Regime change in Iran unlikely with an air attack alone

In mid-1940, a few months after Winston Churchill became prime minister of the United Kingdom, he analyzed Royal Air Force bombing reports on Germany and concluded that conventional bombs filled with Amatol — a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate — were destructive but insufficient to cripple the Nazi regime.

He told Lord Beaverbrook, his Canadian-born minister of aircraft production, that the only way to defeat Germany was by “an absolutely devastating exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to overwhelm them by this means, without which I do not see a way through.”

In the weeks that followed, Beaverbrook learned about research and production of the explosive cyclonite. In the twenties and thirties, British scientists, building upon experimentational work undertaken by European and American researchers going back to the 1890s, figured out how to stabilize cyclonite. For security reasons, they called it “Research Department Explosive” or RDX. (Throughout the Second World War, Montreal chemical engineer J.R. Donald, on behalf of the Canadian federal government, worked closely with British and American scientists in perfecting RDX.)

By March 1, 1941, the RAF were bombing German cities with bombs composed of a lethal RDX-TNT mixture. The result was just as Churchill wanted: absolute destruction of people and property. One RAF pilot told a Time magazine reporter that when the RDX bomb detonated it produced “a huge heaving mass like a volcano in eruption, which rose and settled down into a great red glow fully half a mile in diameter.”

As terrible as that bombing was, the death of German civilians and military personnel and the levelling of buildings and infrastructure did not compel Hitler and the Nazi regime to surrender, any more than it compelled Churchill and the British to give up when the Nazi air force bombed London and other U.K. cities and towns for more than 50 days from September 1940 to May 1941.

The Nazi regime was only defeated after the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day on June 6, 1944. It took another 11 months and the deaths of thousands of Allied soldiers before Hitler committed suicide, the Nazis capitulated, and the war in Europe ended.

Since 1945, apart from the U.S. dropping two atomic bombs on Japan — that killed hundreds of thousands of people and decimated two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki — air power alone has mostly proven insufficient to defeat an implacable enemy and affect positive political change.

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. mistakenly believed that an intensive bombing campaign (“Operation Rolling Thunder”) would force the North Vietnamese to accept American peace terms; it had the opposite effect.

In 1991, in the war against Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait, a wave of air attacks did not force Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, to alter course. That happened only after allied ground forces were involved.

“Airpower tends to succeed not through punishment of civilian infrastructure, but when it is linked to a credible threat to seize or hold territory,” argues Sina Azodi, a professor of Middle East Politics at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. “Even NATO’s [1999] campaign in Kosovo — often cited as a triumph of airpower — became coercive only when Serbian forces on the ground were increasingly threatened and the prospect of a NATO invasion appeared plausible. The lesson is consistent: without jeopardizing territorial control, bombing alone rarely compels capitulation or surrender.”

That is why U.S. President Donald Trump’s current chief objective (though his strategy is constantly in flux) of achieving a regime change in Iran using air, missile and drone attacks will almost certainly fail.

The targeted killings of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top Iranian officials wounded the regime. But after nearly 50 years in power, the country’s brutal dictatorship remains firmly in control with a powerful and ruthless military. (Consider that during the past two years, Israel, with its superior air and military forces, has seriously weakened Hamas, but have not been able to completely defeat or disarm the militant-terrorist group.)

The notion, suggested by Trump in a recent interview with the New York Times, that Iran’s regime may vanish and its military forces might voluntarily surrender their weapons to the Iranian people, is improbable, if absurd.

Perhaps, as the Times’s columnist Thomas Friedman suggests, the U.S led attack might eventually convince Iran’s new leaders to moderate their position in dealing with the west and their own citizens. Though right now, that seems like wishful thinking.

History shows that the only way to eliminate an entrenched and extremist regime such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime that has abused human rights, slaughtered its own people, and fostered terrorism, is a full-scale Second World War-style “boots on the ground” attack utilizing American, Israeli and Western European soldiers. Such an assault would cause the deaths of many combatants, including young Americans.

Given all the other issues Trump is presently dealing with, coupled with his “America First” campaign promise of no more wars, it is doubtful he would take such action, which would be extremely unpopular with his loyal MAGA followers.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context. His most recent book is The Dollar-A-Year Men: How the Best Business Brains in Canada Helped to Win the Second World War.