ISRAEL GOES ALL IN FOR REGIME CHANGE IN IRAN
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put Israel all in to try to help facilitate regime change in Iran.
He is not saying it 100% explicitly, and the IDF is very carefully avoiding saying it, but on Monday (6/23), for the first time, the IDF attacks on Iran seemed to be overwhelmingly against the regime’s internal political power versus its nuclear or external military power.
Israel is now doing almost everything it can to remove the obstacles preventing the Iranian people to rise up and remove the mullahs from power.
Israel’s air force took the time out to bomb a clock – a symbolic clock in Iran about destroying Israel – but nevertheless, a clock.
It bombed the Basij headquarters.
The Basij is an awful group of two million hooligans who kill, beat, and torture their own people to prevent the spread of protests for democracy. But they do not and have never been part of the Islamic Republic’s forces for threatening Israel, which would be the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
The IDF attacked the Evin Prison entrance, part of a jail that the regime uses for torturing its internal political opposition. That allowed an as-yet uncounted number of political prisoners to escape.
Additionally, the air force attacked numerous other IRGC locations with missions focused on maintaining internal Iranian rule and oppression.
It also attacked some ballistic missile launchers that were aimed at Israel and access points to the Fordow nuclear site, which the US bombed Sunday morning.
But the majority of the targets struck were hit to weaken the ayatollahs’ regime internally.
IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Effie Defrin completely dispensed with talking about the need to remove “existential threats” from Iran against Israel; instead, he described the importance of Israeli attacks in taking apart the internal power and resilience of the Iranian regime.
In fact, the only major target or use of force that Israel seems to be refraining from in Iran, so far, is assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel may yet kill Khamenei, but so far, US President Donald Trump still seems strongly opposed enough that Jerusalem has held off.
It is an interesting question as to whether the Mossad is assisting opposition leaders in Iran against IRGC and regime officials.
Unusually, the Mossad admitted on June 13 to hundreds of its agents or allied Iranian dissidents fanning out all over the country to help assassinate nine out of the 13 top Iranian military officials and around a dozen nuclear scientists, as well as taking out Iranian air defenses, nuclear sites, and ballistic missile assets.
No one has said that these agents left the country, and with chaos reigning in the Islamic Republic, there may be less available to stop them from carrying out more missions against the regime’s stability than at any time since it was established in 1979.
Ultimately, Israel does not seem to think it can replace the regime of Khamenei and the ayatollahs on its own.
Rather, IDF attacks seem intended to tear down the IRGC, the Basij, and the portions of the regime that are the most oppressive and used to prevent democratic protests, which could turn into a revolution.
This is being done either in the hope that America will weigh in also or to remove Khamenei’s tools for violently preventing opposition Iranians from bringing about his downfall.
Since the June 2009 opposition protests against then-Iranian president Mohammed Ahmadinejad allegedly stealing the presidential election on behalf of the regime, Khamenei has used the IRGC and Basij to put down several protests that had gained the support of hundreds of thousands of people.
Most recently, even Shi’ites, who normally supported the regime, protested from September 2022 until mid-2023 against the regime when its enforcers killed Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab head covering improperly. Several hundred Iranian protesters were killed by the Basij and IRGC, and as many as tens of thousands were said to have been beaten to quell the protests.
If one or more Iranian generals defect to the side of the Iranian opposition, and if the IRGC and Basij are sufficiently weakened, a democratic revolution against Khamenei and his ayatollahs might finally have a real chance. But this is a big if, and Israel is currently playing a very risky game.
If the ayatollahs’ regime survives – even if Khamenei does not (he is already 86) – it could eventually blow back against Israel.
But even since Israel struck Iran’s non-functioning Arak nuclear site last week and started blowing up Iranian aircraft that have been useless for decades, it has become more and more apparent that Jerusalem had decided to roll the dice to not only take out the nuclear program and harm the ballistic missile program but to reduce Khamenei’s power along the way as much as possible.
Following Trump’s attack on three Iranian nuclear sites on Sunday (6/22), it seems that the regime-weakening efforts went into overdrive.
What will be the final results of this latest push? Only time will tell.
Yonah Jeremy Bob is a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post.