Terry Moran at Real Patriotism:

Any sane and decent person wants this war to be short and the Iranian people to be free from the brutal theocracy that has ruled them for half a century. But hope is not a strategy. At this point—Day Five of Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran—both of those outcomes look unlikely. We Americans have learned the hard way over the last 60 years that it is easy to start wars, and hard to end them. And wars rarely end the way their architects imagine. That familiar line of military strategists is worth calling to mind again: No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Or, as Mike Tyson put it, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

The US military is the best in the world and it’s not close. Our forces have demonstrated that fact in spectacular ways during this presidency; Trump has ordered them into action more than any president in the modern era. But Iran is different. It is a proud, mountainous, heavily defended nation of 90 million people with an armed force of over a million active-duty and reserve personnel and a vast, indigenous arsenal of ballistic/cruise missiles and drones. Iran’s forces are no match in a direct confrontation with the combined power of the US and Israeli attack—but the leadership has long recognized that fact, and prepared extensively for an asymmetric fight.

The likely ending

A short war that topples the regime and triggers an uprising that liberates the Iranian people is possible, but unlikely. The more realistic scenario is a conflict that ends unsatisfactorily without becoming catastrophic. It may well be the best that can be hoped for at this point.

[...]

Nightmare No. 1: The Kurdish War of Independence

The chaos of war inside Iran could ignite ethnic uprisings inside and outside its borders. In western Iran, the Kurds have been fighting Tehran on and off for decades. Now, according to several reports, the US and Israel are in active talks with Kurdish forces in Iran to arm them and foment an uprising aimed at overthrowing the regime. But Kurdish revolts rarely stay confined to one country. There are an estimated 25-30 million Kurds; they are the largest ethnic group in the world without a state, spread across parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia. In each of those places they already possess armed movements, political organizations, and—in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria—semi-autonomous territory.

[...]

Nightmare No. 2: The Yugoslavia Scenario

Another dark possibility involves not a Kurdish state but the fragmentation of Iran itself. Iran is not a homogeneous country. Roughly half its population belongs to ethnic minorities—Kurds, but also Azeris, Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmen and others—many living in border regions with strong cross-national ties. Western imperialists drew borders for generations in the Middle East as they saw fit, but those lines are still resented by many in the region. There are those in Washington and Tel Aviv who quietly speculate that a weakened Iran might break apart along these lines. 

[...]

Nightmare No. 3: The War That Doesn’t End

The third scenario is less dramatic but more likely. The Islamic Republic survives. Iran’s leaders have spent decades preparing for precisely this moment. They anticipated air strikes, regime-change rhetoric, and attempts to decapitate their command structure. If the regime survives the opening phase of the war—as looks likely now—it will shift into a long campaign of attrition. That war has in fact already begun. Iran’s missiles and drones are a real problem for the the US, Israel and the Gulf states. Our missile/drone defense systems inventories are not infinite. And Iran can still activate proxies in the region for attacks against American bases and businesses. The shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait remain vulnerable.

Terry Moran has a look at the various nightmare scenarios for Iran.

See Also:

"Who will take power if Ayatollah Ali #Khamenei is deposed or the #RevolutionaryGuards are defeated? What will prevent the ethnically diverse and bitterly divided country from descending into bloody #balkanization, score-sett[l]ing, or even #civilwar, thereby destabilizing an already volatile region? What happens if the #regimechange operation fails, and #Iran's current rulers emerge triumphant and emboldened? In typical fashion, the #Trump administration seems to be proceeding without much of a plan beyond bombast and the overwhelming display of power."

Western #hegemonists' "end goal is a so-called '#post_Russia', which #Putin described as 'a territory stripped of its #sovereignty & split into small fragments subordinate to the West.'"

#Balkanization #MacKinder #WorldIsland #globalism #Russia