Strikes on Iran will not topple the regime as Donald Trump’s administration intends, an expert on the Middle East has warned.
While the president may hope to see change in the region following a series of strikes over the weekend, which left over 500 people dead, the chances of wholly changing the Iranian regime remain slim, according to the analyst.
Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London and fellow at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, warned there would be little in the way of change to the regime itself, as it is built unlike Western governments.
Krieg, speaking to The Mirror US, said, “This is a network state. That’s a decentralized, quite horizontally organized state. It’s very different. or more hierarchical authoritarian state that you’d see in the Arab world or in Venezuela, which is very top-heavy.
“Regime change is not going to happen by just taking out the leadership because, anyway, the country is run by the IRGC and the IRGC is the network.
“It’s a network of networks, ultimately, because not only do you have the IRGC, Quds Force, and all the companies affiliated, but you have the Basij, which is kind of a domestic militia of more than a million people, and they’re all regionally or locally organized within neighborhoods and villages and rural areas as well as in cities. This is not something you’re going to kill.”
A change in how power is delegated within the regime will make all the difference, according to Krieg, who believes the Iranian regime has more in common with a militia than a typical government.
“The Iranian regime has been set up, if you will, like an insurgency group,” Krieg explained. “Any analysis of an insurgency group and why insurgencies prevail and why it’s so difficult militarily to stop them is because they’re so decentralized and there is a lot of delegation to the local level.
“And the regime has set up a chain of command and command control that is very decentralized, very much organized from the bottom up rather than the top down. So even if you were going to degrade and you’re going to kill the leadership, this is not going to lead to a collapse of the regime.”
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