The Western media keep asking whether “regime change” in Iran has failed. That question is not only premature when it comes to the war in Iran, but also mistakenly assumes the outcome will be decided by the West. It won’t.
The U.S. and Israeli military operation has materially changed the equation on the ground. It has degraded the regime’s repressive infrastructure, disrupted its communications, and stripped its ability to coordinate violence against its own population.
For decades, the principal obstacle to a grassroots Iranian uprising was not a lack of will but the asymmetry of force between a population determined to fight for its freedom and a security apparatus built specifically to quash it. That asymmetry is narrowing.
In January, millions of Iranians took to the streets. More than 30,000 were killed. Anadolu via Getty Images But leveling the playing field is not the same as winning the fight. That part belongs to the Iranian people. The West can create the conditions. Only Iranians can create a country.
In January, millions of Iranians took to the streets knowing what it would cost them. More than 30,000 were killed. Over 330,000 were injured. That was not even the beginning of their revolution, but the continuation of one built on decades of repression.
Populations do not absorb casualties at that scale for a cause they are willing to abandon easily.
I have been researching and reporting on Iran for over two decades. The question I keep hearing from Western media is whether anyone can say with confidence what Iranians want. I can.
Despite Internet blackouts, isolation, and the very real threat of death for speaking out, the Iranian people have told their story clearly and repeatedly, at enormous personal cost.
What is striking is how confidently those who have never spoken to a single Iranian are now speaking for them: that Iranians don’t want this war, that they are content to live under this regime, that they have no capacity to reclaim their country.
The evidence across multiple cycles of protest, from the Green Movement through Woman Life Freedom through the deadly January protests, tells a different story.
Iranians want the end of the Islamic Republic, not its reform. They have said so clearly and repeatedly.
What is also being missed is the unique and tactical nature of President Donald Trump’s strategy.
For years, Washington ping-ponged between two options on Iran, both inadequate: bomb the program or accept the bomb. Neither addressed the underlying problem, which was not the bomb, but the system producing it. Neither would remove the threat.
President Trump employed a “third option,” which I have been advocating for years, and one that neither party had been willing to attempt in a serious way: partner with the Iranian people.
AP The military operation was always designed to be one half of a two-part strategy. Its purpose was not to topple the regime from the outside, but to degrade the apparatus that has kept Iranians from toppling it themselves.
In the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury, Trump said explicitly that the outcome would be up to the Iranian people. The U.S. and Israel take them to the 1-yard line. Iranians carry it in.
Which is precisely why calling this a failed revolution is a category error. We have not yet entered the act in which the Iranian people move.
Exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has been a leading voice for the Iranian people and the only transitional figure they are currently supporting, has asked Iranians to prepare, not yet to march. That is strategically consistent with the military timeline.
The regime’s navy is gone. Its air force is gone. Its communications are shattered. The security apparatus that once made mass repression effortless is fracturing.
The calculation is not whether Iranians will mobilize. It is when. Declaring the revolution over before that moment arrives is premature and impatient.
The Islamic Republic has always known how to rebrand under pressure. It has done it before and survived. The nuclear deal should have been a lesson for the West not to trust a duplicitous regime that will not alter its deadly ideology or rogue agenda.
Lasting stability in the region requires a clean break, not personnel change.
Ultimately, Iran’s fate belongs to Iranians. The West did not start this revolution, and it cannot finish it alone.
The more consequential question is whether Western governments will accurately read what the Iranian people have already made clear, or once again negotiate a convenient settlement with a regime that produced the crisis in the first place.
That choice belongs to the West. The revolution belongs to Iranians.
Lisa Daftari is a foreign policy analyst and media commentator based in Los Angeles.
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