THE WRONG REVOLUTION
Washington Does Not Get to Choose Iran’s Future. History Already Answered That Question.
The school in Minab had forty desks.
That number comes from the survivors, from the teachers who had assigned them, from the parents who had watched their daughters file in that morning the way they did every Saturday because Saturday is the first day of the working week in Iran, an ordinary fact that the planners of Operation Epic Fury either knew and disregarded or did not know at all. The building was in Hormozgan province, in Iran’s south, far from the nuclear facilities in Isfahan, far from the missile infrastructure in Tehran, far from whatever strategic logic animated the targeting lists assembled in air-conditioned rooms in Tel Aviv and Washington. It was a girls’ elementary school. By the first reports out of the province, at least forty people were killed. The Israeli military’s Persian-language spokesman had issued an urgent warning to Iranian civilians near “military industries and infrastructure” to evacuate immediately. No one had told the girls of Minab that their school was adjacent to military infrastructure. No one had told their mothers.
Begin there. Begin with forty desks and the Saturday morning sun over Hormozgan, and then follow the chain of decisions backward until you reach the men who made them, the ones who will not be named in the official communiques, who will not appear in the footage of the strikes, who will give interviews in the coming days about precision and proportionality and the regrettable costs of necessary action. Follow it back until you reach the specific architecture of this war and the specific political project it was designed to install.
Because what began this morning over Iranian skies is not, at its core, a nonproliferation campaign. It is a regime change operation with a preferred successor already waiting in a Virginia suburb. And the history of such operations, in this region and beyond, is not a matter of speculation. It is a documented record.
Trump did not wake on February 28 moved by a sudden concern for Iranian democracy. The construction of this war was visible in plain sight for anyone willing to read the sequence without the official framing imposed on each individual step.
On February 13, Trump told reporters that regime change in Iran would be “the best thing that could happen.” On February 14, U.S. officials told Reuters that the Pentagon was preparing for weeks-long sustained operations, not a limited strike, but a broad campaign targeting Iranian state and security infrastructure. On February 24, during his State of the Union address, Trump accused Iran of “sinister” nuclear ambitions and warned that Washington was prepared to act. On February 27, Oman’s foreign minister, serving as the designated mediator between Washington and Tehran, announced that the two sides had made “significant progress” in their latest round of negotiations.
Hours later, the bombs fell on Minab. On Tehran. On Isfahan. On Qom. On Karaj. On Kermanshah.
The sequence tells you what this operation is. It is the military arm of a political project: the removal of one government and the installation of an external alternative, Washington-approved, Israel-compatible, monarchist in character, onto a country of 90 million people who already made one revolution in the last half century, and who paid dearly for the foreign hands involved in that one too.
Standing by on February 28, dressed for the cameras and ready with a statement, was Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah, heir to the Peacock Throne, resident of the United States for 47 years. He called the strikes “a humanitarian intervention.” He urged Trump to exercise caution with civilian lives. He announced, in a video statement posted within hours of the first explosions, that the assistance “the President of the United States had promised to the brave people of Iran has now arrived.”
That sentence deserves to be read in full, and slowly. Not as a political statement. As a confession.
Since January, Pahlavi has been running what amounts to a lobbying campaign for his own restoration. He held press conferences at the National Press Club in Washington. He appeared at the Munich Security Conference alongside Senator Lindsey Graham and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola. He published an “Emergency Phase Booklet,” part of his Iran Prosperity Project, detailing governance arrangements for Iran’s “first six months” post-collapse. He called for U.S. airstrikes specifically targeting IRGC command and control infrastructure. He told Reuters, on the sidelines of Munich, that “intervention is a way to save lives.”
He has not lived inside Iran since 1979. He left at 17 to train as a fighter pilot in the United States and never returned. He has spent 47 years in exile, longer than most Iranians alive today have been alive, building a political identity as Iran’s rightful future from a suburb of Washington, D.C.
The legitimacy question here is not about sentiment or lineage. It is structural. Pahlavi’s entire political project depends on external actors doing what Iranians themselves, for all their genuine and documented fury at the clerical system, have not authorized anyone to do on their behalf. He cannot win a referendum without first having foreign bombs create the conditions for one. This is not leadership. It is the operational logic of every externally sponsored transition in the post-Cold War record, from Kabul to Baghdad to Tripoli, and the outcome of every one of those transitions is available for examination by anyone with access to a newspaper archive.
Even Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah’s last ambassador to Washington and an unabashed monarchist until his death, understood what Pahlavi has apparently not learned. When asked in his final years about exile Iranians demanding foreign military intervention, Zahedi’s response was unambiguous: such appeals were “dishonorable.” No political order imposed by foreign bombs could ever be legitimate in Iranian eyes. That judgment came from inside the monarchist tradition itself.
The protests that began in late December 2025 are real. The grievances that generated them are real. Record inflation, the collapse of the rial, mass executions of demonstrators. Human Rights Activists in Iran documented at least 7,000 dead since the protests began, with other estimates reaching considerably higher. The regime’s violence against its own population is documented and indefensible.
None of that gives Washington the right to choose what comes next.
The January protests were, by multiple independent assessments, broadly leaderless before Pahlavi’s call for coordinated demonstrations on January 8. Even after that call, his influence on the ground remained contested. Iranians were chanting against Khamenei. Some were chanting for Pahlavi. Many were chanting for a secular republic with no monarchy attached. The country contains multitudes, including 47 years of lived experience under the Islamic Republic and the institutional memory, passed through families, through literature, through the documented record, of what happened the last time foreign powers decided Iran’s political future on Iran’s behalf.
Operation Ajax in 1953 removed the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, organized by the CIA and British intelligence, to reinstall the Shah. The Shah’s subsequent rule, sustained by American money and SAVAK’s torture infrastructure, produced the conditions for the 1979 revolution. The 1979 revolution produced the Islamic Republic that Trump and Netanyahu are now bombing. Every intervention in this chain was justified, in its moment, by the language of security, stability, and the welfare of the Iranian people. Every single one produced the conditions for the next catastrophe.
The scenario being assembled in Washington carries a specific danger not being discussed with the seriousness it demands.
Iran is not a unified authoritarian state with a coherent opposition ready to assume power the moment the government falls. It is a country of deep ethnic and regional complexity, Persian, Azeri, Kurdish, Arab, and Baloch populations; urban secular liberals and provincial religious conservatives; an IRGC with economic roots throughout every sector of the country; a clerical establishment with genuine social networks across the provinces; and an exile opposition commanding real affection in Tehran and almost no organizational infrastructure inside the country.
If the strikes killed Khamenei, President Pezeshkian, and military chief Mousavi simultaneously, as Israel was reportedly targeting, what fills that vacuum is not Reza Pahlavi and a transitional government flown in from Washington. What fills it is what filled the vacuum in Baghdad in 2003 and Tripoli in 2011: competing armed factions, regional fragmentation, IRGC units that do not surrender because their commanders are dead, and a civilian population trapped in the middle of a war that foreign powers started and will not be present to finish.
The IRGC is not simply a military organization. It is a parallel economy, a political network, and a patronage system embedded in virtually every sector of Iranian society. Bombing its leadership does not dissolve it. It disperses it. A dispersed IRGC operating without central command across a state that has just collapsed is more dangerous than a centralized one, not less.
Iran has already retaliated today. Ballistic missiles struck U.S. bases in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Air raid sirens activated in Manama. The U.S. 5th Fleet headquarters were targeted. Explosions were reported across Dubai. Flights were suspended at Gulf airports. The Houthis announced the resumption of Red Sea operations. The conflict spread beyond Iran’s borders within the first hours of strikes.
A foreign-backed regime change that fails to deliver a functioning government, and the historical record of such operations gives no reason to expect otherwise, does not produce a contained domestic political transition. It produces a regional fire.
Iran’s internal opposition is not weak. Iranians have demonstrated, at extraordinary personal cost, that they want a different country. Thousands have died in the streets making that demand. What they have not yet built, and what no foreign power can substitute for, is the political infrastructure, the cross-regional coalitions, and the post-clerical institutional frameworks capable of governing a country of 90 million people on the other side of transition.
That work requires time. It requires internal organizing. It requires the kind of negotiated, bottom-up process that produced every durable political transition of the last century. Spain’s transition after Franco. South Africa’s negotiated end to apartheid. Neither was delivered by bombing the incumbent government’s leadership on a Saturday morning while the mediating country’s foreign minister was still publicly announcing progress in the talks.
The Iranian people have the right to change their government. They have demonstrated that they want to. The question is whether that change belongs to them, built on the capacity they are developing at enormous cost inside the country, or whether it is handed to an exile who spent 47 years in Maryland, whose political project was cleared in Washington, and whose first act after the bombs fell was to call it a humanitarian intervention.
History has a word for governments that arrive on the back of foreign airstrikes. It is not democratic. It is not legitimate. And it is not stable.
Oman’s mediator was reporting significant progress on the morning of February 27. By the evening of February 28, Tehran was burning, Gulf states were under missile fire, and a girls’ school in Minab had forty empty desks.
Washington decided that Iranians needed to be freed. It did not ask them.
That is where every catastrophe in this region has always begun.