Politics of regime-change within regime continuity

Looking at recent US-induced events and developments in Venezuela, and now in Iran, it should be clear to everyone that US Global Policy is war-based and driven, but LIMITED WAR! America cannot afford a long drawn-out conflict, and the Russia-Ukraine war is a forbidding example. 

Consistent with the LIMITED WAR strategy, US aggression against marked states takes the simple arithmetic of determining the axle of a targeted system and society, in particular persons and institutions in which the vibrancy and longevity of that system and society reposes. 

Venezuela ran a "system" which rested on personal charisma of the leader, never mind the copious rhetoric on historical figures and immediate past president, Chavez. Chavismo was not a system; it was a personality inheritance with no depth in society and in governance systems. 

Contrast that with Cuba whose Revolution has, over the years, translated to a deep governing and defence system based on a people's resistance. The recent probing attack by the US, using Cuban exiles - as in the 1961 Bay of Pigs - showed the difference between personality cult-based political structure and a dispersed, society-wide system in which citizens are mobilised both for sanctions/embargo-based hardships, and for resistance against foreign aggression. 

Even more critically, it showed how faced with such a daunting possibility, US policy shifts from LIMITED WAR to  long-term influence, attrition and subversion. US is not ready for drawn-out, people's war, something it learnt well in Vietnam and most recently in Afghanistan. 

Where this is not available, the US will mobilize all its might - as in both Venezuela and Iran - while inciting and attempting to appropriate the targeted populace to its side in order to isolate the charismatic leadership or the governing sect, as in the case of Iran. 

While Venezuela was a leader-centred authoritarian system, Iran was and is a THEOCRACY. Both ran/run on elitist exclusivity, and on non-consensual leadership style where obedience to personality or religious values invites coercive governance. 

Invariably, the leadership gets high-handed and resented, and thus unable to mobilise whole-of-society defensive response. 

Elite defence units become the defence, as opposed to a diffuse, people-driven popular resistance one finds in Cuba. Such set-ups predispose such societies to enormous vulnerabilities through short, surgical attacks which seek to take out the strongman or deeply unpopular "strong-system". 

Such set-ups are fertile ground for US strategy of SHORT, LIMITED WAR achieved through abductions -on a good day - and/or assassinations/decapitation - at worst. As both a Venezuela and Iran show, the the swinging of the huge, decapitating US hammer, and the taking out of limited targets, is soon followed by eerie silence and abrupt cessation of hostilities as the US moves in - through multiple prongs - to replace odious persons and/or systems by someone and something more amenable. 

Often the replacement is a person who is drawn from the deposed "system" to give a veneer of regime continuity. 

Venezuela is a perfect example. Under the US/Israeli system, the CIA and Special Forces are key players to locate select targets, principally the residence and movement of the targeted system's strongman. Thereafter, surgical operations are put in train, enabled by a massively spectacular, distracting bombing action meant to enable extraction - as in Venezuela - or cruise missile attack on the compound of the Ayatollah, as in Iran. And as both Venezuela and Iran show, weapons from allies of targeted countries, while important, are not decisive. In fact they amount to a misreading of US war aims and strategy largely developed from a good SWOT analysis of the governing system in targeted countries. 

Also because a person or a religion will have been marketed as embodiments of the targeted nation's sovereignty and defence, their elimination inevitably leads to the immediate capitulation of the country and people, as happened in Venezuela. 

We remain keenly watchful of how the new, caretaker Ayatollah in Iran will ensure regime-continuity from a values/politics point of view, or will ensure regime continuity through a new trajectory which accommodates US interests, both geopolitical and economic. 

My hunch is that the new Ayatollah - who is a son of the slain religious leader - will most probably use concessions already done to the US by Iran under his slain father, to then put in train a pro-US policy shift, and to loosen the much-resented Islamic fetter on greater society, itself a big source of popular disaffection. 

Those who accuse US of duplicitous negotiations - the US proceeded to attack even after Iran had totally given in to US demands - miss one thing: that the dead Ayatollah had already made key concessions for the Iranian regime which would emerge in the wake of his death, and under his own son!! Libya, after all, showed US the dangers of bringing in outsiders to take over from the erstwhile governing system, while sidelining scions of that system. 

Where that happens, the absence of a slain or abducted strongman creates an vacuum in which endless bloody conflicts play out, and where scions of the deposed person-centred system, might have to be eliminated, as happened to Gaddafi's son recently. While most of us have a disdainful estimate of Trump's intellect, no one should ever underestimate the US Deep State's capacity to read history and strategize appropriately. 
 
I laughed when one commentator dismissed the US war against Iran as "a war without a strategy". Such a misconception inevitably arises from an exaggerated role of the US President in shaping events in America and abroad. MY TAKE!!!!