An oppressed people are, once again, lured onto the street only to have their hopes dashed

They always celebrate. In Iraq. In Libya. In Venezuela. Now, in Iran. This is the natural response of those living under authoritarianism to news their tyrant is gone. So much is loaded into the moment. Like releasing a breath that has been held for decades. The birth of a dream. The flash of infinite possibilities. Again and again, those dreams are dashed.

Sometimes they are ground into the dust. Witness those who celebrated in Kabul, Afghanistan, when the Taliban was routed in 2001, only to see the organisation return to power after 20 years of incessant violence. Sometimes the country gets torn apart, as we saw in Iraq, where the legacy was the rise of Shiite militias, the horrors of Islamic State, and the material consequences of power blackouts, water shortages, and a quarter of the country impoverished. Sometimes the country simply implodes, as has happened in Libya, which is now the theatre of an unabating civil war.

The Trump era has delivered a different version – a more honest one – where at least these hopes are dashed from the beginning. That’s what we saw in Venezuela, when America snatched Nicolas Maduro from his bedroom. After the briefest, most vague flirtations with the language of democracy, Donald Trump made clear he had no interest in the Venezuelan opposition, and that he would leave the regime in place.

Now, it seems we’re seeing something similar in Iran, where Trump has swerved from talk of regime change, and instead stated an aim confined to crushing Iran’s military capability. “No nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars,” thundered Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, to bring the point home.

“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” Trump told the Iranian people as he launched this war. Any regime change, and all the fallout, it seems, will fall to them. He’s inviting them to rise up against the regime, but has no apparent intention to uproot it. The last time America issued such an invitation was president George Bush snr to the Iraqi people in 1991.

Yet when the uprisings came, he abandoned them to Saddam Hussein’s slaughter. Colin Powell – then America’s highest ranking military officer – would later write that America’s “practical intention” was to leave the Iraqi regime in place “to survive as a threat to Iran”.

That’s how these wars work. They are not humanitarian exercises. They are not waged for the benefit of these countries, or the oppressed people within them. If they were, we’d see far more of them in places of little geopolitical interest, and with fewer natural resources. And we’d see far less of Western powers supporting and sometimes funding dictatorships they regard as friendly. Instead, these are matters of blunt geopolitical calculation.

The bombed nations are chess pieces, their people only pawns, whose plight is quickly forgotten when we have no further need to remember it. None of this is to criticise those celebrating on the streets. I’d probably be one of them. But it perhaps explains why I have such a viscerally allergic reaction when I hear Western politicians invoking an oppressed people to sell some dubious military intervention.

This war is no different. Iran is Israel’s primary security threat. Having dealt enormous blows to Iran’s missile defence systems and proxies in the region, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw an opportunity to weaken it further.

If we are to believe Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, America came along for the ride, realising Israel was going to proceed anyway. These attacks are not being waged because Iran poses an immediate threat. Rather, they are being waged precisely because, right now, it doesn’t. It is not a war of liberation or necessity, but of opportunity. This is plainly illegal, of course, but that is plainly irrelevant to those waging it, and even nations like ours supporting it.

If this isn’t about regime change, there are really only two outcomes: either the regime survives in some form, or the country explodes. Neither is likely to serve the Iranian people. Even a seriously weakened Iranian regime will surely retain the ability to go on shooting troublesome citizens. And even a compliant one – pummelled into serving American and Israeli interests – is unlikely to set its own people free. It’s worth remembering, because we so often forget, that the Shah of Iran was the figurehead of precisely such a regime: a Western ally, installed by a CIA-led coup, that tortured its own people, carried out political executions and killed protesters. The revolution that delivered us the current regime didn’t come out of nowhere.

Alternatively, given Iran’s mix of ethnic and religious minorities, an explosion is easy enough to envisage. The Baloch reach for their guns in the east. The Kurds do the same in the north. The Sunni Arab groups, some linked to al-Qaeda, get active in the south. In the north-west, the Azeri Shiite resistance groups see their chance to seek either independence, or integration with Azerbaijan. Either the regime is strong enough to crush this, or the country falls apart completely. In this case, it sits on a mind map somewhere between Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Meanwhile, what will have been achieved? A diminished Iranian threat on Israel, perhaps, which in Israeli eyes is no small thing. But even a weakened regime could continue to fund terrorist proxies, and it’s a big bet that all this regional chaos wouldn’t throw up all kinds of security threats of its own, including for the West. And in the meantime, a new global logic will have taken hold.

“No stupid rules of engagement,” Hegseth said, in describing how this war proceeds. It’s not just the rules-based order that’s been vapourised, but apparently the idea of rules as such. That is, a jungle, where the relatively weak stand to be bombed opportunistically, and the strong can do as they wish. That’s a world that suits countries like Russia and China just fine, and indeed it’s a fair description of how Trump has treated Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And for every other repressive regime, the lesson is clear: make yourself unbombable. Iran’s mistake wasn’t that it got too close to a nuclear bomb. It’s that it didn’t get close enough. For the oppressed people of the world, that lesson will only deliver catastrophe.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.

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