The Iran Offensive and the Return of America’s Old Follies

What we are witnessing is not a new American strategy. It is the repetition of the oldest one, writes Shashi Velath

Barely an hour after the first American and Israeli missiles struck Iran on 28 February, Donald Trump looked into a camera and told 90 million Iranians: “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

(Photo: Vibhushita Singh/The Quint)

Barely an hour after the first American and Israeli missiles struck Iran on 28 February, Donald Trump looked into a camera and told 90 million Iranians: “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”

The assumption was elegant in its simplicity: kill the head, and the body collapses. Remove Khamenei, and Iranians—60 percent of whom are under 30, battered by sanctions, enraged by the January massacre of tens of thousands of protesters—would pour into the streets, overwhelm the security forces, and deliver regime change on a platter. Washington would get Tehran without Baghdad. Decapitation without occupation. Revolution by remote control.

It hasn’t happened.

Decapitation Without Collapse

Forty-eight hours after Operation Epic Fury killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandson, and at least seven of his most senior military and intelligence commanders, Iran’s coercive apparatus remains intact. The IRGC launched six waves of retaliatory strikes within hours, hitting 27 US bases and Israeli military facilities.

The streets filled—not with revolutionaries, but with millions of mourners. A 40-day mourning period has turned the public square into a funeral ground. And the Provisional Leadership Council has already convened.

As Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution observed, “I’d be surprised if we see significant defections or other conditions that would permit an uprising to succeed today.”

Michael Mulroy, Former United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, was blunter: “You cannot facilitate regime change through air strikes alone. If anyone is left alive to speak, the regime is still there.”

The Council on Foreign Relations assessed it with clinical precision: Trump is pursuing regime change, but his approach is half-hearted. Ensuring the downfall of Iran’s government would require a ground invasion, which he has not ordered. Instead, he is hoping that air strikes will galvanise an uprising. But hope is not a strategy.

So what happens now?

The Three Roads Ahead—All of Them Haunted

Road One: Bomb Harder

The logic of escalation has its own gravity. If decapitation didn’t trigger collapse, the argument goes, then the problem was insufficient destruction. Degrade the IRGC’s command-and-control further. Destroy the remaining missile infrastructure. Hit the oil terminals. Flatten the Basij paramilitary network.

This is the path that strategic analyst Mick Ryan warns against: every American war designed as a quick intervention has become a long war. The Soviets entered Afghanistan in 1979 planning to leave in six months; they stayed nine years. The US entered Iraq expecting a short campaign; it became America’s longest war.

Iran is not Iraq. It is 92 million people—more than triple the population of Iraq or Afghanistan when the US invaded. It has a regular military, a parallel IRGC military with its own army, navy, intelligence, and special forces, and a Basij militia numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Its terrain is mountainous, vast, and defensive.

“When bombs start falling, people rally around the flag. They rally around the government.” — Donald Heflin, Tufts University

Road Two: The Civil War Trap

If the regime doesn’t collapse and the US doesn’t invade, the most probable medium-term outcome is the one that has followed every American intervention in the Islamic world since 2001: state fragmentation, sectarian fracture, and civil war.

Iran is not a monolith. Persians constitute roughly 61 percent of the population. The rest—Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baloch, Lurs, Turkmen—have deep, unresolved grievances. These fault lines are already cracking. Kurdish armed groups are clashing with government forces in the northwest. In 2026, major Kurdish factions formed a coalition explicitly seeking to “bring down the Islamic Republic and realise the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination.”

Baloch fighters are ambushing government forces in the southeast. In Khuzestan, Iran’s oil-rich Arab-majority province, separatist sentiments simmer.

The New Lines Institute warned just days before the strikes: “These sectarian strains are contained for now, but they could erupt and escalate without warning if the iron grip of the central government is eroded significantly.”

This is the Iraq scenario. The Libya scenario. The Syria scenario. What the Century Foundation called “the calculated, slow-motion unravelling of a state into a fractured zone of chaos — too broken to threaten the outside world, and too unstable to rebuild.”

Foreign Policy mapped this with forensic precision: “In the face of growing armed opposition, weakened government security forces could lose control of some spaces in Iran, enabling armed opposition elements to proliferate; that is what happened in Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan.” None of the Bush administration policymakers anticipated that toppling Saddam would enable Iran to become the dominant power in Baghdad. None of the Obama-era Syria analysts anticipated that the civil war would displace half the population.

What would a fragmenting Iran produce? A Kurdish statelet in the west, landlocked and dependent on external patrons. An Arab entity in Khuzestan sitting atop massive oil reserves, immediately contested by Gulf monarchies. A Baloch entity straddling Pakistan’s border. An Azeri entity in the northwest, pulled between Ankara, Baku, and Moscow.

Road Three: The Regime Hardens

There is a third possibility, and it may be the most likely. The regime doesn’t fall. It doesn’t fragment. It hardens.

Iran is shifting from religious legitimacy to survivalist nationalism. The 40-day mourning period weaponises Shia martyrdom theology to consolidate power. The IRGC, despite losing senior commanders, has institutional redundancy designed for exactly this scenario over 45 years.

The nation that emerges from this crisis will be “fundamentally different: less calculated and probably more violent.” The doctrine of “strategic patience” died with Khamenei. What replaces it is direct, unmediated aggression.

This is, paradoxically, the worst outcome for Washington. A hardened, radicalised Iran with nothing left to lose, stripped of its moderating supreme leader, run by IRGC commanders who believe restraint is weakness, and armed with whatever nuclear knowledge survived the strikes.

The Frankenstein Pattern: America’s 21st Century Signature

Step back far enough, and a pattern emerges that is so consistent it can no longer be called coincidence. It is doctrine.

Afghanistan, 1979–2001. The CIA launched Operation Cyclone, one of the longest and most expensive covert operations in American history, to arm and finance the Afghan mujahideen. Funding rose from $20–30 million per year to $630 million by 1987, matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia. The programme leaned heavily toward supporting militant Islamic fundamentalist groups. Of the seven mujahideen groups backed by Pakistan, four espoused fundamentalist beliefs — and these received most of the funding.

Brzezinski, the architect, was asked in 1998 whether he regretted supporting Islamic fundamentalism. His response: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe?”

Some agitated Muslims. That phrase—dripping with imperial condescension—is the epitaph of American strategic thinking in the Muslim world.

The mujahideen defeated the Soviets. Then, armed with American weapons and radicalised by American-funded programs, they tore Afghanistan apart. The Taliban emerged. Al-Qaeda found sanctuary. And on September 11, 2001, the blowback arrived in Manhattan. As Benazir Bhutto warned: “You are creating a Frankenstein.”

Iraq, 2003. Invasion to remove Saddam, destroy WMDs that didn’t exist, build democracy. Three weeks to topple. Eight years to occupy. Hundreds of thousands dead. Sectarian civil war. The Islamic State. And an Iraq where Iran — the very adversary the US now seeks to destroy — became the most influential power.

Libya, 2011. NATO intervened to protect civilians. Expanded into regime change. Gaddafi killed. A decade of civil war, two competing governments, militia rule, a failed state, and an open-air slave market in Tripoli.

Syria, 2011–present. Backed moderate rebels to topple Assad. Outfought by jihadists. ISIS seized territory the size of Britain. Half the population displaced. After a decade, an Islamist militant group — not the Western-backed opposition — forced Assad’s departure.

Yemen, 2015–present. Supported Saudi intervention. The Houthis not only survived but expanded control, disrupted global shipping, and emerged stronger.

Now Iran, 2026. The pattern is unmistakable.

The Original Sin

There is a deeper irony that the current moment forces into the light.

The United States did not merely intervene in the Muslim world. It invented the modern infrastructure of Islamic militancy as a strategic weapon. Operation Cyclone was not a peripheral Cold War footnote — it was a $3 billion investment in radicalising an entire generation of Muslim fighters.

The CIA shipped thousands of Korans into Soviet Central Asia. American-funded textbooks taught Afghan children to count with illustrations of bullets and tanks. The global network of jihadist recruitment, training, and deployment that produced al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their descendants was incubated in American-funded camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Steve Coll’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars documents how the CIA’s key Afghan beneficiaries—Haqqani, Hekmatyar—became bin Laden’s closest allies. Haqqani received direct cash from CIA agents. His network played a central role in forming al-Qaeda. Hekmatyar, who received $600 million in American funding, later became one of Afghanistan’s most violent warlords.

The jihadist infrastructure did not emerge organically from Muslim civilisation. It was cultivated, funded, armed, and deployed as an instrument of American geo-strategy. When it turned against its creators, the response was not introspection but escalation—more intervention, more regime change, more state destruction, producing more failed states, more radicalisation, and more blowback.

And now, in 2026, the cycle reaches Iran—the largest, most ancient, most institutionally complex society the United States has ever attempted to destabilise from the air.

The Question No One Is Asking

The CSIS analysis of America’s “failed state wars” identified a devastating pattern: the structural problems that make these countries unstable exist independently of any particular leader or terrorist group. Corruption, population pressure, urbanisation, economic fragility, governance failures — these persist and deepen regardless of who holds power.

Iran has all of these pressures, compounded by four decades of sanctions. Remove the regime, and these pressures don’t vanish. They explode.

The question no one in Washington appears to be asking is not “Can we topple the Iranian regime?” It is: “What fills the vacuum in a country of 92 million people, with 185,000 IRGC-affiliated forces, nuclear knowledge that cannot be un-bombed, ethnic fault lines running in five directions, and a 2,500-year civilisational memory of resisting foreign domination?”

Iraq taught us that regime change without a political plan produces chaos. Libya taught us that air power without ground commitment produces a failed state. Syria taught us that backing fragmented opposition produces jihadist takeover. Afghanistan taught us that the forces you arm today become the enemies you fight tomorrow.

Iran is all of these lessons combined, at triple the scale, with nuclear dimensions.

The Frankenstein Doctrine

What we are witnessing is not a new American strategy. It is the repetition of the oldest one — with the serial numbers filed off.

Create chaos. Arm proxies. Destroy the state. Declare victory. Leave. Watch it burn. Return when the fire threatens the homeland. Repeat.

From the mujahideen of the 1980s to the sectarian militias of Iraq to the “moderate rebels” of Syria to the Kurdish and Baloch armed groups now being positioned along Iran’s borders, the pattern is identical. The faces change. The flags change. The justifications change. The outcome never does.

Benazir Bhutto called it a Frankenstein. Chalmers Johnson called it blowback. The CSIS calls them “failed state wars.” The Century Foundation calls it “a harvest of chaos.”

Whatever you call it, this is America’s 21st-century signature — written in the blood of Muslim societies, by the original architects of modern jihad.

The 40 days of mourning in Iran have begun. The question is not whether they will end. It is what rises from the ashes when they do — and whether America, for the sixth time in 25 years, will recognise its own creation staring back at it.

(The author is an investigative journalist and led CNN IBN’s Special Investigation Team from 2005 to 2009. This is an opinion piece and views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)