When US presidents talk of regime change, we must be careful what they wish for

Independent

4 hours ago

US president Donald Trump once boasted that he was a 'stable genius'. Well, it never had much of a ring of truth to it. He is in fact, and probably always has been, extremely erratic, a trait lauded by his cult followers as a mystical style of instinctive leadership that all Maga disciples must simply trust, as if he were a latter-day Jesus Christ or, more likely, a tangerine Charles Manson. Either way, Trump is more dangerous than ever.
Only a few days ago, we may recall, he was publicly taunting the Ayatollah Khamenei, head of the Iranian theocracy, an 86-year old mullah of unyielding, medievally cruel convictions. Trump took to social media to declare: 'We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.'
It's almost as if the guy had spent all his life in the gangsterish world of New York real estate, isn't it?
Then, at the weekend, having bombed the hell out of some mountains (the experts say those crafty Iranians cheated by getting their precious enriched uranium out before the bunker busters dropped), Trump allowed his closest lieutenants to go and tell the world it's all about the nukes, and not the old monster who rules the country – Khamenei, not Trump.
JD Vance, for example, rumoured to be sceptical about intervention, said that 'has been very clear that we don't want a regime change '. Marco Rubio, secretly still more of a George W Bush style neocon, and thus probably more sympathetic to the idea of getting rid of the 'regime', nonetheless sought to please his boss with what was supposed to be the collective line on Operation Midnight Hammer: 'It was not an attack on Iran, it was not an attack on the Iranian people. This wasn't a regime change move.'
Now? Not so much.
Trump has revived the idea, in his trademark menacing-playful way, in a post of Truth Social: 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!'.
Trump apologists say he was only kidding; but how do we know when to take the guy seriously – apart from 'always and never'?
Perhaps Trump dreams of the Iranian people rising up and creating a new pluralistic democracy – a country where elections are free and fair, where the losers always gracefully accept the result and participate in the ceremonial peaceful transfer of power, and would never incite a mob to storm the parliament building where the will of the people is being ratified, and deny the parliamentary authorities the use of troops to defend themselves and the overwhelmed police officers…?
The Iranians, especially, are unlikely to be impressed by such talk from the Americans, and, indeed, the Israelis. If they're paranoid about the CIA and MI5, they have reason to be. On numerous occasions in the past, the 'Great Satan' of America – and before that, Little Satan (Britain) – have interfered in Iranian affairs, including deposing two shahs and a prime minister, Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had the temerity to want take control of Iran's oil riches away from 'British' Petroleum.
The various coups engineered by the imperialists – a fair description – worked, but not indefinitely; and the seeds of their own eventual destruction were sown in Iran as elsewhere. A period of misrule by the last shah ended up with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and all that has followed since.
We should all be worried when an American president talks about regime change. To be fair, Trump is hardly the first, and it rarely ends well, whether it succeeds or not.
Historically, the leader the Americans would most have loved to be rid of was their troublesome Communist neighbour Fidel Castro, parked from 1959 to his death in 2016 (natural causes) on what amounted to a giant Russian aircraft carrier 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The CIA considered all manner of ways to assassinate him, including, famously, an exploding cigar. Whether this was inspired by a trip to a joke shop is still classified.
A more serious, but still bungled, attempt at an invasion and a coup d'etat in Cuba failed when the US-trained rebels were cornered in what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. That was in 1961, and was hardly the first or the last time they tried to oust Fidel, but this failed plot merely made him even more popular and humiliated the Kennedy administration, who inherited the plan from President Eisenhower's team: regime change has always been a bit of a bipartisan affair.
JFK went on, a couple of a years later, to at least acquiesce in the murder of the Diem brothers who ran South Vietnam, replacing them with a chap named Nguyen Van Thieu, who was more to American tastes but no more democratic, nor effective in resisting the Communist conquest of his country. It was an even greater American humbling when they lost that war.
The regime change sideshow in that Indo-China conflict was Cambodia, where the Americans helped depose the jolly Prince Sihanouk with a more pro-American general, who was, inevitably, himself deposed when the Khmer Rouge took over and the killing fields were filled with the corpses of more than a million Cambodians.
Such disastrous CIA escapades during the cold war were why Congress in the 1970s passed laws banning such covert activities – including the War Powers Act, to try to prevent presidents circumventing the Congressional power to declare war. That oversight didn't persist, and minor, US-inspired coups followed in Grenada (1984) and Nicaragua (1989).
The greatest blunder in regime change was, of course, Iraq. To be fair to the second President Bush and Tony Blair, as people tend not to be, it's only right that we recall that their definition of regime change was more nuanced. Regime change could mean a change of policy under an existing dictator. So if Saddam Hussein had genuinely renounced weapons of mass destruction (instead of pretending he had them to scare people away), and allowed comprehensive inspections by the UN, he might still be in business now, albeit unlikely.
The alternative, increasingly obvious, was that he'd be forcibly removed. That would also end the mortal threat to the stability of the region. Which it didn't; it just created new ones. As we all know, things didn't turn out any better for the West when Islamic State turned up in post-Saddam Iraq, and turned the Middle East upside down. Much the same may be said about post-Gadaffi Libya, and post-invasion Afghanistan.
It all sounds wearily familiar, doesn't it? The Americans upturn one unsatisfactory regime and somehow contrive to make matters worse. Rather like when they re-elected Trump last year.