The only Iran plan that doesn’t end with a 20-year hangover

Iran won’t be “fixed” by a press conference, a bombing run, or a fantasy about instant regime collapse. If you want a road map for what comes next, look at Northern Italy in 1945 — and the quiet, brutal work that made liberation possible.

The situations share a grim similarity. In Northern Italy, civilians lived under overlapping enemy forces — SS, Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht units, and Italian Fascists — all capable of total control, including public executions at a local commander’s discretion.

America will not administer Iran. Iranians will. US involvement will not morph into open-ended governance or ‘reconstruction’ missions that turn into permanent deployments.

The U.S. Office of Strategic Services began the behind-the-lines effort by building the Committee for the Liberation of Northern Italy — the CLNAI (from its Italian name, Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia) — into a political umbrella that assembled a host of anti-fascist and anti-Nazi groups into something recognizable as a governing alternative.

Then the OSS inserted American and Italian anti-fascist agents, organized reception networks, and helped train and equip partisan formations. By early 1945, OSS Operational Groups and Special Operations parties were raising hell across Northern Italy in an arc from Genoa and Belluno to Ravenna. OSS officer Captain Albert “The Brain” Materazzi kept pressure on by anticipating and parrying German countermoves against individual missions.

As the war ended, the results were uneven: Wehrmacht units often surrendered; SS and Gestapo often did not. The CLNAI declared national liberation on April 25, 1945. A large uprising across Northern Italy forced the surrender of most enemy units; the remainder were killed, captured, or fled.

Even then, stability did not arrive overnight. Italy needed another year before a referendum made it a republic — and many more years before postwar order fully settled.

The point: Liberation is a sequence, not a switch.

What Italy suggests for Iran

Iran already has the raw material for internal change. The question is whether it can be organized, protected, and sustained long enough to become the next government rather than the next massacre.

1) Resistance exists — at scale

It’s obvious that many Iranians are willing to resist the mullahs and their coercive apparatus. The sheer number killed in recent protests — as many as 30,000 — proves that a large demographic has already shown the will to fight the regime.

2) The opposition is diverse — and that’s normal

The resistance contains deep political differences. Some want a return of the shah; others vehemently reject that. Some are Kurds seeking autonomy; others are separatists. But the unifying principle remains the same: ending the clerical regime and its enforcement arms.

3) Not every unit will fold the same way

Some elements of Iran’s security forces may quietly cease hostilities when the regime’s command structure fractures. Hardcore units — especially ideologically driven formations — will resist longer and more violently, like the SS “Werewolf” units after May 1945.

4) Preventing post-conflict starvation

A transition can fail because people get hungry, cold, and desperate faster than a new order can take shape. Keeping the civilian population alive and supplied is strategy, not charity.

What can be done

1) Build an umbrella political alternative

Organize and fund an Iranian resistance umbrella organization capable of acting like a provisional authority: coherent messaging, defined leadership, internal discipline, and a plan for a post-regime state.

2) Reopen information flow

Help the Iranian people communicate beyond regime control. That means smuggling thousands more Starlink communication kits to inform and unify the civilian population.

3) Create protected space for internal organization

Iran’s borders and peripheries are strategically vital. The objective is to give resisting Iranians room to organize, train, coordinate, and survive the fight against the hardcore religious units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially the Basij — without turning the effort into an open-ended American occupation.

4) Neutralize Tehran’s remaining leverage

As we have seen, the regime’s last international lever often involves disrupting commerce and energy flows, especially around the Strait of Hormuz. But that can work both ways. The goal should be to reduce Tehran’s capacity to use choke points as blackmail — through sustained maritime security and allied coordination — while keeping escalation controlled.

In recent weeks, U.S. air power suppressed all of Iran’s military sites on Kharg Island, stopping short of sending ground troops to control the island and reopen the Strait.

The U.S. can further counter Iran by “absorbing” whatever drones, missiles, fast-attack boats, mini-subs, and unmanned “suicide skiffs” it has left until the regime runs dry. We don’t need to put our ships and sailors in harm’s way. Instead, we can create a flotilla of “drone sponges,” a screen of decoy tankers loaded only with ballast, to force the IRGC to attack what appear to be hostile targets in the Strait.

With constant airborne surveillance (aided by artificial intelligence), each launch site and its personnel can be immediately and overwhelmingly attacked and reduced. The preferred weapon for these attacks should be Mark 77 Incindigel (not your grandfather’s napalm) because of its destructive potential and psychological effects.

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Celal Gunes/Anadolu/Getty Images

End state

The United States should pursue a defined end state in Iran: the collapse of the regime’s coercive apparatus, the emergence of an Iranian-led governing alternative, and the rapid stabilization of civilian life — without a large-scale U.S. occupation.

This doctrine rests on five commitments.

1) No occupation, no nation-building bureaucracy.

America will not administer Iran. Iranians will. U.S. involvement will not morph into open-ended governance or “reconstruction” missions that turn into permanent deployments.

2) Iranian-led transition, backed by U.S. leverage.

Washington will recognize and support an Iranian resistance umbrella capable of coordinating civil authority, communicating with the public, and negotiating defections from regime institutions. The goal is political consolidation inside Iran, not a U.S.-designed replacement government.

3) Relentless pressure on the regime’s hard-power core.

The campaign will focus on degrading the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and associated internal-security organs until they can no longer sustain repression or organize effective retaliation. The objective is to break the regime’s capacity to rule by fear.

4) Targeted “advise and assist” support, not massed ground forces.

U.S. support will center on intelligence, communications, logistics, training, and limited partner enablement in support of Iranian formations willing to resist. The mission stays narrow: enable Iranians to defeat the regime’s coercive units and secure key nodes long enough for civil authority to take hold.

5) Humanitarian stabilization as a war aim, not an afterthought.

The United States will plan and execute large-scale relief to prevent post-conflict collapse: food, medical supplies, power and water restoration support, and protected corridors for aid delivery. Starvation and infrastructure failure create chaos, empower extremists, and discredit any transition. Stabilization protects the moral legitimacy of the effort and the practical viability of the outcome.

Success looks like this: The regime’s enforcement arms split and lose cohesion; civilian life steadies; an Iranian transitional authority takes control of basic services and internal security; Tehran’s ability to retaliate drops below the level that gives it strategic leverage; and the United States draws down to diplomacy, intelligence cooperation, and humanitarian support — then exits.