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| Kurds, Ahmadinejad and a march on Tehran: Inside Israel's failed plan to topple Iran's regime | ||
| 2026-08-04 | ||
In 1932, Ze’ev Jabotinsky published an essay that became foundational, at least for the Revisionist minority. Its title was “On Adventurism.” An avantura, in Yiddish, is something between an adventure and a brawl. An “adventurist,” a trouble-seeking daredevil, was a serious insult in the cautious world of the Jewish shtetl. Jabotinsky came along and argued, in the context of the struggle against the British White Paper, precisely the opposite. There are moments, he said, when such adventurers are needed, people who will change the world, who will be applauded only if they succeed and denounced immediately if they fail. In his own words: “And where is it written, and what is the source of the indisputable conclusion, that among the many instruments of war there is no place for adventurism? The lesson of history is otherwise. History teaches that quite often even an unsuccessful adventure is an instrument of war. Particularly ‘when it is not the adventure of one individual, but of many individuals.’” He proposed “thumbing one’s nose,” as he put it in the essay, at the restrictions imposed by the British Mandate and immigrating to the Land of Israel. When one thinks about the ambitious plan to overthrow the regime in Iran, it is impossible not to think of the avantura. It is one thing to try to bring down the regime through economic pressure, influence operations and the sowing of fear and confusion, over time and through gradual attrition. But trying to recruit former Iranian president and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an agent and install him as leader? Initiating a full-scale Kurdish invasion? That is the kind of project in which even superpowers can fail. Israel tried to do it and invested enormous effort in the attempt. In recent weeks, The New York Times and Haaretz have published many intriguing details about it. The following account presents additional details about the most ambitious regional objective Israel has attempted to advance: regime change in a country of roughly 100 million people, a regional power, while at war and in coordination with the world’s sole superpower, the United States. In a presentation delivered by the Mossad to the Security Cabinet on the eve of the operation, ministers were told that regime change would come within “one to three years.” It was an appropriate qualification; the Islamic Revolution itself did not happen in a day. But the music the ministers heard was different. “We understood,” one of them told me, “that we were going for rapid and sweeping regime change, with the killing of the current leader, a Kurdish invasion, Ahmadinejad as our agent and protesters in the streets.” The first distinction is important. Again and again, the effort has been described as “a Mossad operation.” The Mossad was undoubtedly its driving force, its planner and its chief advocate. But this was an operation of the State of Israel, ordered by the Cabinet. It emerged from a conception that gradually became entrenched within the political leadership and was imposed on the defense establishment: There would be no solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis or to the confrontation with Iran without regime change. An opportunity for regime change had emerged after the 12-day war and with Trump in the White House. Israel had to try, because the opportunity might pass. The price of inaction, even at the risk of failure, was higher than the price of action. Netanyahu said those words explicitly to the American president. And indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu was the father of the concept. These are not interpretations. The objectives of Operation Roaring Lion were never officially published for the public. But after conversations with a double-digit number of military and political sources, it is possible to understand that the central objective was to deeply damage, or remove, the threats Iran posed to the State of Israel by creating the military conditions for regime change in Iran. Those may not have been the precise words, but “creating the conditions for regime change” was the bottom line. The formulation was the product of compromises, including with the IDF. From the first moment of the war, the military explained that it did not know how to bring about regime change by itself. For the General Staff, the principal effort was to inflict strategic damage on Iran and eliminate capabilities over time. Assistance to the Mossad, as the military saw it, was a secondary effort. Why “creating the conditions” rather than “overthrowing the regime”? One security official offered this explanation: The IDF knew that it was a complex, perhaps impossible, objective. It did not want to be dragged into a war whose goal was so absolute that it could continue forever, and far beyond the limits of the IDF’s interceptor-missile inventory. Nevertheless, the Cabinet voted for an objective that was, in practice, an attempt at regime change. It was an objective so vast, some would say megalomaniacal, that it required the allocation of immense resources and carried severe regional implications. In other words, the nuclear and ballistic missile programs may have been important, but they were not the holy grail. Nor were they the central message of the war that followed. While the 12-day war in June 2025, Operation Rising Lion, prioritized damage to Iran’s nuclear program and did indeed lead to the suspension of uranium enrichment, Operation Roaring Lion was intended to be the war that ended all wars. At least against Iran. The result, as of this writing, is this: Iran’s military industry, particularly its ballistic missile production line, was severely damaged, and the damage to the nuclear program was deepened. The IDF inflicted grave losses on Iran, measurable in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Israeli intelligence demonstrated an extraordinary ability to penetrate the Iranian establishment. But if Roaring Lion’s objective was to create the conditions for regime change, the regime remains alive, functioning and ruling with an iron fist. Foreign actors made sure to leak the details of the Israeli plan, including the asset, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Once the Israeli operation failed to achieve the objective that had been set, the regime could say it had won: “We won because we survived.” That is not semantics. In the summer of 2025, the “axis of resistance” had been battered across the region, and Israelis, according to the polls, felt a sense of victory. In the summer of 2026, an overwhelming majority of Israelis do not believe Israel defeated Iran in the war. Only 11% believe Israel won, according to a Channel 12 News poll, while the axis of resistance appears to have recovered. The previous summer, the Iranians did not control the Strait of Hormuz. A year later, they hold a waterway critical to the global economy. The regime will not survive forever, but it is doubtful that the war “created the conditions” for its fall. This is not a story about an adventure that simply went wrong. Many of those involved argue that the regime-change operation could have succeeded had the United States not changed its mind about some of its central components. There is not enough information to judge that claim, because parts of the plan remain in the dark. The story is one of systemic failure: how an enormous strategic objective, regime change, became an operational mission without the political leadership, the IDF and the Mossad ever truly agreeing on its nature, centrality, feasibility or on whether the tools matched the objective. In retrospect, most of those actors also disagree about the facts.
The campaign against Iran is not over. The deep damage to Iran’s military and nuclear industries is beyond dispute. The regime’s distress is a fundamental reality, reflected in inflation and severe economic hardship. At times, very small acts and forces bring down empires, including states larger and more powerful than Iran. Far fewer than 15,000 armed men brought down the Soviet Union. Who knows? Had Trump approved the Kurdish invasion, perhaps the regime would have been destabilized or at least dragged into civil war. Had that happened, everyone would have praised the Mossad’s avantura. In an undertaking like this, you need to succeed only once. Those are necessary words. But they are not persuasive. An uprising began in Iran in December 2025. Together with the country’s weakness after Operation Rising Lion, Trump’s promise to protect the protesters, the American success in Venezuela and the extraordinary capabilities demonstrated by Israeli Military Intelligence and the Air Force, an atmosphere developed in which everything seemed possible. Including regime change. Netanyahu, with the scent of elections in his nostrils, pushed and pushed hard. That was precisely the moment when Cabinet ministers and security officials should have recognized the obvious danger: a bridge too far. More seriously, no comprehensive staff process examined the campaign as a whole. Anyone who wants to make kings must understand kingdoms. What would happen to Israel’s standing in the United States if it publicly pushed Washington toward an all-out war against Iran? The answer: a severe, perhaps fatal, collapse. How might Turkey disrupt the Kurdish initiative? With a single telephone call. If the supreme leader were killed, might the door open to dangerous radicalization? It did. Above all, Israel did not understand, and to this moment still does not understand, American conduct surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. “It is a mystery,” one knowledgeable official told me. It is not merely a mystery. It is a failure of Israeli coordination with the United States. Hormuz was, and remains, Iran’s most important strategic achievement of the war. In the late Netanyahu era, the phrase “the limits of power” has disappeared. Israel’s defense establishment is engaged in a relentless war of attrition against a belligerent political leadership that recognizes no limits. The National Security Council does not function as an effective policy-planning body, particularly during wartime. The Defense Ministry’s diplomatic-security division is paralyzed. The professional ranks of the Foreign Ministry are ignored. There is no independent, functioning team around the prime minister. That was the situation on February 28, when Israel went to war. It remains the situation today, perhaps on the eve of another confrontation. | ||
| Posted by:Penguin of the Best Desert |
| #4 |
| Posted by: mossomo 2026-08-04 16:56 |
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| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2026-08-04 14:38 |
| #2 |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-08-04 13:20 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2026-08-04 04:05 |