Objective: An Iran Back To The Norm

On the night of April 13-14, 2024, Iran broke a big taboo: It attacked Israel with 300 drones, ballistic and cruise missiles. The attack was a retaliation to the supposedly Israeli strike two weeks earlier in Syria that killed an Iranian brigadier general of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) who allegedly played a pivotal role in setting up Hamas for its October 7 attack on Israel. The attack was a long time coming. Iran has been in open hostility with Israel since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that brought a fierce anti-Israel Ayatollah into supreme power; for decades, it was a shadow war with multifaceted proxies from Iran and covert operations from Israel. On that fateful day in 2024, Iran crossed the line and attacked Israel from its own territory. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) now had all the justification for breaking its self-imposed restriction: From now on, it could send jets and launch drones and missiles toward Iran. The April war did not escalate; after some tit-and-tats, Iran and Israel adopted a tacit ceasefire. Since then, an unresolved issue continues to brew and now bubbles: Iranian nuclear ambition. Iran is reportedly close to producing a nuclear weapon. If it could mount tactical nuke warheads on top of its missiles, a 2024-similar attack could turn disastrous for Israel.

June 12, 2025, was the day Israel took the matter into its own hands since Iran’s 2024 move has given it permission. Operation Rising Lion air campaign totally surprised the Iranians. Six days later, as of this writing, Israel has achieved total air superiority over Iranian air space and has hit all the nuclear and military targets affecting both facilities and personnel. This tactical decisive result will assure a significant degradation of Iranian nuclear prospects and military capabilities for quite some time. As for a defining strategic victory, this offensive, conducted exclusively through air power and covert tactics, will unlikely result in one: Unless Israeli troops march into Tehran, Iran will rebuild its military with the next coterie of promoted generals, and reestablish its nuclear capabilities with more hardened facilities and a new crop of scientists (perhaps trained in North Korea in exchange for oil). Israeli troops will not march on Tehran, but somebody else can. And this is what the Iranian regime fears the most.

Iran’s regime is not one but two: It is a hybrid political system that combines a theocracy and a republic. An elected administration governs the republic, but the ultimate authority is held by the ruler-for-life Supreme Leader, as well as other unelected Ayatollahs and their appointed clerical institutions. The administration of the republic includes the President overseeing the executive branch, the legislative Parliament (Majlis), and the Assembly of Experts — all of them elected by the Iranian people. The Assembly of Experts is an interesting body: It is composed of prominent clerics, but unlike the self-appointed Ayatollahs, they are chosen by popular vote. Their duty is to select the Supreme Leader and to oversee his performance. For the first duty, they convened only once, in 1989, to rubber-stamp Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to his current supreme position. As for the second constitutional duty, they have never exercised it. This democratic veneer and clerical hardcore are enshrined in Iran’s revolutionary constitution adopted by a popular referendum in 1979.

An exasperated US President Trump is now hinting about regime change in Iran. Past regime changes in the Middle East, such as in Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011), did not end well. A sudden collapse of the Iranian Islamic government will likely follow a similar pattern of a power vacuum where competing factions vie for control, and can lead to a civil war or radical or extremist elements gaining prominence. There is an alternative to destabilizing regime change: It is a government back to the norm. The complex Iranian hybrid system will be simplified to a normal republic with the theocracy gradually reduced and then abolished. By popular pressure, the Assembly of Experts will exercise its constitutional duty to evaluate the performance of the Supreme Leader and dismiss him for poor performance — justified considering how Iran has been faring since his rise to supreme power. The republic’s administration will then oversee the writing of a new constitution that abolishes the theocratic part; the revised constitution will be put to a referendum; with the new law of the land approved, the politically unpopular Ayatollahs will retire to their mosques to tender to the souls of followers not the travails of the state. Throughout the entire process, the republic’s administration will remain in control, thereby averting any power vacuum. Under the new constitution, the President will take back from the Supreme Leader the role of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and his (or her) executive administration, along with the legislative Parliament, will regain decisions on all domestic and foreign policies, with the major ones currently under the purview of the clerics.

What does Israel gain from a normalized Iranian republic? The present administration is headed by President Pezeshkian, a reformist who beat a hardliner in the 2024 presidential snap election. Unshackled by the clerics, his government may still be hostile toward Israel. However, Israel, a Jewish state living among Middle East Muslim states, is used to this treatment. It can negotiate state-to-state with a democratic Iran , run by an elected government that responds to the wishes of its voters. (One such wish may be a nuclear program deal that removes the Western sanctions and puts Iran back on the path of prosperity.) It has been impossible for Israel to have a sane conversation with a theocratic Iran that calls Israel “Satan” and vows its destruction under God’s name. After gaining tactical supremacy over Iran, Israel should define the normalization of Iran as its strategic objective for Operation Rising Lion or a future military campaign if need be.

Israeli troops will not confront the bigger Iranian army and march into Tehran, so how can Israel achieve this objective with a military campaign waged solely over the air where it can dominate? It will be through the Iranian population. Protests will erupt in all Iranian cities to demand the Assembly of Experts to assert its constitutional duty to review the Supreme Leader’s performance and dismiss him on his record. A second wave of demonstrations will force the republic’s administration to work on a new constitution that separates church and state, and put it on a referendum. The last call will be for all Iranians to go to the voting booths. Following the death of the previous President in a helicopter crash in May 2024, Iran held a snap election that went into two rounds. The first round saw a record-low turnout, with only 39.93% of Iranians voting; the second round improved to 49.68%, still lower than many pre-2021 elections. Over the years, the people turned sour on the antics of the theocratic regime, which only allowed loyal candidates to run, and voted their displeasure by staying home. For the referendum vote and subsequent elections in the new Iran, Iranians will embrace the new constitution by showing up at the polls. This show of popular force will be the greatest deterrent against reactionary attempts by the clerics and their IRGC henchmen to regain state power.

The precatory scenario above could happen on its own; most likely, on its own, it will remain a pipe dream. There was no shortage of anti-government demonstrations in recent years: the 2021-2022 Water Protests, the 2022 Food Protests (May 2022), and most significantly, as a generational demand for dignity and freedom, the 2022-2023 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests (also known as the Mahsa Amini protests). All of them were met with intense and deadly crackdowns. The first layer is the republic’s administration Law Enforcement Forces (LEF), which include the national police force that uses crowd and riot controls to limit the spread of the demonstrations. Then, the IRGC paramilitary units, especially its Basij Militia, moved in with batons, tear gas, and firearms (including live ammunition and birdshot). The ensuing hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests proved that unarmed demonstrators had no chance against a regime with no qualms about killing its people to survive.

By itself, the popular pressure is a pipe dream; with Israeli air dominance, a ground operation by Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, and some technology tweaks, it will be a dream come true. This will be the topic of the next article in the series.