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Donald Trump may not be unafraid to use military force against Iran, according to the White House, but the reality is the US president has few to no options that could obviously help that country’s protest movement, never mind the fact that the history of US intervention in the region has hardly been a success.
Emboldened by the seizure of the erstwhile Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, after an operation that took months of planning, Trump talked up military intervention against the Iranian regime with no military pre-positioning having taken place. In fact, there has been a drawdown in the last few months, reducing military options further.
The US has had no aircraft carriers deployed in the Middle East since October, after two years of near continuous deployment following the Hamas attack on Israel, having moved out the USS Gerald R Ford to the Caribbean in the summer and the USS Nimitz to a port on the US west coast in the autumn.
It means any air or missile strikes against regime targets, and perhaps at the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would probably have to come from or involve US and allied airbases in the Middle East. An alternative would be similar to June’s long range B-2 bombing mission against the underground Iranian nuclear site of Fordow, although that sort of attack against an urban site would appear to be dangerous overkill.
The US would also have to ask permission to use bases in countries such as Qatar, Bahrain, Iraq, the UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia (perhaps even the UK’s Akrotiri base in Cyprus) – and protect them and their host countries against retaliation. Even if such assets were not used by the US, Iranian leaders have threatened to strike US bases and ships if the country is attacked.
Although Iran’s military capabilities were badly degraded in the 12-day summer war with Israel, and its air defence systems easily overwhelmed, Tehran has retained a limited missile capability. Key launch sites remain buried in the mountains, and it has been rebuilding. It is estimated that Iran has 2,000 heavy ballistic missiles, capable, if launched in numbers, of evading US and Israeli air defences.
A more salient question is: what would the US bomb? It would be possible to identify military and civilian sites used by the Iranian regime, but both the protests and the increasingly bloody regime crackdown are taking place across the country. Targeting is not always accurate, sites can be misidentified and civilian casualties in urban locations would be an evident risk. And it is not obvious this would be effective on the ground.
It would also not be difficult for the Iranian regime to try to use any US attacks as a rallying point for what is left of its support, given the long history of US meddling dating back to the 1953 CIA coup. And, however unpopular it may be with ordinary people protesting, the ruling regime does not appear to be brittle or weak, having already survived Israel’s sustained attack in June.
“There is a clearly a cohesive government and military and security service in Iran,” said Roxane Farmanfarmaian, a senior associate at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank. “The government is showing it doesn’t have any red lines: it is going to secure its borders and streets, and the extraordinary number of body bags reveals its determination to do so.”
The US could consider a direct attack on Khamenei. Trying to kill the Iranian leader would be easier militarily than a Maduro-style seizure operation, which would be considerably more complex than in Venezuela because Tehran lies hundreds of miles from the country’s borders. However, killing the leader of another country would be astonishingly escalatory, raise a host of legal concerns, and invite a sustained military response.
Nor would it necessarily lead to regime change. During the 12-day war, Khamenei appears to have evaded Israeli detection: the country’s defence minister, Israel Katz, defence minister said afterwards that “if he had been in our sights, we would have taken him out”. The Iranian leader had also lined up three senior clerics on a shortlist to replace him if he was killed, in an effort to secure a rapid transition.
Other experts, such as Farmanfarmaian, argue that the most likely outcome would be a takeover led by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. But either way, the Iranian regime remained intact after Israel killed as many as 30 military and security leaders in June. A handful of US demonstration strikes would be unlikely to change that, while US allies, Congress and Trump himself would almost certainly not want a lengthy campaign. Already, the president himself has ruled out “boots on the ground”.
Against such an uncertain backdrop, it is not surprising alternatives have been canvassed. The most notable is a targeted cyber-attack, raising the question of what would be intended. After the seizure of Maduro, Trump claimed that the US had turned off the power in Caracas to help facilitate his capture, but this would only be useful in Iran in conjunction with a military operation.
Ciaran Martin, a former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, argues that “it is hard to see what could work” and that “disrupting civilian or even government services” such as electricity would probably affect civilians more. A theoretical possibility would be for the US to try restore the internet, largely shut down since last Thursday, though Martin added it would be “hard to intervene via cyber” to do so.
A simpler possibility would be to try and “flood the place with Starlink” – Elon Musk’s satellite internet service – by overcoming Iranian jamming, providing the service for free. But, Martin said, that was “not really a cyber-operation” and sharing more information about repression may not stop the killing in the streets. What can be achieved by US military intervention may not match up to Trump’s promise that “help is on its way”.
