Attempt to ‘decapitate’ state may harden resistance instead of destabilising regime
Israel’s decision to authorise its military to kill any senior Iranian official on its assassination list has raised significant new questions about its so-called decapitation strategy and what it is intended to achieve.
Privately, Israeli officials have briefed their US counterparts that in the event of an uprising, Iran’s opposition would be “slaughtered”. That appears to be at odds with Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy to pursue regime change by targeting senior figures in Iran’s political and security apparatus.
Even before the outbreak of full-scale war, however, Iran experts and analysts – and some former Israeli officials – were sceptical that Iran’s clerical regime could be toppled by such strikes.
This is a replay of eliminating the Ba’athist in Iraq. Turns out when you remove the only thing keeping a factionalized sectarian country together it destabilizes the country. We learned this lesson already. Now we’re repeating it because we have an administration that refuses to learn anything from history…
We’re repeating it because we have a regime that wants to create chaos on purpose.
An Iranian civil war would be Netanyahu’s preferred outcome.