There’s a raging debate on the right about whether the Trump Administration should back regime change in Iran or not. After holding off on killing Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (reportedly at Trump’s behest), Israel seems quite open to taking him out along with any remnants of the rest of the regime. Some figures on the right (Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens being two, though each have being moving, at various speeds, to the right’s fringes for a while now) are absolutely dead-set against regime change in Iran.
Over all of this, of course, hangs the specter of the Iraq War(s), in which the United States expended trillions of dollars and thousands of soldiers lives in order to gain very little (deposing Saddam and sorta, kinda, stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq). And for all this we got to endure three decades of heightened terrorist attacks due to having U.S. troops in “the land of the two mosques.” So it’s understandable that Americans would want to avoid another long slog of nation-building in a failed Middle East state to prevent it from becoming a haven for transnational Islamic terrorism.
Understandable, but not applicable to Iran, for the most basic of reasons. Iraq was an Arab state with Sunni minority leaders ruling over a restive Shiite minority. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a Persian nation currently ruled over by a Shiite theocratic dictatorship that is already one of the region’s main (if not the main) financial supporters of terrorism. There’s no danger of an Arab Sunni terrorist group like the Islamic State taking hold, because the population of Sunni Arabs in Iran is too small for such an insurgency to take hold. And there’s no nation in the Middle East that seems likely to pick up the mantle of funding Shiite fundamentalism in the region. (Qatar’s ruling family is Sunni, as is the overwhelming majority of Pakistan.) Ali Khamenei is the head of the snake, and when his regime dies, the snake dies as well.
If Israel can finish off Khamenei’s regime, what follows it will not be something worse, or even a failed state like Somalia. There is every sign that ordinary Iranians are weary to death of being under the heel of the Mullahs, and what will follow more likely to be more secular and western-oriented state than what is there now (which is, to be sure, a very low bar.) And though Iran is somewhat multi-ethnic, the minorities there (primarily Kurds and various Turkish ethnicities) are too small compared to the ethnic Persian majority to seriously contend for control of the Iranian state. (The Kurds could, in theory, launch a bid for independence (or, like in Iraq and Syria, quasi-independence), but without U.S. support are unlikely to make much headway. Their best play may be to negotiate broad autonomy with any new government.)
Could there be a civil war power struggle to rule post-theocratic Iran? Possibly. Still a better outcome for us than a theocratic, terrorist-supporting Islamic state with nuclear weapons. Ditto a military dictatorship, as long as they allowed an end to the nuclear weapons program. Ditto any number of other possible political outcomes, from a modern, secular democratic state to a (deeply unlikely) restoration of the Pahlavi monarchy. All are almost certainly improvements over the fanatical, institutional hostility to the west shown by the mullahs. (Not to mention the fanatical, institutional hostility to Israel. Historically, Persians and Jews have gotten along well, both being outsiders to the Turks and Arabs running the Ottoman Empire.)
There’s no reason to fear a post-theocratic Iran because we won’t be the one having to do nation-building or pick up the pieces.
Getting rid of a government than ritually chants “Death to America” and funds terrorists that have killed numerous Americans throughout the life of the regime must be considered a desirable outcome. The Abraham Accords indicated that a number of Sunni Arab states are abandoning their institutional hostility to Israel and the west, and toppling the mullahs will dry up funds for Shiite terrorism across the world as well. The result will not automatically make the Middle East peaceful and prosperous, but will probably calm things down enough to measurably move the region a bit closer to those admittedly very distant goals.