The Hour That Bombs Cannot Bring

On February 28, as American and Israeli strikes on Iran began, President Trump spoke to its people directly. "The hour of your freedom is at hand," he told them. "When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take." Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the same day that the joint action would create the conditions for Iranians to take their destiny into their own hands. He urged them to cast off tyranny. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later said America's objectives were to destroy Iran's navy, air force, and weapons factories and reduce the number of its missile launchers. Those objectives, he added, had nothing to do with Iran's leadership, though Washington would not be heartbroken by a change and would be willing to play a role in one. Regardless of its formal aims, the war held out freedom to Iranians in its first hours. The war is not over, but the promise behind it is old enough to test.

Bombs can kill a regime's leaders, wreck its military, and bring it down. They cannot organize the people who must take power and hold it, without whom freedom does not follow. In Serbia, a movement built before NATO bombed helped win an election Slobodan Milošević chose to hold. In Libya, rebels toppled Muammar Gaddafi with NATO's help and with no authority able to disarm them; his fall delivered militias. Iran is the test under way. By June the bombs had not turned Iranians toward the regime, and the wish to be rid of it had risen since the previous September. But the war gave the regime a wartime charge against anyone who organizes: collaboration with the countries bombing Iran. The organizing remains local, scattered, and watched, as January left it.

Serbia is the case the war's hawks cite, and it cuts both ways. NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999 to force Milošević out of Kosovo rather than out of power. Srdja Popović, a leader of Otpor, the student movement that helped bring Milošević down, said in 2010 that the bombing had rallied Serbs behind their leader and that Milošević had used the state of emergency to destroy what was left of the opposition. A 2022 study by the political scientist Milos Popovic complicates that account. Comparing municipalities by their exposure to the bombing, it found the regime's vote in the 2000 local elections about 2.6% lower where the bombs fell. Both can be true. Bombing can wound a strongman's standing and still hand him tools against his opponents.

What decided Serbia was organization the bombs did not build. Otpor had formed in October 1998, months before the first bombs fell. In 2000, 18 opposition parties united behind one candidate in an election Milošević himself had called. The bombing at most tilted that contest. Iran's opposition has no such contest to enter, since an unelected council vets the candidates for president, parliament, and the Assembly of Experts.

Libya shows what happens when the organization cannot control the guns. The UN authorized force in 2011 to protect civilians, and NATO's air campaign helped rebels bring Gaddafi down within months. In 2016 the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee found that "the limited intervention to protect civilians had drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change," and that the policy had no strategy for what came after. A transitional council won recognition and handed power to an elected congress in August 2012. It never disarmed the militias that had fought Gaddafi. They later turned their guns on each other.

In Iran, start with what the hawks get right. By the survey group GAMAAN's measures, Iranians protested in their millions in January. By late June most welcomed the war's blow to the regime, more wanted it gone than the year before, and fewer backed an Islamic Republic as a system. Iranians split almost evenly on whether the strikes were aggression against their country. Slightly more said the war had turned them against foreign military intervention than toward it, though supporters of intervention still outnumbered opponents. The survey reaches a large, literate slice of Iran online, not the whole country. Even read with that limit, it shows no rally around the flag in June.

Wanting is not the same as being able. Iranians proved the wanting in January and paid for it. The protests began in late December with strikes in the bazaars. By the account of the UN fact-finding mission on Iran, they spread to all 31 provinces and more than 200 cities. On January 8 the government cut the country off from the internet, just before the deadliest days of the crackdown. The government's own list of the dead runs past 3,000, while the mission believes the true figure is significantly higher. By February 28 the opposition, battered and isolated in January, was only beginning to stir again, on university campuses and at memorials. When the bombs fell, its best-known figure abroad, Reza Pahlavi, the late shah's son, told Iranians to stay in their homes and wait for his signal to return to the streets.

That is what makes the war's effect measurable. A regime that had just killed thousands of its citizens needed a story about why, and Iran's was ready. On January 5 the head of the judiciary promised no leniency for rioters, claiming the United States and Israel had openly supported the unrest. In January that was an accusation. After February 28 it had bombs behind it. Within 50 days of the war's start, Iran Human Rights counted more than 3,600 detentions, on charges including espionage, contact with foreign intelligence, and sending images of sensitive sites to media abroad. In April the same official said the cases of people who had collaborated with enemies must be expedited. Executions slowed from the year before, as far as monitors could count, while those for political and security offenses rose. The collaboration charge had long been available. A law Iran's parliament first passed in June 2025 raises its penalties by up to three degrees for offenses committed in wartime or in security conditions declared by the Supreme National Security Council. The war made the charge easier to press.

It also changed who holds the security state. On March 8 the Assembly of Experts chose Mojtaba Khamenei to succeed his father, Ali Khamenei, killed in the war's opening strikes. After Ali Larijani was killed in March, the post of security council secretary went to Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, a former chief of the Revolutionary Guards' joint staff. In August it passed to Mohsen Rezaei, who commanded the Guards in the 1980s, within a day of his being named the new Leader's own representative on the council.

None of this proves the Guards rule Iran. Most earlier secretaries of the council were also Guards veterans, every appointment still went out over President Masoud Pezeshkian's signature, and he has kept a diplomatic role. The claim is narrower. The institution the war strengthened is the one whose business is suppressing organized dissent. The war against Iraq in the 1980s turned the Guards from a militia into one of the state's central institutions. This one has made their commander from that war secretary of the council that coordinates the state's security. That council also decides when the new law's harsher penalties apply.

The war has handed the regime leverage over global energy supply. Iran has struck its Gulf neighbors' energy sites, widening the strikes after Israel hit Iran's share of the South Pars gas field in March. It has also made the Strait of Hormuz, which carried about a fifth of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas before the war, a bargaining chip. Tehran has tied reopening it to terms that have included lifting the American blockade and sanctions, freeing frozen assets, and paying compensation. Washington, by Rubio's account, wants Iran to give up any path to a nuclear weapon, stop building missiles and drones, and end its backing for armed groups abroad. Those terms now define the stalled talks. The more the war puts at stake for global energy and maritime traffic, the more the talks turn on what Tehran can do to the world rather than on how it treats its own people. That leaves less and less room for the freedom the war promised Iranians.

The strongest objection is that this argument gets the order wrong. The regime's monopoly on violence is exactly why Iranians cannot organize, the hawks say, so breaking it from outside is the precondition for organizing rather than a substitute for it. January, on this view, proves that waiting for Iranians to organize under the gun means waiting forever.

Yet the bombs did not break that monopoly. The strikes killed the Supreme Leader, the security council's secretary, and many civilians. They did not disarm the forces that fired on the crowds in January, and they did not empty the prisons. The prisons filled. Workers have kept protesting, 67 times in September by the count of the monitor HRANA, but staged only four strikes, against about 35 a month in 2025. No national body has emerged to speak for them. Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said in March that he had seen no signs of defections and that the regime's coercive institutions were performing better than in the past. The apparatus that crushed the uprising has survived the war so far and gained a wartime reason to use force.

Pahlavi is the opposition's most recognizable face, but recognition is not organization. He has lived abroad since before the revolution. The National Council of Resistance of Iran rejects a return of the monarchy as well as the Islamic Republic. A coalition of Kurdish parties formed in February makes recognition of national rights a condition of any alliance. A movement able to take power would have to bring those camps together with the people inside Iran who marched in January, and no figure, Pahlavi included, has yet done so. Charles Wald, a retired American general who backs the exiled council, argues in a recent essay that military power can destroy the regime's missiles but cannot bring political change without the Iranian people's organized resistance. Nearly eight months in, no resistance able to bring the regime down has risen.

A second objection is that Iranians themselves welcomed the regime's weakening, and that outsiders have no standing to second-guess them. They did, and they were entitled to, though they did not speak with one voice. Pahlavi called the strikes a humanitarian intervention, while more than 300 Iranian scholars and activists around the world signed a statement calling the war an absolute evil that brings no democracy. Nothing here disputes the welcome, only what the bombs can deliver. Satisfaction at a blow to one's jailers is not a key to the cell.

John Stuart Mill argued in 1859 that the only real test of a people's fitness for popular institutions is that they, or enough of them to win, will risk hardship and danger to free themselves. Iranians met the first half of that test in January, at a price the UN has documented. The second half, enough of them to win, is what organization supplies against a modern security state. Mill also warned that liberty "bestowed on them by other hands than their own, will have nothing real, nothing permanent." The war offered that kind of liberty and could not deliver it. All it could do was change the circumstances under which Iranians would have to gain their own. So far, the war has supplied the regime with new grounds for repression without cracking the forces that guard it. Iranians were told the hour of their freedom was at hand. They had already shown they wanted it. What the bombs have not given them is the means to take it.