My Colleague Niall Ferguson on Iran

From his Free Press article; Ferguson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a former Harvard history professor, and a noted author both on historical matters and modern ones:

Since the news of the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran this morning, I have been thinking a lot about a song in the 2004 movie Team America:World Police. The movie was co-written by the creators of South Park and follows a group of heroic American puppets waging kinetic war on Islamic terrorists, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, and liberal Hollywood, leaving cataclysmic collateral damage (the Eiffel Tower, Cairo, the Sphinx) in their wake. But the real highlight is a song called “America, Fuck Yeah.” Here’s how it goes:

America, fuck yeah
Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah
America, fuck yeah
Freedom is the only way, yeah
Terrorists, your game is through
‘Cause now you have to answer to …
America, fuck yeah
So lick my butt and suck on my balls
America, fuck yeah
What you gonna do when we come for you now?
It’s the dream that we all share
It’s the hope for tomorrow
Fuck yeah

Team America was an ambivalent movie at the time. That was what made it funny. It simultaneously mocked the liberal opponents of an aggressive foreign policy and the neoconservatives who advocated policies such as regime change in Iraq. The South Park team understood before many commentators that the United States has a track record of coming to save the day and leaving a trail of devastation.

For the habitual critics of U.S. foreign policy in general and Donald Trump’s in particular, the analogy between today’s air raids against Iran and the invasion of Iraq nearly 23 years ago is too obvious to be resisted….

However, Iran 2026 is not Iraq 2003. Back in those days, I shed no tears for Saddam Hussein and had considerable sympathy with the project of covert empire-building, but I was a critic of the Bush administration’s post-invasion nation-building strategy because I believed the U.S. lacked the key structural attributes to make it work.

By comparison with the British Empire, American power in the 2000s had three fateful deficits: a manpower deficit, a fiscal deficit, and an attention deficit. I argued that the occupying force was too small relative to Iraq’s population. The complete destruction of the Ba’athist regime laid the foundations for anarchy and civil war, which swiftly mutated into an insurgency against the U.S.-led coalition. And I came to see that the principal beneficiary of Hussein’s downfall was none other than Iran.

And yet, contrary to the criticism already being aired on both the left and the right, Trump is not reverting to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s “regime change” playbook….

Operation Epic Fury differs from Operation Iraqi Freedom—the 2003 invasion of Iraq—in two key respects. Yes, the justification is preemption against a regime intent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction and implicated in international terrorism. But the goal is not to march into Iran and confer, much less impose, freedom on the Iranians. It is to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s political structure and leave the Iranians to take their freedom from the mullahs and their murderous henchmen. As Trump said in his speech this morning, “members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police” can “have complete immunity” if they lay down their weapons….

The real question is: Who rules in Tehran after Khamenei? …