Speaking to the US broadcaster ABC News on Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked about reports that US President Donald Trump nixed an Israeli plan to assassinate Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“It’s not going to escalate the conflict, it’s going to end the conflict,” Netanyahu insisted, not denying Trump’s rejection nor such Israeli plans.
Israel, he said, is “doing what we need to do”.
Not long after, two leading voices in the “Make America Great Again” movement – Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump during his first term, and Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News pundit – said all signs from the White House pointed to regime change in Iran, as they assessed the administration’s moves since Israel launched its first air strikes on Tehran on Friday.
“Why was Tulsi Gabbard not invited to the Camp David meeting all day?” Bannon asked about the director of national intelligence, who had testified to lawmakers in March that there was no intelligence to suggest Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon.
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“It wasn’t just about the nuclear programme. It’s a decapitation of total leadership,” he added. “So this is a total regime change, which, by the way – you may have a plan for regime change, that’s fine – but you got to bring the American people on.”
‘It wasn’t just about the nuclear programme. It’s a decapitation of total leadership’
– Steve Bannon
“This is the point of this, is regime change,” Carlson chimed in. “I know everyone involved. I know I’m telling the truth. I have no weird motive here at all.”
But is there really an appetite within the Trump administration to go down a similar path to the one assumed by George W Bush in Iraq 22 years ago?
“Today, it’s Tel Aviv. Tomorrow, it’s New York,” Netanyahu warned on ABC News. “Look, I understand ‘America First’. I don’t understand ‘America Dead’.”
But several “America Firsters” who wield influence among both Trump’s voter base and his administration aren’t buying Netanyahu’s argument and have gone on the record to state their opposition to the US being dragged into another war in the Middle East.
‘They have contingencies’
Laws and norms established for warfare dating back to the 1600s have prohibited the targeted assassinations of heads of state.
The “war on terror” that the US mounted after the 9/11 attacks muddied those definitions, given the open-ended “war” was not a traditional one against a nation-state and its army, but rather guerrilla groups, international militias, and ideologies labelled “extremism” or “Islamic fundamentalism”.
On Washington’s books, Iran has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1984, five years after the 1979 revolution that overthrew the US-backed monarchy led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
‘There is a possibility that Israelis might try to assassinate Khamenei. But… this is not a group, it’s a country’
– Sina Azodi, George Washington University
“Imagine if Russia tried to assassinate the president of the United States, and the West’s reaction to it,” Sina Azodi, an Iran expert at George Washington University, told Middle East Eye in reference to attempts at regime change.
“There is a possibility that Israelis might try to assassinate Khamenei. But… this is not a group, it’s a country. They have contingencies. Iran has a council [whose] job it is to elect the next supreme leader.”
That Iran is not an autocracy in the traditional sense, with one strongman and no successors, would complicate any US involvement in such an effort, likely dragging it into direct involvement, something Trump has repeatedly stated he is opposed to.
Azodi likens it to the case of Iraq in the 1990s, where only once the US invaded and occupied the country a decade later was it able to enact regime change.
“Or the case of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the bombing campaign of Nato did not result in a regime change there. Nothing happened. Why? Because you need people on the ground.”
Decades of ever-tightening US sanctions on Iran’s energy and financial sectors have thus far failed to produce a popular organic uprising against the Ayatollah’s rule, in the same vein as 1979.
And Trump, at least until Friday, appeared to be eagerly anticipating a diplomatic victory with Iran and a new nuclear deal with his name on it, especially after, in a surprising move, he personally traded letters with Khamenei earlier in the year.
So how did the conversation shift to assassination?
“I mean, we are in a world where much of international law, including the law of war, has lost practical meaning,” Dylan Williams, the vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, told MEE.
“The United States has been fine with over a year and a half of Israel consistently breaking international law as well as the laws of the United States in the Gaza context. I certainly don’t expect the Trump administration to offer much resistance to Israel similarly engaging in gross violations of international law in the war it initiated with Iran,” he said.
“I think President Trump himself means what he says when he posts about de-escalating and returning to diplomacy. I just think the leeway he’s given Netanyahu works directly against that.”
Opposite effect
The US is the only global actor with the leverage to rein in Israel. But that leeway provided to Netanyahu may only harden the stance of the Iranian government and further unify Iranians against the West.
“The Netanyahu government claims [to want] to destabilise the regime,” Azodi said. “But in reality, I think that the Israeli government is offering the Islamic Republic an insurance policy. Why? Because it’s normally, it’s usually the case that under cases of national crisis, governments become more oppressive.
“Now the Iranian government has always been an oppressive regime. There’s no question,” he added. “But now they have an excuse to be more oppressive and crack down on any sort of dissent.”
‘Iran’s got eighty million people…. I’ve not heard anyone actually express sympathy for this regime change campaign’
– Jewish Iranian-America
Still, a popular uprising against Khamenei “seems less likely by the day, as Israel attacks Iranian civilian infrastructure and civilian casualties mount”, Williams told MEE, adding that instead, what they are witnessing is more Iranian people, even opponents of the regime, rallying around the flag.
A Jewish Iranian-American who has family in Israel and who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely with MEE explained that there is little sympathy for the regime change campaign among young Iranians, in particular, both in the diaspora and in Iran.
“I think we shouldn’t jump to underestimating the resiliency and breadth and depth of Iranian nationalism [and] the ability to reconstitute,” the individual said.
“Iran’s got eighty million people…. I’ve not heard anyone actually express sympathy for this regime change campaign, and I think I’ve heard nothing but complete ridicule of [Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah’s son] in some of his statements.”
The lack of an organic movement that can topple the regime with external help will likely just remind the US of the mistakes it made in Iraq during the “war on terror”.
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If Netanyahu indeed carries out an assassination of Iranian political leaders outside of the military’s ranks, there is little doubt that the optics will point towards the US and its culpability in any such event.
“President Trump has been clear that we are supplying Israel with the weapons to carry out this campaign, and that more weapons are coming. We’re clearly providing it the diplomatic cover and encouragement on the world stage,” Williams told MEE.
“The peoples of the region, no doubt, see this as a US and Israeli effort, even if at this stage, it is only actively being carried out by the Israelis.”
Azodi thinks Trump, at this point in time, has no interest in taking a gamble with Iran’s governance, not as long as Iran wants to return to the negotiating table.
“I don’t think the United States cares about the regime in Iran – the type of the regime in Iran – as long as it plays with or accepts the US dominance in the Middle East,” he explained.
“What the core problem of this is with the US, is that [Iran’s] nature is anti-imperialistic. It rejects the dominance of the United States in the region. It is trying to force the United States out of the region, and that is why the US has a problem with it.”
