War and Political Rupture: The Limits of the Iraq and Afghanistan Analogy

Since the confrontation between Israel, the United States and the Islamic Republic began, Western debates have repeatedly warned that Iran must not become another Iraq or Afghanistan. The experience of those interventions gives the warning considerable weight. Institutional destruction in Iraq, the rise of Islamic State and the Taliban’s return all demand serious consideration before another war is contemplated.

Yet a warning is not an explanation. Does Iran have the same social structures, history of state formation and political conflicts as either country? One experience can illuminate another situation. It cannot assign the outcome in advance.

The deeper mistake is to treat countries and peoples as unchanging entities. A shared religion does not establish identical political trajectories. Institutions, social relations and collective expectations change. A rupture emerges from forces acting within a particular society at a particular moment, rather than from that society’s supposed essence.

The purpose is therefore not to turn comparison into a case for war. It is to understand which processes war may accelerate, which possibilities it may close and what conditions would permit a political order to be rebuilt. War can weaken a regime, but it can also consolidate it or enable a harsher form of domination.

The political logic of war

Moral condemnation and promises of liberation by force share a weakness when they replace analysis: both can bypass the examination of actors, objectives and decisions. Ethical and legal obligations remain essential. On their own, however, they do not explain how a war develops or what it produces.

My argument is that the Islamic Republic’s policies of confrontation, toward its own society and its regional environment, contributed decisively to the present impasse. That political judgment does not establish that war was inevitable or that every responsibility for its destruction belongs to one party. Each belligerent also bears responsibility for its own decisions and actions.

Clausewitz’s account of war as a continuation of policy reminds us that it does not occur outside history. Raymond Aron likewise situated it within relations between states and calculations of power. Understanding this conflict requires asking whose interests it serves, which balance it changes and what order its participants seek to establish.

Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction cannot answer those questions on its own. Nor does it mean that all politics consists of permanent warfare. Identifying an enemy does not explain how a society can move from confrontation to institutions capable of settling its conflicts.

Agamben’s work on the state of exception raises another problem: war can allow security emergencies to suspend ordinary rules indefinitely. But this theoretical framework does not determine a country’s future. The collective ability to escape the exception remains an open political question.

What historical precedents actually demonstrate

Military victory by itself creates neither revolution nor democracy. Without social forces capable of carrying change and institutions able to stabilise it, a government’s disappearance may reproduce the old order in another form or open a more destructive crisis.

The First World War did not invent the contradictions of tsarist Russia. It accelerated their deterioration and the disorganisation of authority. Nor does military defeat alone explain Germany’s and Japan’s transformations after 1945: occupation, institutional reconstruction and postwar political arrangements were decisive.

In 1915, Lenin distinguished the conditions of a revolutionary situation from the capacity of organised forces to act upon it. Rulers unable to govern in the old way and a population unwilling to live in the old way do not guarantee a successful revolution. Political agency is a separate condition.

In Afghanistan, twenty years of Western military presence and assistance failed to establish an order able to withstand the Taliban’s return. That outcome does not demonstrate an absence of social change. Education, women’s aspirations and urban mobilisation had developed substantially. It reveals instead the gap between those changes and the consolidation of durable national authority amid warfare and multiple dependencies.

Iraq presents a different problem. Saddam Hussein’s overthrow did not necessarily require the collapse of state functions. Disbanding the army, extensive de-Baathification, the redistribution of power and occupation policy contributed to disorganisation. Internal conflicts and regional interventions, including those of the Islamic Republic, then aggravated the crisis.

Islamic State’s emergence belongs to that sequence, alongside the Syrian war and other factors. Explaining Iraq’s trajectory through an inherent national characteristic, or through war as a single cause, avoids examining the decisions that made particular outcomes possible.

Useful comparisons therefore concern mechanisms: the destruction or preservation of institutions, legitimacy, social organisation, foreign intervention and transitional choices. They become misleading when they turn a precedent into a destiny.

Iranian society before the war

Iran has a long history of state formation and a political memory of its existence as a country. That continuity includes ruptures and guarantees no outcome. It must not be used to deny Iraq’s or Afghanistan’s own political histories. It is one element of the Iranian problem, among others.

The transformations of recent decades matter more directly. Urbanisation, higher education, digital communications, generational change and women’s presence in public life have altered expectations and forms of mobilisation. Contemporary society cannot be understood through categories describing Iran in 1979.

A substantial part of that society seeks ways of life, rights and a future that the regime’s religious order cannot accommodate without changing. The fracture therefore concerns the foundations of legitimacy, beyond competition for office or disagreement over a particular policy.

“Woman, Life, Freedom” made that fracture especially visible. It was not its starting point, but an expression of an earlier transformation. It nevertheless showed that protest could address society’s relationship with the entire system rather than elections or internal reforms alone.

Differences from Afghanistan and Iraq should be examined at this level. They justify neither contempt for those societies nor certainty of Iranian success. They mean that the relationships between institutions, mobilisation and legitimacy take different forms.

Accelerating a rupture is not the same as building an alternative

Asking whether war can bring down the Islamic Republic is insufficient. We must also ask what could follow. A militarily weakened regime may retain coercive capacity, while a society opposed to it may lack a shared procedure for organising the future.

If the existing order retains substantial support, if its opponents have no common horizon and if the institutions of change are unprepared, external military superiority cannot fill the gap. Conversely, an already profound fracture may enter a new phase under the pressure of war.

In my assessment, the Islamic Republic faces an exceptionally deep crisis in the reproduction of its legitimacy. That does not turn every protest or economic difficulty into evidence of imminent rupture. The regime’s erosion and the construction of an alternative are distinct processes.

Here lies a major weakness of the opposition. Rejection of the regime has not yet generated a sufficiently shared national project to make the management of transition credible. What is missing is less another proclamation than agreement on rules, responsibilities and guarantees.

Some opposition forces still reason through categories and disputes inherited from the second half of the twentieth century. Yet younger generations’ expectations, communication and participation have changed. A political vocabulary that ignores these developments risks speaking for a society it no longer understands.

Repression and the regime’s divisive strategies have also weakened cooperation. Surveillance, intimidation and efforts to cultivate mistrust can make organisation extremely difficult. But not every opposition rivalry is a state operation. Historical differences, organisational choices and the actors’ own responsibilities require examination.

The paradox remains: a considerable distance between the regime and much of society coexists with the absence of a common transitional project. That paradox explains some foreign reservations. It does not make those reservations permanent.

The cost of preserving the existing order

Defenders of the status quo argue that an uncertain alternative could expose Iran to civil war and the region to greater instability. The argument deserves serious consideration. It rests, however, on an assumption: that the current regime can still preserve relative stability and contain the crises it helps produce.

If that assumption ceases to be credible, the calculation changes. The choice may no longer be between stability and instability, but between chronic instability and the risks of transition. A prepared transition does not eliminate danger; it may offer a way out that permanent crisis does not.

The Islamic Republic has often used the external enemy and domestic emergency as instruments of government. Schmitt’s concept of the enemy and Agamben’s analysis of exception help interpret that combination. They do not substitute for studying institutions and their practices.

A system can experience crises without being destined to disappear. But when crises accumulate without a durable mechanism of resolution, crisis itself tends to become a method of governing. The economic, social and regional costs then enter the calculations of actors who previously regarded continuity as preferable.

I believe continuation along the present course could lead some defenders of the status quo to revise their position. This is neither a certain prediction nor a promise of democratisation through war. It is a hypothesis: the regime’s behaviour may undermine the claim that preserving it remains the least dangerous option.

Iran’s future therefore follows neither from a foreign precedent nor from a military victory. It depends on the interaction between longstanding social transformations, the conflict’s effects and the political capacity to organise an exit from crisis. That interaction must be examined without fatalism or promises of salvation from outside.