This article was originally published by Truthout.
The U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran has already sparked regional war, and threatens to reshape West Asia for years to come. The military strikes began on February 28, killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several of his top officials. Now, several days into the war, the rationale has not been clearly articulated; U.S. lawmakers and officials have offered up different, often competing explanations for the initial attack and end goals. Yet the massive American military buildup in the region in the weeks before the attack made it evident that something significant was coming, even as negotiations between Iranian and American officials continued, and even as the Omani foreign minister declared the night before the initial strike that an agreement was within reach.
Despite Khamenei’s death, President Trump has said the strikes will continue. To what end? If Iran’s nuclear facilities and capabilities were already obliterated during last year’s U.S. strikes, as Trump has long claimed, what is now the objective? The elimination of remaining leaders, as U.S. forces attempted in Iraq? The dismantling of the Revolutionary Guard? The state’s total collapse?
Those objectives presume that the Islamic Republic is a pyramid resting on a single figure. It is not.
Iran’s regular army, the Artesh, numbers roughly 375,000 personnel. The Revolutionary Guard — Iran’s military, political, and economic powerhouse — counts approximately 125,000 or more. The Basij, Iran’s voluntary paramilitary organization, maintains around 90,000 active members and can mobilize 450,000. By some estimates, nearly one million individuals serve in or alongside the state’s security structure. As of this writing, the regime has not collapsed, and these forces remain intact.
In an eight-minute video released at the beginning of the bombing campaign, President Trump urged Iran’s army, police, Revolutionary Guard, and Basij to lay down their arms and called on citizens to take control of their government. That appeal assumes a rapid implosion of the state’s coercive machinery. But institutions of that scale do not dissolve because they are told to. Hundreds of thousands of armed men do not disarm overnight and hand the country to foreign powers or spontaneous civic committees.
If the expectation is that bombing will accelerate internal democratic change, recent events suggest otherwise.
Iran was already under severe strain. A banking crisis and sharp currency devaluation triggered nationwide protests that began at the end of 2025, involving everyone from students and workers to bazaar merchants. Security forces responded with brutal force. Human rights groups reported thousands of civilian casualties; authorities reported losses among their own ranks. The protests had begun to reemerge when the bombs fell.
Airstrikes do not create space for civic mobilization. They drive people indoors. When foreign aircraft strike cities, citizens do not gather in public squares demanding reform. They seek shelter. Within 24 hours of the start of the military strikes, hundreds of Iranians were reportedly killed, including students at a girls’ school in Hormozgan Province. Whatever fragile momentum for internal change existed has now been interrupted by war.
Following from the confusion about Trump’s plan for this war, another question quickly follows: if the current leadership collapses, who governs?
There is no unified opposition inside Iran with institutional capacity to assume control. The Islamic Republic’s opponents are fragmented: reformists, republicans, labor activists, student networks, ethnic movements, and monarchists often disagree not only on leadership but on the structure of a future state. The current government has also spent decades repressing any of these forces that could come as a reasonable threat to its power, suffocating space for democratic debate.
Among the most visible figures in exile is Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s former shah. A segment of the Iranian diaspora regards him as a transitional leader and speaks as though his succession is self-evident. On social media and satellite networks, some supporters already frame him as the natural heir to a post-Islamic Republic Iran.
But diaspora visibility is not the same as governing legitimacy inside the country.
Reza Pahlavi commands no formal political party within Iran, no known alliance with senior military officers, and no organized structure capable of securing ministries, borders, or public order in a moment of upheaval. His father and grandfather ruled through authoritarian control, and for many Iranians, especially those who experienced imprisonment, censorship, or repression under the monarchy, that history remains unresolved.
Reza Pahlavi and his supporters assume that the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei will automatically clear the path for the restoration of the Pahlavi regime. That assumption overlooks the institutions that still exist: the Revolutionary Guard, regional power brokers, clerical networks, provincial patronage systems, and armed groups unwilling to surrender authority to a figure whose base of support is largely external.
Even prominent American officials appear unconvinced. Donald Trump has suggested that Reza Pahlavi lacks the necessary support and capacity to lead Iran. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told Reuters in January. “I don’t know whether or not his country would accept his leadership, and certainly if they would, that would be fine with me.” Of the monarchists, one anonymous U.S. official told Politico, “They scare me.”
Leadership in a country of more than 90 million people does not materialize through wish or nostalgia. It requires institutional alignment, territorial control, and internal legitimacy, none of which can be assumed from exile.
Iran’s internal complexity deepens the uncertainty about what now.
If the expectation is that bombing will accelerate internal democratic change, recent events suggest otherwise … Airstrikes do not create space for civic mobilization. They drive people indoors.
Although Persians form a majority of Iran’s population, the country includes substantial Azeri, Kurdish, Baluch, Arab, and Turkic populations. These communities are deeply integrated into national life, yet historical grievances and regional tensions persist. It’s important to remember that grievances against centralized state power in Iran long predate 1979. Ethnic and regional minorities often faced cultural and political marginalization under the Pahlavi monarchy, including denial of national rights and suppression of uprisings in outlying provinces. These long-standing issues helped fuel broader discontent that contributed to the revolution. Efforts at ‘nation-building’ under the Shah also involved policies aimed at linguistic and cultural homogenization, which many non-Persian communities experienced as exclusionary and repressive.
In stable times, such tensions are contained by a functioning center. In unstable times, they resurface quickly.
In the northwest, Azeri communities share linguistic and cultural ties with the Republic of Azerbaijan. In the southeast, Sistan and Baluchistan has endured decades of insurgency and state neglect. In the southwest, Khuzestan holds much of Iran’s oil and contains a significant Arab population with a history of separatist sentiment. Kurdish regions are connected to broader Kurdish movements across Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.
A prolonged vacuum in Tehran would not produce orderly transition. It would invite regional intervention, militia mobilization, and competing territorial claims. Fragmentation would not be theoretical. It would be violent.
History offers sobering examples. The disintegration of Yugoslavia led to ethnic war and Balkanization. The 2003 invasion of Iraq unleashed sectarian conflict that reshaped the state. NATO’s intervention in Libya preceded years of militia competition. Afghanistan’s 20-year war ended with the return of the Taliban.
READ: Only 1 in 4 Americans Support Trump’s War on Iran, Reuters/Ipsos Poll Shows
Iran is not identical to those cases. But the belief that sustained bombing can engineer stable democracy has repeatedly been disproven.
War does not operate with surgical precision. It does not remove one figure and install another. It shifts power to those most capable of wielding force. It weakens civil society faster than it builds alternatives. It deepens grievances that last generations.
Removing leadership is not the same as constructing governance.
The price of this ambiguity around the future will not be paid primarily by generals or politicians. It will be paid by students in Shiraz, factory workers in Isfahan, merchants in Tabriz, families in Mashhad — by people who have already endured sanctions, repression, and economic collapse.
Iran is more than its rulers. It is a layered society held together by history and shared memory. Remove the center without a viable replacement and you do not create democracy. You create a vacuum. And in this region, vacuums rarely remain empty. They fill with militaries, militias, foreign proxies, and wars that often outlive the people who start them.
If the architects of this attack have a plan for the morning after, they have not shared it. If they believe the story ends with the fall of one man, history suggests otherwise.
February 28 may not mark the end of a regime. It may mark the beginning of a far more dangerous uncertainty — the destabilization of a nation.
This article was originally published by Truthout and is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
