Two words get used as if they mean the same thing. They do not. “Regime change” means new rulers in Tehran. “Dismemberment” means no Tehran to rule at all. Washington has flirted with the first idea for decades. Israel, in its most candid strategic writing, has quietly built the case for the second. The distinction is not academic. It decides whether Iran remains one exhausted, humbled state or becomes six-or-seven-armed fragments, each a magnet for the next war.

A mosaic, not a monolith, but not a house of cards either

Iran is not Persia with an accent problem. Persians make up roughly 61 percent of its 90-plus million people. Azeris are close to 16 percent, Kurds about 10 percent, Lurs 6 percent, with Baloch, Arabs, and Turkmen rounding out the rest. Sunni, Shia, and a scattering of smaller faiths sit inside that ethnic map.

Iran is not Persia with an accent problem. Persians make up roughly 61 percent of its 90-plus million people. Azeris are close to 16 percent, Kurds about 10 percent, Lurs 6 percent, with Baloch, Arabs, and Turkmen rounding out the rest. Sunni, Shia, and a scattering of smaller faiths sit inside that ethnic map.

Tehran governs a federation, in fact, even as it insists it is a nation-state in name.

That diversity is real. A century of Persian-centered nation-building and the binding force of Twelver Shi’ism across most of the population have absorbed shocks that would have split weaker states. The people who now argue otherwise are not neutral demographers. They are strategists building a case for fragmentation.

Mahabad: the template, and its lesson

The template already exists, and it failed. In January 1946, with Soviet troops still on Iranian soil, Kurdish leader Qazi Muhammad declared the Republic of Mahabad in Iran’s northwest. Mullah Mustafa Barzani commanded its forces. It opened girls’ schools, printed Kurdish books, and built a parliament. It lasted eleven months. Once Washington and London........

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