In barely two years, the United States and Israel have eliminated Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, as well as the senior Hizbollah commander Fuad Shukr.
That is quite extraordinary and testifies to exceptional military capabilities.
The reactions to these interventions have nevertheless – or therefore, if one is to be polemical – been critical.
This also applies to the current reactions to the Iran intervention. It is Iraq 2003 all over again; American and Israeli leaders are waging war without restraint; the war is unlawful; there is no clear exit strategy; and a catastrophe awaits – such runs the criticism.
It is, of course, very easy to be sceptical. But let me consider the positive aspects.
For the Iranians are not Arabs; there is no question of “boots on the ground”; and the intervention is not liberal-activist democracy export.
The comparison with the Iraq War is therefore misleading. It rests upon a superficial resemblance and ignores everything that distinguishes the two situations from one another.
Regime adjustment, not regime change
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 rested upon an ambition to rebuild an entire country. The result is well known: anarchy, civil war, an insurgency that cost thousands of lives, and in addition an immensely bitter irony: Iran was the real winner, as the principal counterweight in the region collapsed.
The American attack on Iran rests upon an entirely different doctrine, which Niall Ferguson calls regime adjustment rather than regime change. The objective is not to occupy Iran and construct a new government. The objective is to remove the apex of the theocratic system and leave the remainder to the Iranians. Trump said so himself on Saturday morning: “Take over your government. It is yours to take.”
Trump’s National Security Strategy explicitly excludes the deployment of American ground forces, apart from special forces, and presupposes a short timeframe for military operations. It is not a forever war. It is a surgical intervention with a delimited objective.
That constitutes a marked difference compared with the Iraq War. The American force in Iraq was too small relative to the size of the population; the total dismantling of the Ba’ath regime created a power vacuum; and the United States lacked the will, understanding, and capacity for the prolonged state-building that the operation presupposed.
An ideology already cracking
The deeper difference is, moreover, that Iran in 2026 is a country in which the regime is likely in the process of losing its own population.
After Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June 2025, during which nuclear facilities and military bases were destroyed, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was left exposed as incompetent, support for Khamenei and the principles of the revolution fell to 11 per cent, according to encrypted opinion polls from the organisation Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran. Seventy per cent wanted the regime removed. The Iranians are turning on a large scale, not against the West, but against their own oppression.
According to the Iranian-American author Roya Hakakian, the West has imposed upon the Iranians a peace they never asked for. The anti-war movement in the West does not defend peace. It defends the status quo of a regime that has waged war against its own population since 1979, and financed Hamas, Hizbollah, and the Houthi militias with tax revenues that Iranians were never permitted to dispose of.
What is different
The attack is, of course, not without risk. Nevertheless, there are decisive factors pointing in a positive direction – indeed, perhaps even with historical perspectives. Even in Berlingske it is said that the attack resembles a success, and that Trump may be written into the history books as the president who dared to set hard against hard.
Neither Russia nor China is able to assist the regime militarily. China’s significance is being reduced geopolitically. It is balance-of-power politics in practice.
Iran has launched missiles at Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, thereby turning potentially neutral states into supporters of the operation.
The military preparation was massive: 13 American vessels in the region, including the aircraft carrier USS “Abraham Lincoln”, F-22 and F-35 fighter aircraft, EA-18G jammers, and THAAD missile defence.
The two main headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran are situated clearly apart from civilian districts and constitute precise military targets. If the Revolutionary Guards are neutralised, it opens a possibility that the regular Iranian army, with its 300,000 personnel, may step in and take over. The army’s loyalty to the regime is far more limited than that of the Revolutionary Guards. That is an entirely different scenario from Iraq’s total state collapse in 2003, when the entire state apparatus was dissolved at once.
And above all: large parts of the Iranian population hate the regime.