Ian Buruma
Perhaps Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sincerely believed that Israeli bombs would prompt the Iranians to topple their theocratic dictatorship and establish a democratic state. It seemed for a moment that US President Donald Trump did, too. But given Trump’s capriciousness about most things, including America’s war aims in Iran, this possibility should be taken with a grain of salt. The idea that bombing civilians will create the conditions for “regime change” is more than a century old. Between the two world wars, British, American, and Italian strategists argued that extended bombing raids would demoralise civilians enough to turn them against their leaders. This strategy was carried out in devastating fashion during World War II, when much of urban Germany and Japan was flattened, and hun dreds of thousands of civilians killed. A few decades later, the United States dropped three times as many bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. In none of these cases did a demoralised population turn on its leaders. On the contrary, civilians subjected to terror from the air have generally shown remarkable resilience, adapting to appalling conditions and coming together to defy a common enemy. Londoners during the Blitz proudly pro claimed that “London can take it.” Shopping for a new jacket in London in the fall of 1940, my grandmother was caught in a serious air raid. The shop assistant quietly guided her to the shelter while discussing the quality of different tweeds. Berliners were no different, and neither were the people in Hanoi. Iranians, especially those in Tehran, are now showing the same grit. Na jmeh Bozorgmehr, the Financial Times correspondent in Tehran, described how, in the midst of being bombed day and night, and knowing you could die at any moment, “life insists on continuing.” For her, that means contemplating what to have for lunch the next day, and the day after that. “The questions,” she wrote, “are not asked because tomorrow feels certain, but because it does not.” Even in 1944, when Berlin was being demolished by US bombs during the day and British bombs at night, the cinemas were packed, and it was hard to get tickets to concerts. The Berlin Philharmonic played in improvised theatres with holes in the roof, while musicians and audience members wrapped themselves in winter coats. This kind of stoicism has little to do with ideology or loyal ty to a particular set of rulers. By the end of the war, most Berliners were sick of the Na zis. Most Iranians today loathe the fanatical Islamist regime. But as Ruth Andreas-Frie drich, a German resistance member in Berlin, wrote in her diary in 1943: “Clearing the rubble … has nothing to do with being a Nazi. … No one thinks of Hitler when he boards up a kitchen window. But everyone knows you can’t live in the cold.” Many Iranians have risked—and lost—their lives in uprisings against the Islamic Republic. But not while missiles rained down on them. In these conditions, mere survival is hard enough. To go into the gutted streets and face heavily armed members of the murderous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would be suicidal. There is another reason why civilians won’t rebel while being attacked from the air.
Government authorities are often the only people who can provide food and shelter in such moments. When people are expending all their energy trying to make it to the next day, in wartime Berlin, Bleib übrig (“stay alive”) was a common way of saying goodbye to friends—they don’t have any left over for rebellion. Trump was right about one thing on the presidential campaign trail: starting “wars of choice” in the name of toppling foreign regimes and constructing democratic states is a foolish enterprise. During the 2003 Iraq War, neoconservatives defended the invasion by pointing to US success in Germany and Japan in 1945. Hadn’t the Americans built up fine democracies in those defeated countries? The analogy is false. Americans did help rebuild democratic institutions in those countries. But the US entered WWII only after being attacked by Japan, and then moved to democracy-building only after it forced Germany and Japan into unconditional surrender, including through the use of atomic bombs. You cannot simply assault another country and hope that freedom and democracy will follow. And you certainly can’t bomb people while claiming to liberate them. Trump, however, is not a neoconservative. Democracy-building was never his thing.
His strategy is more akin to the one used by organised crime: threaten, and if necessary, employ brute force to compel the other side to submit to a deal it cannot refuse. But this works only if the other side is just as cynical and transactional. In a world of gangsters, it is almost inconceivable that a person would consider a principle or belief worth dying for. Whatever else the Iranian clerics may be, they are not gangsters. The chance that US-Israeli military intervention could help Iranians turn their the ocracy into a democracy is almost nil. There was a time when America’s liberal aspirations, the main source of its soft power, could offer hope and alleviate suffering by welcoming people seeking freedom from tyranny. Alas for such people, and for the US itself, the current administration is doing the exact opposite.
The writer is the author of numerous books, most recently, Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah (Yale University Press, 2024).
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