Like a woman at the end of her ninth month of pregnancy, the State of Israel is waiting for an attack on Iran. Tonight! It will be tonight! Oh no. The night has passed and there was no delivery. That is, no strike. So perhaps today. Or tonight? Is the refrigerator stocked? Is the house in order? I promise, I personally cleaned the house from top to bottom and, just to be safe, made extra cakes and cookies so I would be ready. Who is crazy enough to enter the safe room with children for an unknown period of time without baking cookies in advance?
It is nearly impossible to grasp that we may be on the brink of a historic shift involving the Shiite axis of evil. If the strike materializes on the scale one can only imagine, given the American munitions flowing into the region, it would be a dazzling checkmate of the head of the snake, fittingly enough in the country that invented chess as we know it today.
Even after Operation Rising Lion, it was clear that Iran, over whose skies Israeli aircraft have flown freely, is not as strong or as threatening as its supreme leader portrays while issuing nightly warnings to the "Great Satan" and the "Little Satan." But with all due respect to the drums of history, and there is due respect, we must adopt a painfully sober view regarding Iran the day after.
Never in world history has a benevolent regime replaced an evil one overnight. Not for lack of trying. From the French Revolution to the Arab Spring, freedom-seeking nations have attempted to cast off various forms of oppression, and almost always found themselves at the threshold of a nightmare, where might made right and the new rulers proved no less power-hungry or murderous than those they replaced.
Socialist movements around the world sang of destroying the old world to its foundations, promising that yesterday's nothing would become tomorrow's everything. Yet socialists and non-socialists alike discovered that regimes are not socks that can simply be changed overnight.
France after the revolution descended into blood-soaked years during which Maximilien Robespierre's rule sent tens of thousands to the guillotine. Libya after Muammar Gaddafi remains torn between two rival governments locked in a bitter struggle. Cambodia is still littered with millions of landmines left over from the wars that followed the fall of the Khmer Rouge. And Syria, well, we have seen the horrifying images from the latest chapter involving Abu Mohammad al-Julani's forces and Kurdish female fighters.
A country after the collapse of its regime is a volcano of vengeance, opportunism and thousands of hands grasping for the reins, all amid intense international interference. True, Iran's population is more organic than that of Iraq or Syria. It is more homogeneous, with a shared history and a Shiite majority. Yet even within it there is no consensus regarding the regime or the day after. More troubling still, the practical knowledge of how to run a state, where its resources are and how to utilize them is entirely in the hands, sometimes the legal ownership, of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
If one imagines an Iranian "cleansing of the stables," in which all members of the old regime are exiled, imprisoned or executed, even the most well intentioned new government would require a lengthy grace period to regain control over the spheres that any functioning state must command.
In Iraq, members of Saddam Hussein's defeated Baath Party were excluded from positions of power the day after his fall and went on to join the Islamic State terrorist organization, fighting the new regime from its ranks. Tens of thousands of operatives within Iran's apparatus, or simply supporters of the ayatollahs' regime, will not disappear. Any leadership that fails to overcome impulses of revenge and find them a place in a post-ayatollah order will soon find them nipping at its heels with brutality.
There is no doubt that some of the sharpest and most experienced minds in the world are now meticulously planning a grand and, we hope, final assault on Iran. Toppling a regime of evil and dismantling the Shiite axis are worthy goals. But one hopes that at least some of those minds are studying closely the lessons of revolutions past, especially in the Middle East, and are planning for the Iranian people a future that, even if not ideal and partly shrouded in uncertainty, is at the very least not drenched in blood.
