Airstrikes alone unlikely to lead to regime change in Iran, expert warns: “It never works”
Washington – Airstrikes by the US and Israel alone are unlikely to lead to the ouster of the Iranian government, according to air campaign experts, who said the risks are increasing a hard fought battle which may spread beyond the Middle East.
Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who has studied air power for three decades, told CBS News 24/7 that history does not support the idea that bombing alone can remove a regime and install a friendly leader.
“The truth of the matter is, for more than a century, states have been trying to overthrow governments with air power alone and — I choose my words carefully — it’s never worked,” Pape told CBS News 24/7 on Friday. “We’re looking at the predictable result of increased risk, increased growth. And I’m sorry to say that this may continue for a long time.”
Air raids on Israel at the beginning of the war he killed the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a number of other high-ranking government officials, but the military and high-ranking clergy still control the reins of government. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has continued to launch retaliatory drone and missile strikes across the region, while the clerical movement has also been working to pick up the slack. the next leader of the country.
Pape said the initial US and Israeli strikes failed to “produce a quick and decisive victory.”
“In the end it’s a practice of political self-defeat. We inject nationalism, and the usual result is a strong leader. That’s why President Trump said, ‘I don’t want that guy,'” he said, referring to. Khamenei’s son. “Because he would be worse than what we had before.”
President Trump he warned Friday that he would accept nothing less than “UNLIMITED SURRENDER,” and did not rule out the use of infantry.
The President urged the people of Iran to participate in the overthrow of the government, but he also indicated that he may accept a new leader in the existing power structure if they agree with the US Mr. put in an interim leader which cooperates with the US
Amos Yadlin, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, told CBS News on Friday that no sane person in the Israeli government or military believes a regime change is possible right now.
Pape said Iran “could do a lot of things to escalate the war and hurt us and never fight a war with us.”
“That’s how we lost the Vietnam War. And I’m sorry to say, we went down the road when we didn’t have a strategy to win,” he added.
America’s allies in the Gulf have warned that they are running down on interceptors needed to take out Iranian missiles, CBS News reported Thursday, adding to concerns about being able to replenish a stockpile of expensive weapons used to repel low-cost drones and missiles.
Pape said he began studying the effectiveness of bombing campaigns in the 1980s to understand how the US lost in Vietnam, despite huge gains in technology and resources. He said he began working with the US Air Force on the development of precision-guided munitions in the 1990s.
“All of a sudden you talked about intel. This was the whole idea. The idea is, ‘Wow, we have precision targeting. We’re going to do this with precision intel. We can really now bring down governments,'” he said. “And be careful, we can’t just do that. We’ve tried it over and over again over the course of time. There’s a record of zero success in the last 30 years. And the reason is that targeting is so surprising, you don’t see the long battle ahead.”
Pape said the danger of the current conflict is that “this will not just stop at the escalation of the Middle East. This will begin to increase more and more throughout the world as the weeks and time continue.” He said Iran and its proxy groups can start hitting targets around the world.
“There’s really no strategy here. Doubling down, talking tough and hitting in front of your communities – that’s how democracy tends to get into these long battles,” he said. “And then those leaders basically look like shame years later, because it turns out it didn’t work. So where’s the plan, my question.”
Pape’s concerns are similar to those expressed by analysts and experts in recent days as more attention has been focused on war topics. Elliot Ackerman, a CBS News contributor and former CIA official, told CBS News’ “The Takeout” earlier this week that the war is “very dangerous.”
“It relies on members of the Iranian community to stand up and take control of their government. We are overthrowing a regime in a very difficult place. Iran is the second largest country in the Middle East,” he said. “And I highly doubt that this won’t get worse and that it won’t last long.”
