Why Execution Matters More Than Slogans for Iran
In the dusty streets of Mosul in the summer of 2003, an Iraqi lawyer pulled me aside on a street corner. The power was still out weeks after we had toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. “If you don’t get the electricity back on soon,” he told me, his voice low and urgent, “I will pick up a rifle and fight you.” He wasn’t an insurgent. He was a professional, a father, a man who had welcomed the end of Baathist tyranny. But he was also a realist. Basic services—electricity, water, order—were the difference between gratitude and armed resistance. That conversation has never left me.
A documentary and an oral history collection later confirmed what that lawyer understood instinctively. Molly Bingham and Steve Connors’s 2007 documentary Meeting Resistance captured anonymous fighters in Baghdad describing how occupation frustrations turned ordinary Iraqis into insurgents. Mark Kukis’s oral-history collection Voices from Iraq: A People’s History, 2003–2009 recorded the same sentiment across nearly seventy interviews—with civilians, politicians like former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, former dissidents, and the very militiamen who eventually took up arms. The message was consistent: populations do not wait patiently while outsiders debate policy. They react to the world they actually live in.
I spent twenty-five years in the U.S. Army, beginning as an enlisted soldier in Cold War Germany, earning a commission, serving multiple combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and retiring as a Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel. I have seen policy made in Washington and executed—or mis-executed—on the ground. What I have learned is simple, if unfashionable: America will be engaged in conflict for as long as we remain a global power with global interests. “Forever war” is not a choice we can decline. It is the condition of our era. That condition has persisted regardless of official rhetoric. Despite the Obama administration’s decision to drop the term “Global War on Terrorism,” America has remained engaged in that war since 9/11 and almost certainly will be for decades to come. The evidence is relentless: in February of this year alone, CENTCOM conducted multiple rounds of strikes against more than 30 ISIS targets in Syria. Just days ago, U.S. and Nigerian forces eliminated Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, ISIS’s global second-in-command. These are not isolated incidents; they are proof that the fight against jihadist networks is a persistent, global campaign that transcends any single administration’s branding.
That reality demands a different question. The real question is not whether America will face conflict, but how competently we design and execute the full spectrum of operations required to wage it—especially the complex campaigns we shorthand as “regime change.”
Pundits treat “forever wars,” “regime change,” and “nation building” as dirty words, as if uttering them explains failure. They do not. Failure comes from execution that ignores reality on the ground: the expectations of civilian populations, the requirements of stability operations, and the necessity of sustained political will. There are better and worse ways to conduct these operations. Iraq and Afghanistan offer contrasting case studies in how the same strategic goal—removing a hostile regime—can succeed or unravel depending on how seriously we take the “after” phase.
We have never been able to choose when war begins. Iran’s war on the United States effectively started with the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Al-Qaeda declared war with the 1993 World Trade Center attack. We simply declined to acknowledge those acts as the opening salvos they were. The Cold War itself was a forty-year “forever war” fought by other means—containment, proxies, deterrence. When the towers fell in 2001, we responded with the swiftest, most successful light-footprint campaign in modern history: a handful of CIA officers, Special Forces teams, and airpower allied with the Northern Alliance routed the Taliban in weeks. That victory was real and it was decisive.
It was also intoxicating. It convinced senior leaders in the Bush administration that the same model—speed, precision, minimal boots on the ground—could be transplanted to Iraq with equal success. It could not. We ignored the Powell Doctrine lessons forged in the bitter experience of Vietnam and the Gulf War: overwhelming force when necessary, clear political objectives, a realistic post-conflict plan, and the assurance of sustained public support. General Eric Shinseki’s pre-war estimate that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for stabilization was publicly dismissed by senior Pentagon civilians. We arrived with enough combat power to win the major fighting in three weeks and not nearly enough civil affairs, military police, engineers, or economic development expertise to govern the peace.
The result was predictable to anyone who had listened to Iraqis. Mass defections of Iraqi army units occurred, but we had no immediate plan to pay or employ those thousands of suddenly unemployed soldiers. Electricity remained sporadic. Police stations stayed shuttered or corrupt. The vacuum was filled by militias, looters, and the early stirrings of what became the insurgency. My conversation with the Mosul lawyer was not exceptional; it was commonplace. The documentary Meeting Resistance and Kukis’s oral histories document how quickly ordinary Iraqis crossed from cautious hope to active opposition when the promised stability never materialized. We did not lose ground in Iraq because regime change itself was impossible. We lost ground because we treated the post-regime-change phase as an afterthought rather than the decisive phase.
Afghanistan began differently and ended worse. The initial 2001 operation validated the light-footprint model precisely because the objective was narrow: destroy al-Qaeda’s safe haven and remove the Taliban regime that hosted it. Success was rapid and complete. Then, almost imperceptibly, the mission crept. We began building a Western-style central government in a country whose people had never wanted one. Tribal, subsistence-farming societies do not share the urban, somewhat unified civic culture of Iraq. Development projects that looked transformative on PowerPoint slides often arrived in villages that simply wanted security, roads, and the ability to farm without being taxed or conscripted by whichever warlord held the local checkpoint that week. We poured resources into institutions that had no cultural roots and little popular legitimacy.
And then, when the endeavor proved hard—as counterinsurgency always does—we quit. Twenty years of effort, thousands of American lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, and an Afghan government that collapsed in days once we signaled withdrawal. The lesson was not that nation-building is inherently impossible. The lesson was that we lacked the patience and the strategic consistency to see a difficult task through once the domestic political mood shifted.
Both experiences reveal the same truth: regime change is not a binary policy option. It is a spectrum of execution choices. At one end lies the minimalist approach—decapitate the leadership, declare victory, and depart—leaving behind the very power vacuums that breed the next generation of threats. At the other end lies the comprehensive approach: simultaneous major combat, immediate and adequately resourced stability operations, economic restoration, and a realistic understanding of the population’s actual culture, desires, and tolerances. The difference is not ideology. It is competence.
This is why the endless debate over whether regime change is good or bad misses the point. It is sometimes necessary. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States, directly or through proxies, for more than four decades. Its pursuit of nuclear weapons, its support for groups that kill Americans and destabilize the region, and its ideological commitment to exporting revolution make continued coexistence on current terms untenable for any serious American strategy.
Regime change may therefore become a necessary course of action — as my previous op-eds in Real Clear Defense have advocated for—but only if we are willing to do it the competent way: with forethought, patience, a fully integrated plan for the day after, and unwavering political support through the inevitable difficult years. I hope that the Secretary of War’s stated disdain for regime change and nation building has not caused senior leaders to discard out of hand any CENTCOM-recommended course of action capable of addressing the root cause—the extremist theocratic regime itself. Likewise, I hope the Commander in Chief’s sincere love of the military and appreciation for the lives of those who serve has not led to ruling out a fuller Powell Doctrine approach that would involve adequate ground forces where necessary. As a combat veteran, I know my fellow Special Forces brethren understand the true cost of service. They are willing to pay that price with life or limb—but they want the assurance that if they are asked to do so, the mission will be done properly and seen through to the end, unlike what happened in Afghanistan. History offers very few examples of major wars won through air and naval power alone. There are even fewer—if any—in which an extremist theocratic regime has seen its core ideology fundamentally defeated or replaced by such means. I also hope we do not discard this course of action simply because the words “regime change” or “nation building” now carry such heavy, negative connotations. Half-measures and premature exits are not strategies; they are the very errors we have already paid for in blood and treasure.
America does not get to opt out of history. We will be engaged, in one form or another, for the foreseeable future. The slogans that dominate cable news—“forever wars,” “no more regime change,” “end nation-building”—offer emotional satisfaction without strategic insight. The harder, adult conversation is about execution: how seriously we take the population, how honestly we resource the stabilization phase, and how consistently we maintain the will to finish what we start.
That Iraqi lawyer understood this in 2003. He was not asking us to leave. He was asking us to succeed. Twenty-three years later, that remains the only question that matters. If we refuse to learn it, we will simply repeat the same cycle under new names and in new places. If we finally internalize it, we may yet conduct the difficult work our position in the world demands with the competence it deserves.
Stephen D. Cook is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service. A combat veteran decorated for both heroism and valor, he is the author of the field manuals Plan Like a Green Beret and Choose the Heavier Ruck, and the techno-thriller In the Shadows of the Sky. His work explores the intersection of elite military decision-making, intuition, and disruptive leadership. He is based in St. Augustine, Florida.
