3,500 Canadians requesting assistance in departing ‘volatile’ Middle East, foreign affairs minister says
Fears Trump will leave Iran in a worse place
While U.S. President Donald Trump has not explicitly named regime change as an objective of his military operation in Iran, it’s difficult to see how he’ll persuade the American people that he won the war if a hard-line Islamic republic remains in place in Tehran.
Trump has so far been non-committal about who he wants to see in power in Iran after the war ends, but it’s been clear since the early hours of the joint U.S.-Israel military operation that toppling the regime is his preferred outcome.
“When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said to the Iranian people in the video message he posted shortly after air strikes began. “It will be yours to take.”
By putting the responsibility for regime change onto the Iranians, Trump appears to be trying to create an environment where he can declare victory even if the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard remain in control once the bombing stops.
Yet Trump has also signalled that he intends to have his say on who takes control in Iran after the war is over.
Will Trump actually do “whatever it takes” to achieve his objectives, as he pledged this week, even if gas prices keep rising, ground troops become necessary and U.S. military casualties start mounting? Or will he prematurely declare the mission accomplished with the regime still in place?
Nader Hashemi, an associate professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., says merely installing a new supreme leader in Iran will not fundamentally change the foreign or domestic policies of the Islamic republic.
“My big fear is that when this is all over, you’re going to see a regime that’s still in power, deeply entrenched, much more brutal, and at the end of the day, the Iranian people are going to be the big losers,” Hashemi said.Read CBC’s Washington correspondent Mike Crawley’s full analysis here.
