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market.7 A “social war” would involve appeals to Islamic solidarity
and attempts to weaken popular support for adversary governments
through influence operations and attacks aimed at civilians. In such a
broad and protracted contest, the United States might not enjoy a
favorable balance of advantages. It is by no means clear, either, that
the U.S. government is structured to effectively prosecute such a war,
or that its intelligence capabilities are oriented properly toward
supporting it.
Given these caveats and complexities, it seems to follow that if the
United States chose to attack Iran, it would do so in ways that would
prevent Iran from expanding the conflict into areas where it held an
advantage. The reasoning might go something like this: Since the
Iranian regime has many ways to widen a war into domains that do
not favor the United States, the best option is to execute regime-
change before the regime can open its bag of tricks. Or it might go
like this: Start small, but if the Iranians escalate the war, shift
immediately to a regime-change option before they can succeed.
Almost needless to say, these are hard-to-control and high-risk
approaches. A decapitation strategy, we know, did not fare so well in
March 2003 against Iraq, and it would probably be harder to pull off
against a more deeply institutionalized polity like Iran.
As for a “start small” approach, let’s suppose that the war begins with
a limited air and naval operation. Iran could respond in a limited “tit-
for-tat” way. But the regime might conclude that the operation is
intended to remove it from power (or succeed in doing so
unintentionally); if so, it might respond with a high level of violence
along several axes of capability. There is simply no way to predict
with confidence how radicals in Iran would respond to an initially
limited U.S. attack. We must base our predictions largely on what the
leadership says, the Iranian regime’s history and our limited
intelligence on the regime’s internal dynamics.8 All this is subject to

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