments change. priorities change. Intelligence officers rotate. Political alliances disappear. Today’s indispensable asset can become tomorrow’s inconvenient liability.

A visa can be offered. Money can be offered. Protection can be offered. Political influence can be offered.

And people can certainly be purchased.

But purchasing somebody and earning somebody’s allegiance are two very different things.

This creates what I call the intelligence prostitution problem. If the primary basis of the relationship is transactional, the intelligence relationship begins to resemble every other transactional market. The person providing the service has an incentive to keep the customer satisfied.

And that is precisely what an intelligence service should not want.

The best intelligence source is not the person who tells you what you want to hear. It is the person who repeatedly tells you that you are wrong.

Adverse Selection

There is an economic concept called adverse selection. Sometimes the structure of a market causes the people most eager to participate in it to be precisely the people you should be most suspicious of.

Iran presents an extraordinary version of this problem.

The Iranian most willing to work with a foreign intelligence organization may be someone motivated by money, immigration, revenge, ideology, ethnic separatism, personal ambition or the expectation of a position in a future government.

Some of these people may provide excellent information. The problem is that, collectively, they need not constitute anything resembling a representative sample of Iranian society.

Indeed, they may constitute its opposite.

Consider an Iranian exile activist who has spent twenty years telling Western officials that the Islamic Republic is about to collapse. His political relevance, fundraising ability and access to Western institutions may depend upon that proposition remaining believable.

What incentive does he have to walk into Washington and say:

“The regime is unpopular, but most Iranians don’t support us either. If you bomb the country, nationalism may overwhelm opposition to the government. If you arm separatists, Iranians who hate the Islamic Republic may nevertheless rally to defend Iran. And if you expect millions of people to come into the streets to install your preferred exile leadership, you are dreaming.”

That might be extremely valuable intelligence.

It is also a terrible sales pitch.

Tell the Customer What He Wants to Hear

Now consider the information chain.

An Iranian source speaks to a handler. The handler reports upward through an intelligence bureaucracy. Intelligence is incorporated into assessments. Assessments reach political officials. Political officials make decisions.

At every stage there are incentives.

The source wants to remain valuable. The handler wants productive sources. The intelligence organization wants actionable intelligence. Political leaders want evidence supporting policies they have already decided to pursue.

The result can become an extraordinary feedback mechanism:

Poor access to Iranian society → dependence upon highly motivated dissidents → distorted picture of Iranian opinion → optimistic assessments → failed policy → demand for additional intelligence → even greater dependence upon the same networks.

Eventually everybody is talking to everybody else and mistaking repetition for corroboration.

Ten Iranian opposition activists telling Washington the same thing does not necessarily constitute ten independent pieces of intelligence if all ten belong to the same political ecosystem.

It may simply constitute one mistaken assumption repeated ten times.

The Ghost of the Shah

There is another reason why genuinely valuable Iranian assets may hesitate to entrust their futures to Washington: the historical memory of Mohammad Reza Shah.

The Shah was about as useful a regional partner as the United States could reasonably have hoped to possess. Iran was strategically located, fiercely opposed to Soviet expansion, enormously important to Western energy security, militarily powerful, relatively secular and closely aligned with Washington.

Yet when the revolutionary crisis arrived, America’s ability and willingness to preserve that political order proved finite. Historians can debate endlessly whether Washington abandoned the Shah, mishandled the crisis, had already concluded that his position was unsustainable, or simply lacked the ability to reverse events. The important issue for intelligence recruitment is not which interpretation ultimately wins the historical argument.

It is the lesson a prospective asset might draw from it.

If America’s relationship with the Shah could end that way, what exactly is America’s promise to you worth?

That question becomes even more serious in a political system in which presidents can be replaced every four years.

A Republican administration embraces one faction. A Democratic administration rejects it. Another president reverses course again. Political appointees disappear. Priorities move from the Middle East to Asia and back again.

Iran remains.

That asymmetry is enormous.

Iranian institutions can think in decades. American administrations frequently think in election cycles. Yet successful human intelligence networks require precisely the opposite: patience, continuity, trust and the credible expectation that relationships will survive political changes.

Without that credibility, the people easiest to recruit become the people whose loyalty is easiest to purchase.

And purchased loyalty has a terrible habit of remaining available to the highest bidder.

Great Tactical Intelligence, Terrible Strategic Intelligence

This helps explain one of the strangest features of Western intelligence operations against Iran.

How can intelligence services demonstrate astonishing knowledge about individual Iranian officials, military facilities, nuclear scientists, communications networks and weapons systems while repeatedly appearing surprised by Iran’s political behavior?

Because these are different forms of intelligence.

Finding a missile launcher is an engineering problem.

Understanding Iranian nationalism is a human problem.

Identifying a commander is a surveillance problem.

Predicting whether Iranians will revolt during a foreign attack is a sociological problem.

Intercepting communications requires technology.

Understanding why an Iranian who despises the Islamic Republic might nevertheless fight fiercely against Israel or the United States requires understanding Iran.

That distinction is absolutely critical.

You can penetrate a government without penetrating a society.

Indeed, an intelligence organization can know almost everything about a state’s internal workings while understanding remarkably little about the civilization surrounding it.

The Regime Is Not Iran

This is where the consequences become enormous.

One of the easiest mistakes outsiders make about Iran is assuming that opposition to the Islamic Republic translates automatically into support for whatever harms the Islamic Republic.

It doesn’t.

An Iranian can hate the government and oppose bombing Iran.

An Iranian can want regime change and oppose ethnic separatism.

An Iranian can despise the Revolutionary Guards and still want Iran to possess a powerful military.

An Iranian can oppose compulsory religious rule and simultaneously resent Israel.

An Iranian can admire America culturally while deeply distrusting American foreign policy.

None of these positions is contradictory.

They become contradictory only if Iran is viewed through a simplistic binary framework in which everyone is either “pro-regime” or “pro-Western.”

Iranian nationalism is thousands of years older than the Islamic Republic. The state, the government, the nation, and the civilization are not interchangeable concepts.

Any intelligence assessment that fails to understand this distinction is almost guaranteed eventually to produce catastrophic policy recommendations.

The Exile Bubble

The problem becomes even worse when policymakers confuse the Iranian diaspora with Iran itself.

Exiles are disproportionately people who left because they were unhappy with conditions inside the country. Political activists within that population are an even more highly selected subgroup. Opposition organizations represent another level of selection beyond that.

By the time an intelligence service reaches somebody who actively seeks meetings with foreign governments and promises that his movement can govern Iran after regime change, it may be dealing with a person several layers removed from representative Iranian public opinion.

Yet these are precisely the people most accessible to Western policymakers.

They speak English. They live in Washington, London, Paris or Los Angeles. They understand Western media. They know congressional staffers. They appear on television. They know what Western audiences want to hear.

Meanwhile, the shopkeeper in Mashhad, the engineer in Isfahan, the student in Shiraz, the factory worker in Tabriz, or the middle-class family in Tehran whose political behavior ultimately determines Iran’s future remain largely invisible.

The result is an enormous sampling error masquerading as intelligence.

When Bad Intelligence Becomes War

This would merely be an interesting bureaucratic problem if the consequences were confined to intelligence reports.

They are not.

Imagine building a strategy around assumptions such as these:

The government is about to collapse.

The population will rise after military strikes.

The armed forces will defect.

Ethnic minorities will rebel.

Opposition groups abroad have substantial domestic support.

Military pressure will weaken nationalism rather than strengthen it.

The population will distinguish perfectly between attacks against “the regime” and attacks against their country.

Now imagine that most of those assumptions ultimately came from people whose careers, incomes, immigration status, political ambitions, or institutional relevance depended on Western governments believing them.

Suddenly the quality of human intelligence becomes one of the most important variables in the entire war.

The problem is no longer simply that intelligence produced a mistaken forecast.

Bad intelligence can produce the strategy that produces the war that proves the intelligence was bad.

Intelligence Needs People Who Say No

There is a simple test for any intelligence organization operating in a difficult country.

Ask how many of its most valued sources regularly tell it things it does not want to hear.

If every Iranian source says the regime is six months from collapse, there is probably a problem.

If every opposition figure says his organization is enormously popular, there is probably a problem.

If every exile says Iranians will welcome foreign military intervention, there is definitely a problem.

Real societies are messy. Real intelligence should therefore be messy too.

The most valuable Iranian source may be the person saying:

“You don’t understand this country.”

“You are confusing hatred of the government with hatred of Iran.”

“These opposition leaders aren’t popular.”

“Bombing will strengthen nationalism.”

“Arming separatists will destroy your credibility.”

“Your assumptions are wrong.”

An intelligence service that systematically filters such voices out will eventually create an exquisitely detailed map of a country that does not actually exist.

The Ultimate Irony

America and Israel may possess some of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence capabilities. They can see extraordinary things. They can intercept extraordinary things. They can find people who believed themselves impossible to find.

But technological superiority creates its own temptation: the belief that because you can see almost everything, you therefore understand everything.

You don’t.

A satellite can photograph Iran.

It cannot understand Iran.

A phone intercept can reveal what an Iranian commander said yesterday.

It cannot tell you what millions of Iranians will decide tomorrow.

And an agent recruited because he desperately wants your money, your visa, your protection, or your political sponsorship may know exactly what his handler wants to hear.

That is the intelligence prostitution problem.

If you build an intelligence network primarily from people whose loyalty is for sale, you should not be surprised when the intelligence they provide is also for sale.

Perhaps this explains one of the great paradoxes of Western policy toward Iran: extraordinary intelligence capabilities accompanied by extraordinary strategic miscalculations.

The problem may never have been that America couldn’t see Iran.

The problem may be that it kept paying the wrong people to explain what it was seeing.

There is something increasingly strange about the relationship between the United States and Israel.

The United States provides Israel with enormous military, diplomatic, intelligence, and political support. American weapons help defend Israel. American forces have repeatedly been placed at risk protecting Israel, and American diplomacy has frequently shielded Israel internationally. Yet when an American president decides that a particular course of action is in the interests of the United States, Israel increasingly seems perfectly comfortable saying no.

That raises a simple question that Washington rarely seems willing to ask:

What exactly does “ally” mean?

There is nothing inherently wrong with Israel rejecting an American demand. Israel is a sovereign country. Its government has an obligation to pursue what it believes are Israeli national interests, not American national interests. If Benjamin Netanyahu believes an American proposal is bad for Israel, he has every right to reject it.

But sovereignty works both ways.

If Israel has the right to pursue Israeli interests independently of Washington, then Washington has precisely the same right to pursue American interests independently of Israel.

And that is where the relationship has become badly distorted.

Sovereignty Cannot Work in Only One Direction

Imagine the United States saying something very simple to Israel:

You are a sovereign country. Make whatever decisions you believe are necessary for your national security. But if those decisions contradict American policy, America is under no obligation to finance them, arm them, defend them, or absorb their consequences.

What exactly would be unreasonable about that?

The problem is not that Israel occasionally disagrees with America. Allies disagree all the time. Britain disagrees with Washington. France disagrees with Washington. Germany disagrees with Washington. Japan disagrees with Washington.

The problem arises when independence becomes asymmetric.

Israel can reject American policy because Israel is sovereign, while America is nevertheless expected to provide the weapons, money, diplomatic protection and sometimes military involvement necessary to sustain the Israeli policy that America just rejected.

That isn’t really strategic independence for both countries.

It is independence for one and obligation for the other.

The Iran War Has Exposed the Problem

The current conflict with Iran has made this contradiction much harder to ignore.

The United States and Israel do not necessarily have identical interests in Iran. They never did.

Israel naturally evaluates Iran primarily through the lens of Israeli security. America has a much broader set of considerations. Washington must think about American troops throughout the region, energy markets, relations with Arab governments, Turkey, Europe, Russia and China, global trade, the Strait of Hormuz, American military inventories and the enormous financial cost of another prolonged Middle Eastern war.

Those interests can overlap with Israel’s interests.

But they are not identical.

And once those interests diverge, Washington has to be able to say so.

If an American president concludes that continuing a war with Iran is damaging American interests, then the United States should be able to pursue a settlement regardless of whether the Israeli government likes that settlement.

Israel can continue fighting if it chooses.

But then it becomes Israel’s war.

That distinction should be obvious, yet American foreign policy has had enormous difficulty making it.

Defending Israel Is Not the Same as Financing Every Israeli Policy

There is another distinction Washington desperately needs to establish.

The United States can remain committed to Israel’s existence and security without committing itself to every military operation undertaken by an Israeli government.

Those are completely different propositions.

America can help defend Israeli cities against missile attacks. It can share intelligence about genuine common threats. It can maintain technological, economic and military cooperation. It can make clear that attempts to destroy Israel will encounter American opposition.

None of that requires Washington to provide unconditional support for every Israeli offensive operation.

There should be a dividing line between defending Israel and underwriting Israeli policy.

If Israel chooses a military operation that Washington believes damages American interests, Israel should finance it, supply it and accept the consequences of it.

That isn’t abandoning an ally.

That is what sovereignty looks like.

America Has Enormous Leverage — But Rarely Uses It

The strangest part of the relationship is that America isn’t actually powerless.

Quite the opposite.

The United States possesses extraordinary leverage.

Israel benefits enormously from American military assistance, weapons supplies, intelligence cooperation, diplomatic support and access to American technology. More broadly, America’s presence in the Middle East provides a strategic security umbrella whose value is difficult to calculate.

Yet Washington frequently behaves as though Israel possesses all the leverage.

That is an extraordinary inversion.

The United States doesn’t need to threaten Israel. It doesn’t need sanctions. It doesn’t need dramatic confrontations between presidents and prime ministers.

It simply needs to stop subsidizing policies it opposes.

If Washington says, “Don’t undertake this operation,” and Israel undertakes it anyway, the American response can be remarkably uncomplicated:

Fine. But we aren’t paying for it.

That one principle would fundamentally rebalance the relationship.

What Does America Receive in Return?

There is also a question that Congress should be asking about Israel—and frankly about every American alliance.

For every major category of American support, what does America receive in return?

Not emotionally.

Not historically.

Not rhetorically.

Strategically.

What measurable American interest is being advanced?

Perhaps there is an excellent answer. Israel provides intelligence, technological cooperation, military capabilities, and strategic benefits to the United States. Those benefits should be identified and valued.

But so should the costs.

That is how rational governments make decisions.

American foreign policy should not operate like a collection of permanent sentimental obligations inherited from previous generations. Alliances exist because they advance mutual interests.

When those interests change, alliances should change with them.

Allies, Not Clients — And Certainly Not Masters

The principle should extend far beyond Israel.

America needs normal relationships with its allies.

Saudi Arabia should pursue Saudi interests. Turkey should pursue Turkish interests. Britain should pursue British interests. Japan should pursue Japanese interests. Israel should pursue Israeli interests.

And America should pursue American interests.

Sometimes those interests will coincide beautifully.

Sometimes they won’t.

When they coincide, America should cooperate enthusiastically. When they diverge, each country should be free to pursue its own course.

That is what an alliance between sovereign countries actually looks like.

The unhealthy alternative is a relationship in which America assumes responsibility for decisions it didn’t make.

And that may be precisely where Washington increasingly finds itself with Israel.

The Answer Is Conditional Alignment

America doesn’t need to “dump Israel.”

It needs something much more sensible:

conditional alignment.

American military assistance should support objectives America actually supports.

American diplomatic protection should defend policies America actually believes in.

American troops should be placed at risk only when American interests genuinely require it.

And American weapons should not automatically underwrite military strategies an American administration has explicitly rejected.

Israel would remain perfectly free to disagree.

But freedom comes with responsibility.

If Netanyahu—or any future Israeli prime minister—believes Israeli national security requires rejecting an American president’s demands, he should reject them.

That is Israel’s sovereign right.

But an American president should then be equally comfortable saying:

“That’s your decision. But then it’s your operation, your money, your weapons and your consequences.”

There is nothing anti-Israel about that position.

Quite the opposite. It treats Israel as what Israel has always insisted it is: an independent sovereign nation capable of making its own decisions and accepting responsibility for them.

And it treats America the same way.

Because an alliance in which one country can repeatedly say no while the other country is still expected to pay the bill isn’t much of an alliance.

It is a dependency.

And when the supposedly dependent country is the one dictating the terms, Washington should probably start asking which country is actually dependent on which.

As the war with Iran winds down, the United States has a choice. It can attempt to reconstruct the same Middle Eastern order that existed before the war, restoring sanctions, rebuilding containment, and pretending that nothing fundamental has changed. Or it can recognize that the war itself has changed the strategic equation and use that change to produce something far more valuable than another temporary ceasefire.

The strategic win now is to open Iran.

That means ending the sanctions regime—not temporarily, not through another collection of waivers that can disappear with the next American president, but through a comprehensive normalization of Iran’s economic relationship with the world.

Sanctions must become the central issue in any final settlement because they have become one of the principal barriers to Iran’s normal membership in the international community. Iran should therefore be willing to make substantial compromises to obtain their permanent removal, while the United States should recognize that removing them may now serve American interests better than preserving them.

This is particularly important because the old strategic rationale for containing Iran has been badly damaged by the war.

For decades, American Middle Eastern strategy rested in part on protecting the Gulf Arab states and the economic order that grew around them. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain benefited enormously from being stable, internationally connected commercial and financial centers, while Iran—the largest country directly across the Persian Gulf—was economically isolated.

Whatever one thinks of the original justification for that arrangement, the war has exposed its limitations. The Gulf conflict has demonstrated how vulnerable the entire regional economy is to confrontation around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The World Bank noted earlier this year that roughly 20 percent of global oil consumption and LNG trade passes through Hormuz and that the conflict directly affected GCC economies as well as Iran.

That changes the calculation.

The idea that Iran can simply be contained indefinitely while the economies surrounding it flourish assumes that containment operates primarily in one direction. The war has demonstrated that it does not. Iran possesses a favorable geography, a large population, energy resources, and control over access to one of the world’s most important maritime corridors. Attempting to economically strangle Iran therefore imposes costs far beyond Iran itself.

Iran can disrupt the economic environment surrounding it. Iran can impose costs. Iran can make containment reciprocal.

That doesn’t mean Iran should do those things. Quite the opposite. It means everyone has an enormous incentive to replace containment with integration.

Iran Is the Asset Hiding in Plain Sight

Iran is not some economically insignificant country that can simply be removed from the global system without consequence. It has more than 92 million people, according to the latest World Bank data, and possesses the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves and fourth-largest proven crude oil reserves. It also has a relatively diversified industrial base and a large educated workforce.

But Iran’s greatest economic asset may ultimately be something that cannot be sanctioned away:

its geography.

Look at a map.

Iran sits between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. To its west are Turkey and Europe. To its north are the Caucasus, Russia and Central Asia. To its east are Afghanistan and Pakistan, and beyond them India and China. To its south is the Indian Ocean.

Iran is not merely an oil producer.

Iran is a crossroads.

And that matters enormously as Central Asia develops.

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and the rest of Central Asia are vast territories seeking efficient connections to global markets. Kazakhstan alone is receiving major international investment in rail connectivity, including a World Bank-backed project designed to strengthen the Trans-Caspian trade corridor between Asia and Europe.

But Central Asia doesn’t only need to go west.

It needs to go south.

And immediately south sits Iran.

Railways and highways through Iran can eventually connect Central Asian production with Persian Gulf ports, the Indian Ocean, Turkey, Pakistan and markets beyond. Chabahar can become part of that system. Bandar Abbas can become part of it. Iranian railways can become part of it. Caspian ports can become part of it.

Indeed, analysts are already examining whether a postwar U.S.-Iran framework could reopen what has been called Central Asia’s “southern route.”

This is the larger strategic opportunity that Washington should recognize.

Bet on Iran

For decades the implicit American proposition was essentially: contain Iran and build relationships with everyone around Iran.

Perhaps the next proposition should be different:

integrate Iran and build relationships through Iran.

That does not mean abandoning the Gulf Arabs. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and the other Gulf states remain important countries and potentially important American partners.

But American strategy should not require Iran to remain poor so that other countries can remain prosperous.

That is neither sustainable nor necessary.

There is enough economic opportunity for Dubai and Tehran, Abu Dhabi and Isfahan, Riyadh and Mashhad to prosper simultaneously. In fact, a genuinely integrated regional economy could ultimately make all of them more prosperous.

The United States should therefore stop thinking about Middle Eastern economic development as a zero-sum competition between Iran and the Gulf Arabs.

Iran is the new horse worth betting on—not instead of the Gulf states, but as the enormous missing economy that has been artificially disconnected from the regional system.

Imagine what normalization could mean.

Iran needs hundreds of commercial aircraft. It needs airports, railways, power plants, water infrastructure, telecommunications systems, automobiles, industrial equipment, refineries, petrochemical facilities, hotels and financial services. It has enormous energy reserves, major mineral resources, an educated population and a domestic market of more than 90 million people.

Years of conflict and intensified sanctions have taken a serious toll. The World Bank estimates that Iran’s economy contracted in 2025/26 and identifies sanctions, conflict, infrastructure damage, energy shortages, and weakened investment as major constraints on the economy.

Turn that around, and the same weaknesses become investment opportunities.

Boeing and Airbus aircraft. American and European industrial equipment. International hotel chains. Banking. Insurance. Engineering. Telecommunications. Energy development. Mining. Transportation infrastructure. Consumer products. Tourism.

Instead of spending enormous resources trying to prevent commerce with Iran, imagine America competing for that commerce.

Sanctions Have Also Distorted Iran

There is another reason sanctions should end.

Isolation does not necessarily moderate a country. Quite often it does the opposite.

When a country believes itself permanently threatened, security institutions become stronger. Military expenditures become easier to justify. Political dissent can more easily be characterized as foreign interference. Businesses engaged in sanctions circumvention become economically powerful, while ordinary, internationally oriented businesses suffer.

The people most naturally inclined toward engagement with the outside world—entrepreneurs, engineers, academics, exporters, students and professionals—are precisely the people an isolation strategy disadvantages.

That is backward.

If the long-term objective is a more normal Iran, then create conditions in which normality pays.

Let Iranian airlines fly everywhere.

Let Iranian businesses trade everywhere.

Let Iranian students study everywhere.

Let American companies invest in Iran.

Let Europeans build factories there.

Let Japanese and Korean manufacturers compete there.

Let Iranian tourists travel, and foreign tourists visit Iran.

Let Iranian banks reconnect with the international financial system.

Let millions of ordinary Iranians acquire an economic interest in maintaining peaceful relations with the rest of the world.

That is not appeasement.

That is leverage of an entirely different kind, and potentially much more durable.

Don’t Repeat the JCPOA Mistake

There is one enormous qualification.

Iran cannot reasonably accept another sanctions arrangement that disappears whenever administrations change in Washington.

That lesson has already been learned.

If Iran makes significant concessions in a final settlement, sanctions relief must therefore be institutional rather than merely presidential. Congressional sanctions that can reasonably be repealed should be repealed. Executive sanctions tied simply to Iran’s status as an adversarial state should be removed. Secondary sanctions preventing legitimate third-country commerce should disappear. Banking restrictions should be normalized.

Iran does not need immunity from ordinary international rules. If an Iranian individual engages in terrorism, narcotics trafficking, corruption, or other sanctionable conduct, sanction that individual under the same rules applied elsewhere.

But stop sanctioning normal economic activity simply because it is Iranian.

The objective should not be another temporary period of sanctions relief.

The objective should be normalization.

Turn Defeat Into a Strategic Win

Wars rarely end exactly as their architects imagined.

Objectives change. Assumptions collapse. Unexpected strengths and vulnerabilities become apparent. The important question afterward is whether governments have enough imagination to adapt.

Whatever military objectives the United States originally expected to achieve in this war, the postwar question is different:

What outcome leaves America strategically better off ten or twenty years from now?

An isolated, angry Iran of 92 million people sitting astride the Persian Gulf and the transportation routes of Central Asia does not obviously accomplish that.

A prosperous Iran increasingly dependent upon international investment, trade, tourism, aviation, banking and regional transportation might.

And there is an enormous difference between the two.

The first Iran has every incentive to develop mechanisms for circumventing the international system.

The second has an enormous stake in preserving it.

The first Iran sees the world outside its borders primarily as a threat.

The second increasingly sees it as a customer.

The first depends upon confrontation.

The second profits from stability.

That is how the United States can turn an inconclusive or even unsuccessful war into a strategic win.

Not by pretending the war was something it wasn’t.

Not by searching for another enemy to bomb.

Not by attempting to reconstruct an unsustainable regional order.

But by recognizing the opportunity created by the destruction of the old one.

Open Iran.

End the economic siege. Normalize trade. Rebuild aviation. Connect Iran to Central Asia. Connect Central Asia to the world through Iran. Encourage American, European, and Asian investment. Give Iran an economic stake in international stability and give ordinary Iranians a stake in engagement rather than confrontation.

And then allow something that neither sanctions nor bombs have managed to produce over decades:

time.

Time for prosperity to change incentives. Time for international contact to change attitudes. Time for economic interests to displace security interests. Time for Iranian society to evolve internally without the permanent fear that foreign powers are preparing the next attack.

Peace can end a war.

But trade can change the relationship that produced the war in the first place.

That should be the strategic prize.

And if Washington has the imagination to recognize it, opening Iran may ultimately prove far more valuable to the United States than anything it could ever have achieved by defeating Iran.

There is one more condition Iran should consider attaching to any new system governing maritime traffic entering the Persian Gulf: if you want to enter the Persian Gulf, you should at least be prepared to call it the Persian Gulf.

This may sound symbolic. It isn’t.

Names matter because names eventually become institutions, institutions become habits, and habits become accepted reality. For decades, Iran has complained whenever governments, military organizations, airlines, media companies or mapmakers have substituted the politically manufactured term “Arabian Gulf” for the historical name Persian Gulf. Iran issues a protest, somebody issues a response, everyone moves on, and nothing really changes.

Perhaps Iran has been approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

If Iran is going to exercise greater administrative authority over maritime traffic entering the Persian Gulf, it should establish a very simple rule: all documentation submitted to Iranian authorities concerning navigation into the Persian Gulf must identify the body of water by its internationally established name — the Persian Gulf.

The historical case is hardly obscure. In fact, the United Nations Secretariat’s own editorial directive states explicitly that “Persian Gulf” is the standard geographical designation for the sea between the Arabian Peninsula and Iran. Iran has repeatedly raised the issue at the United Nations, including as recently as 2023, arguing that geographical names constitute historical heritage rather than political branding exercises.

So why should Iran continue treating this merely as something to complain about?

Make it administrative.

A tanker submits its navigation documents. Destination: Persian Gulf. Fine.

A shipping company files its paperwork. Route: Strait of Hormuz to Persian Gulf. Fine.

A vessel submits an electronic chart identifying the destination as the “Arabian Gulf.” The application is returned: incorrect geographical designation — please correct and resubmit.

No shouting. No speeches. No diplomatic crisis. No need to confiscate someone’s atlas.

Just bureaucracy.

And bureaucracy, repeated thousands of times, can accomplish something diplomacy sometimes cannot.

Shipping companies would rapidly adapt because they are in the business of moving cargo, not engaging in geographical arguments. Insurers would adapt. Freight forwarders would adapt. Port agents would adapt. Navigation companies would adapt. Nobody moving a $100 million cargo of oil is going to leave a tanker sitting outside the Strait of Hormuz because someone refuses to change two words on a form.

Within a remarkably short period, the terminology would become routine:

Persian Gulf.

And that is precisely the point.

There is, however, an important distinction Iran should observe. The Strait of Hormuz is an international strait, and international law of the sea strongly protects continuous navigation through such waterways. Article 38 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea provides that ships and aircraft enjoy a right of transit passage through qualifying international straits and says that passage “shall not be impeded.”

Iran therefore should not turn this into an unnecessarily provocative claim that its authorities can board every passing vessel, search the captain’s books and maps, discover the words “Arabian Gulf” somewhere on board and seize the ship.

That would transform a powerful symbolic argument into a questionable maritime confrontation.

The smarter approach is narrower.

Iran should control the terminology of the institutions and administrative systems it controls.

If you submit documents to Iran, use Persian Gulf.

If you request Iranian port services, use Persian Gulf.

If you communicate with Iranian maritime authorities, use Persian Gulf.

If Iran participates in a regional navigation or traffic-management system, its databases should use Persian Gulf.

If an electronic application submitted to an Iranian authority contains “Arabian Gulf,” the computer should simply reject it and ask the applicant to correct the geographical designation.

This is not fundamentally different from governments insisting that passports, customs declarations, bills of lading and other official documents use their recognized terminology. States establish administrative standards constantly.

More importantly, Iran should understand that control over a strategic gateway creates forms of leverage considerably more sophisticated than simply charging tolls.

There is financial leverage.

There is commercial leverage.

There is regulatory leverage.

There is security leverage.

And there is also cultural and diplomatic leverage.

Iran has spent decades demanding recognition of the name Persian Gulf while possessing one of the most extraordinary geographical advantages on Earth: the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz and a coastline running along much of the Gulf itself.

If geography has suddenly become valuable again, Iran should use that geography intelligently.

The objective should not be harassment. It should not be stopping ships for trivial reasons. It should certainly not be creating unpredictable conditions that make international shipping unnecessarily dangerous.

Quite the opposite.

Iran should aspire to make navigation through the Strait of Hormuz extraordinarily professional, predictable, safe, and efficient. The message should effectively be:

You are welcome here. Your ships are safe. Your cargo is safe. Your crews will be treated professionally. The rules are transparent. The fees are published. The navigation lanes are clearly marked. And, incidentally, the body of water you are entering is called the Persian Gulf.

There is something almost elegant about that approach.

For much of the twentieth century, Iran watched other governments attempt to change the terminology through political repetition. “Arabian Gulf” was repeated until people hoped repetition itself would manufacture legitimacy.

Iran can answer repetition with repetition.

Every tanker.

Every container ship.

Every customs declaration.

Every port document.

Every navigation instruction.

Every insurance certificate.

Every maritime database.

Every day.

Persian Gulf. Persian Gulf. Persian Gulf.

Eventually people stop thinking about it.

And that is when a name has truly won.

This is also part of a much larger strategic opportunity for Iran. If the country emerges from the present confrontation with greater influence over the entrance to the Persian Gulf, it should resist the temptation to think about Hormuz merely as a weapon. A weapon has value primarily when somebody fears that you will use it. A functioning international gateway creates value every single day.

Iran should therefore think less like the owner of a roadblock and more like the operator of the world’s most strategically important toll plaza.

Make it safe.

Make it efficient.

Make it predictable.

Make money from it where international law permits.

Build institutions around it.

And use those institutions to establish standards.

One of those standards should be extraordinarily simple:

Welcome to the Persian Gulf.

Because if you are going to sail into it, the least you can do is get the name right.

Sometimes, to fix something, you first have to break it.

History is full of examples. The First World War destroyed Europe’s empires. The Second World War shattered colonialism and gave birth to the United Nations, NATO, and the modern international economic system. The collapse of the Soviet Union redrew the political map of Europe and Central Asia almost overnight.

Whether we like it or not, the Iran war appears poised to become another such inflection point.

The Middle East that existed before this conflict is unlikely to return. Too much has changed. Trust has evaporated. Security assumptions have collapsed. Countries that once relied on outside powers for protection are reassessing those relationships, while regional powers are reconsidering who their long-term partners and rivals really are. Analysts across multiple policy institutions argue that the conflict is accelerating a broader regional realignment, although they differ on what the eventual balance of power will look like.

The real question is not whether the region will change. It already has.

The question is: what replaces the old order?

Perhaps the era of unquestioned American dominance gives way to a more multipolar Middle East. Perhaps regional powers—Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and others—begin taking greater responsibility for their own security architecture. Perhaps new trade corridors, energy arrangements, and diplomatic institutions emerge, reducing dependence on outside powers. Or perhaps the region simply enters a prolonged period of instability before a new equilibrium finally emerges.

Whatever the outcome, one thing seems increasingly clear: the status quo has been broken.

And once history reaches that point, there is rarely any going back.

One of the more fascinating questions surrounding modern warfare has very little to do with missiles, drones, or aircraft. It has to do with artificial intelligence.

The United States almost certainly possesses the world’s most sophisticated military modeling capability. Every conceivable campaign can be simulated thousands of times. Logistics, industrial capacity, missile inventories, casualty estimates, alliance responses, economic consequences, escalation pathways and countless other variables can all be incorporated into increasingly sophisticated models.

Which raises an obvious question.

If those models suggest that decisive military success is unlikely, why fight?

This is not an entirely new question.

During the Obama administration, senior military officials publicly acknowledged that military strikes could delay Iran’s nuclear program but were unlikely to eliminate it permanently. Whether one agreed with the JCPOA or not, the logic behind it was straightforward: if military force could not deliver a lasting strategic solution, diplomacy deserved to be tried.

Today the strategy appears very different.

If the objective is regime change, history provides little encouragement. If the objective is permanently destroying Iran’s nuclear capability through air power alone, many military analysts have long questioned whether that is achievable. If the objective is to fundamentally reshape the Middle East through military force, the last two decades offer a sobering record.

So, what changed?

Perhaps that is the wrong question.

Perhaps the military assessment has not changed very much at all.

Perhaps the political objective has.

Military planners answer one question: What is likely to happen if we do this?

Political leaders answer another question: What future are we trying to create?

Those are not the same questions.

Then another possibility occurred to me.

What if what appears to be a military setback eventually becomes a strategic opportunity?

Not because anyone deliberately seeks defeat, but because wars have a remarkable way of forcing governments to confront realities they have postponed for years.

For decades the United States has maintained an enormous military presence across the Middle East. That posture made sense when American prosperity depended heavily upon uninterrupted access to Gulf oil. Today, the United States is one of the world’s largest oil and natural gas producers. Its principal strategic competitor is increasingly China, not the states of the Persian Gulf. Every dollar, every aircraft carrier, every logistics chain, and every military base committed to one theatre is unavailable elsewhere.

Suppose policymakers quietly conclude that the strategic value of maintaining dozens of installations throughout the region no longer justifies their enormous financial and military cost.

How are you leaving?

Voluntarily withdrawing is politically difficult. It is portrayed as weakness. Allies protest. Opponents celebrate. Domestic critics accuse the administration of surrender.

A costly and inconclusive campaign, however, can create something different.

It can create political permission to rethink decades-old assumptions.

The question changes from “Why are we leaving?” to “Why are we still here?”

That is a profoundly different debate.

Perhaps the most important consequence of this conflict will not be measured in territory gained or lost, but in whether it triggers a broader reassessment of America’s role in the Middle East.

Which commitments remain essential?

Which alliances continue to advance America’s long-term interests?

Which deployments are strategic necessities, and which are simply historical inertia?

These are uncomfortable questions, but they are precisely the questions wars tend to force upon nations.

None of this requires believing that military setbacks are planned or desired. Governments rarely seek failure. But they do adapt. Objectives evolve. Strategies change. Political realities shift.

Artificial intelligence may eventually become extraordinarily good at predicting the likely outcome of military campaigns.

It cannot answer a more fundamental question.

When the facts change, are political leaders willing to change strategy?

History suggests that sometimes the greatest strategic victory is not winning the war itself.

It is recognized that the world has changed—and that having the courage to change with it is essential.

There is value in a loss to Iran! There is value in a new alliance with a regional superpower capable of projecting power into Central Asia. There is value in abandoning Israel and these Arab states. Maybe, just maybe, they will take their fangs out of US politics! That would be a huge win – in fact.