Assassination is on a lot of people’s minds. Last month, Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in Lebanon and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran, raising the specter of war with both countries. In an article about these incidents, Foreign Policy magazine hinted that killing Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of and potential successor to Iran’s supreme leader, could also be a silver bullet to take down the Iranian government.
“The complete unraveling of [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei’s succession plans—and a major danger to the survival of the regime—is only one assassination away,” the article states.
The authors, Kasra Aarabi and Jason Brodsky, work for United Against Nuclear Iran, a think tank that advocates for military action against Iran. Although they don’t outright call for killing Khamenei’s son, they are promoting a dangerously overconfident view of what assassination can accomplish.
I call it the “evil wizard” theory of geopolitics. According to this worldview, enemy societies derive all their power from a single charismatic leader—like an evil wizard controlling a mindless horde. Kill the wizard, the logic goes, and the spell will be broken. They will welcome us as liberators.
In reality, governments and mass movements are more than their leaders. They survive because they represent a large and motivated constituency. If they are hostile to the United States, it’s usually because of structural and historical factors rather than a fanatic leadership. Killing individual leaders might actually make peace harder to achieve.
Military planners during the Cold War learned this lesson in a dramatic way. Both the U.S. and Soviet Union examined the possibility of a “decapitation” attack, nuking the enemy’s capital to paralyze their military. Each country responded to this possibility by setting up ways to launch an automatic second strike if their commander in chief was killed.
Former Pentagon official Daniel Ellsberg noted how all the “decapitation” talk made nuclear war unwinnable in his 2018 memoir, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
“Nothing could so decisively preclude ‘successful negotiations’ than to destroy at the outset the opposing command authorities. With whom would these ‘negotiations’ be carried out? What ability would we have left them to control their operations, implement any ‘deal,’ or terminate their own attacks? Those were questions I had raised in 1961,” Ellsberg wrote.
The war on terror changed American leaders’ calculus. But Al Qaeda was an exception to the rule that decapitation does not win wars. Because it was an underground movement funded by a handful of rich donors, killing or imprisoning a few leaders was enough to neuter the organization.
The Iranian government, on the other hand, is much more than the Khamenei family. Khamenei represents the interests of the Iranian military, the Shia Muslim clergy, and an Islamist middle class that built its prosperity during the theocracy.
While it is shrinking, this constituency is still big enough to fill the mosques, veterans’ clubs, and other institutions that hold up the Islamic Republic. Getting them to withdraw their support from the government would require a lot more than a simple succession crisis.
Assassination has also failed to achieve goals short of regime change. In the early 2000s and again in 2020, Israeli operatives killed Iranian nuclear scientists in hopes that it would cripple the Iranian nuclear program. Whatever temporary chaos the killings caused, they did not stop the program from making progress. Iran, after all, is an industrial power with a big pool of experts, and nuclear capabilities are a lot more valuable to the state than any individual scientist’s fear of death.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meanwhile, has been going on a lot longer than Hamas existed. Whoever is to blame for the overall conflict, the fact is that around 5 million Palestinians have been living under Israeli control since 1967 with no hope of gaining Israeli citizenship. Palestinians’ personal rights are at the mercy of a foreign army, and their property rights are at the mercy of settlers.
Before Hamas, the Palestinian movement was led by secular nationalists. Although Hamas’ vision of Islamic government is polarizing and unpopular in Palestinian politics, its promise of self-rule and military strength has widespread support.
This isn’t to say that assassination doesn’t matter or that force never works. Governments, after all, put a lot of resources into protecting their leaders. But assassination isn’t a silver bullet, and force has to serve a coherent goal. War is politics by other means, the 19th-century strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote.
After defeating the Nazi and Imperial Japanese armies, the United States invested considerable effort and resources into transforming Germany and Japan into independent, prosperous nations. If anything, U.S. military authorities were too lenient on former Axis officials and preserved too much of the old regimes.
Similarly, the defeat of the Islamic State is going to depend a lot on how the Iraqi state and Kurdish-led revolutionaries govern its former territory.
A replacement government doesn’t have to be liberal or democratic, but it has to be functional. People need to be confident that they can lead normal lives, and that the rulers can maintain a modus vivendi with different parts of society. Otherwise, the same kind of forces that led to the old regime will likely bubble back up.
What is the plan to govern Iran without Khamenei? Hawks in Washington have been coalescing around Reza Pahlavi, the former crown prince of Iran before the revolution. Pahlavi has not held office since he was 17 years old, and his recent attempt to lead a government in exile was a chaotic failure.
Besides, Pahlavi’s vision for change involves gaining support from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Iranian military unit at the core of the current regime. Pahlavi understands something that his foreign backers do not: Swapping out the king is not the same as getting rid of the kingmaker.
The visions for ruling Gaza after the war, meanwhile, are no better than Hamas rule, and some are positively worse. One plan gaining popularity in Israeli government circles amounts to a totalitarian police state. It would restrict food supplies to “humanitarian bubbles,” impose total censorship on the media, and subject Palestinians to re-education.
Killing Hamas leaders or even discrediting Islamist ideology will not make Palestinians accept this life. It will only change the flag of the opposition. As long as Palestinians live under foreign sovereignty, they will fight back, and some of them will do so violently. After all, Israelis won their independence the same way.
The United States has been frustrated for decades with its inability to shape Middle Eastern politics. Assassination seems like a tempting alternative to war. Kill the evil wizard and avoid having to fight his minions.
The opposite is true. It is much easier to start wars through assassination than to end them. Haniyeh, the Hamas leader killed last month, led the political bureau in charge of negotiations. Hamas appointed the ultra-militarist Yahya Sinwar as his replacement. He is now refusing to budge on Hamas’ demands for a hostage exchange.
Instead of looking for silver bullets, Americans should recognize the limits of their government’s power. It will be up to Israelis and Palestinians to figure out how to live together, and it will be up to Iranians to determine their system of government after Khamenei. America can look out for its own interest in these conflicts—but first, it needs to do no harm.
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