When President Donald Trump introduced his new war in Iran on Saturday, he closed by offering the Iranian people a breathtakingly confident claim:

To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.

To the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations.

This invitation to revolution followed a list of more prosaic military objectives: The U.S. would “destroy [Iran’s] missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” “annihilate their navy,” neutralize its regional proxy forces, and “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.” He also extolled “the strength and might of the United States armed forces,” boasting: “I built and rebuilt our military in my first administration, and there is no military on earth even close to its power, strength or sophistication.” He has since repeated these claims, and though the opening airstrikes of the war killed Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and numerous other senior officials, the regime still appears intact. Trump has also repeated his calls for Iranians to rise up against that government. “The rest will be up to you, but we’ll be there to help,” he said in a video address on Sunday.

Taking Trump at his word (if that’s ever a good idea), the goal of “Operation Epic Fury” is to destroy the political and military infrastructure of the Islamic Republic, forcing a fundamental reform of the Iranian state. Ideally, this would create an opportunity for an Iranian popular uprising to overthrow the regime entirely, replacing it with a more liberal, western-oriented state that would align with U.S. interests in the Middle East. In Trump’s fantasy, Iran’s elite military forces, many of them fanatically loyal to the regime, will literally just “surrender to the people, if you think about it,” as he put it in a brief interview with the New York Times on Sunday evening.

But Trump on some level must know this is bullshit, and perhaps that is why he is also talking about a very different vision of post-Khamenei Iran. “What we did in Venezuela, I........

© Daily Intelligencer