Let’s take a closer look at the plan for “regime change in Iran” — which is the real reason for the war. Most of the details of this extraordinary story still cannot be published. As is known, in a video call from Tel Aviv, the Mossad chief promised President Donald Trump that the plan would work. Its implementation was supposed to begin during the bombing campaign, which was supposed to stop once the broader public took to the streets. Trump’s advisers warned him about Israel overselling the plan, but the president decided to go to war anyway. Weapons were distributed, and at the beginning of the war the Israeli Air Force bombed border crossings to allow the Kurds to enter and serve as “boots on the ground,” doing what al-Sharaa and his men had done — with Turkish assistance — to Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
And then everything stopped. The Kurds did not enter. Netanyahu publicly called on other minorities to rise up against Iran, but no one did. Trump said that those who had received weapons to fight the regime simply kept the weapons for themselves.
In Israel, a different story is being told: that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called Trump and protested the arming of the Kurds and their involvement in the fighting, perhaps because he feared they would turn the weapons against Turkey. Trump was convinced and stopped the plan. It is a good story. But common sense suggests that there is no way this is the whole story.
If Israel and the United States had prepared, armed, and coordinated a regime-change plan, it makes no sense that a single phone call from Erdoğan would have stopped it. Trump went to war based on this plan, said so publicly, told the Iranian people that this was their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take their country back, and put his entire legacy, popularity, and the U.S. economy on the line over this war. It is therefore unlikely that Erdoğan’s objection caused him to stop everything.
It makes even less sense that Netanyahu, who was also deeply invested in the plan, simply obeyed. It is much more plausible that the plan was amateurish and overly ambitious, and that when the moment of truth came, it simply failed. Perhaps the Kurds, who have been abandoned and betrayed so many times in the past, did not want to participate in a dangerous adventure and face hundreds of thousands of Iranian troops on their own. If that is the correct explanation, then the decision to go to war was based on a plan that was even less sophisticated than the one behind the First Lebanon War — the war that ultimately gave birth to Hezbollah.
What, for example, was the logic behind killing Khamenei if it did not lead to regime change? Khamenei was an extremist leader, but he was also elderly and ill. There is a consensus among Iran experts that had he died naturally, the chances of Mojtaba replacing him would have been very low. A less radical leader might have come to power. Killing Khamenei prompted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to demand that his son be appointed, as a defiant gesture toward the West. In the end, we replaced one extremist Khamenei with an even more extreme Khamenei.
Worse, the younger Khamenei gives the Revolutionary Guards de facto control over the country. An extreme religious regime has, to some extent, been replaced by an extreme military dictatorship that could race toward nuclear weapons, in contrast to the elder Khamenei’s policy, which preferred stopping at the stage of a “threshold state.” And if the new regime manages to obtain even the most primitive nuclear device, can we really trust it not to use it? When we see how they fired on the UAE during the ceasefire, it is clear that the threat they pose has only grown.
We can still hope that once the war ends, Iran’s devastated economy will drive the masses into the streets. But the regime has already proven that it has very few restraints, and if last time it was still afraid of an American attack, this time the gun has already been fired.
The bottom line is that the grandiose fantasies of changing the regime may well have weakened Iran, but for now, at least, they have greatly increased the threat it poses.