The end of Israel’s successful 12 Day War has changed the face of the Middle East already. Gone is the specter of nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles aimed at Tel Aviv, Haifa, and other Israeli population centers. The ballistic missile infrastructure itself has taken massive damage, as has the Iranian drone inventory and production capability. Gone too is the fantasy of Iranian might, and for the most part, their proxy strategy has been reduced to ruin as well.
However, the Ali Khamenei theocratic regime remains in place, along with the IRGC. And that may be creating problems for Benjamin Netanyahu as the cease-fire remains in place. Israelis wanted more finality from their sacrifices over the last two years, and Netanyahu made it clear he wanted it as well. Today, however, Netanyahu asked his Cabinet members for patience — and a clearer view of what would have been possible with a longer campaign:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that even if Israel had more time to undermine the Iranian regime, the regime may not have fallen, while at a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, behind closed doors.
“It’s not that if we had continued for a few more days, the regime would have collapsed – because if that had been the assessment, we would have done it. A revolution like this needs to come from within,” he said.
“We thought it was important to undermine the regime while we have the opportunity. The majority of the public in Iran is fed up with this tyranny. The regime, more than it fears Israel, fears its own people.”
This could become a political problem for Netanyahu if the regime does not fall quickly. Already, some people are blaming him for acquiescing to pressure from Donald Trump to end the war before Israel could achieve all of its objectives. A columnist at the Times of Israel called his decision “bizarre,” and warned that the nuclear threat will return sooner rather than later:
When he congratulated both countries in his ceasefire statement for their “Stamina, Courage, and Intelligence,” it was hard to tell that one side was America’s closest ally in the Middle East, and the other a sworn enemy.
Events moved in an even more bizarre direction after the ceasefire ostensibly went into effect. …
In the matter of hours, Israel had gone from the region’s swaggering top dog to a misbehaving child being publicly berated — denounced, that is, more bitterly than the would-be nuclear regime in Tehran.
Perhaps it was to be expected. Israel’s position post-war is strongest when it defeats its adversaries on its own, as it did in 1967. When it finds itself leaning on the US for support, as it did in the 1973 Yom Kippur War with the crucial American resupply airlift, it has to bow to Washington’s demands on how the wars end and what comes next.
Well, yes. Israel did not have the capacity to destroy Fordow, and the Iranians knew it. They neither have the munitions for the task nor the platform to deliver it. Netanyahu successfully bargained with Trump for limited American involvement, and even prevailed upon Trump to add Isfahan and Natanz to those strikes. However, that does mean that Netanyahu needed to allow Trump some control of the larger strategic moves, which Trump would likely have made anyway. With all of that said, however, Trump gave Netanyahu far more room to deal with Iran than any other American president would have, not to mention Israel’s ongoing battles with Hamas in Gaza.
The serious limitation on forced regime change didn’t come from Trump, not even in his reportedly kiboshing a direct strike on Khamenei. It came from the reality that forced regime change is not really possible in Iran, not unless a major occupying power takes over first. Israel has a population of nine million people; Iran is a nation of 90-plus million people. The Israelis can’t occupy Iran, and the Americans are absolutely not going to try it either, especially not after our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor is the decapitation model much better, considering how it turned out in Libya in 2011, this time with a much larger population split among so many ethnic minorities.
Even though this is clearly a defensive position for Netanyahu, he’s also correct. That’s why Netanyahu kept telling the Iranian people, including and especially Tehranis, that this was the moment to rise up. In that, though, Netanyahu was premature; it would be absurd to expect a revolt or uprising while bombs explode in the street. The cease-fire now can provide an opening for a popular movement to dethrone Khamenei and eject what remains of the IRGC, especially with their losses in resources necessary for subjugation.
Can it happen now? And if so, what would it look like — and who would be the players involved? I spoke yesterday with Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, a US-oriented think tank focused on the region. Roman sees Trump’s intervention as necessary and decisive, but also cautions that the regime may need a substantial push to get toppled. Now that the war has done considerable damage to the regime’s prestige within Iran, Roman wants to see diplomatic and economic pressure remain at the maximum to help the Iranian people take control of their country. But that will be a lot tougher than people think:
Ed: Do you think that this is enough of a loss, enough of a humiliation, that this is going to be a destabilizing event for this regime?
Gregg Roman: I think it is. And you have firsthand accounts of Iranian refugees fleeing the country, first having left Tehran and now going across different borders that Iran has and giving interviews to Western reporters. Kurds leaving to Iraq, saying they’re ready to return under arms. Iranians leaving through the Armenian border. Going to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, saying, we left because we feel like the regime is on the precipice of falling.
We saw the same thing with Pakistan, with Afghanistan and other groups. You have separatist movements now, whether it’s the Baluchis in the southeast of the country, whether it’s the Azeri fronts that are in the northwest of the country, all getting ready to start taking advantage of this. And they didn’t just lose prestige or their credibility with the regular Iranian man on the street. But they also showed how fractured that the top leadership of the country is in terms of not having the ability to communicate on message. ..
Ed: … [W]hat [do] you think the proper role of the United States and maybe Israel and some of the outside actors will be in this.
Gregg Roman: Well, I think that right now, the time inside the country is not necessarily ripe for regime change, but what I would call a controlled implosion of the regime security architecture. You have every province, 31 different provinces in Iran that are able to have their own local forms of governance depending on that specific character of who rules that province. But at the end of the day, they report back to Tehran.
But you see now that when the regime starts feeling like it’s losing its grasp, it calls those forces in the far four corners of the countries back to major city centers. And it’s done that, not just to replace those that but to be able to control mechanisms of state power. If we accept that that’s the current situation, the role of the United States, and I write about this in the Third Way article, is not kinetically getting involved, striking institutions of state power, nor is it sitting on the sidelines and asking the regime be kept in power.
There is plenty more of our conversation in my latest podcast, embedded below. The time may be ripe for action by the people, but it won’t be easy or quick — not even in Tehran.
