Israel has done it again. He has killed the Iranian intelligence minister, Esmail Khatib. The day before yesterday he killed two other big shots at the top of Iranian tyranny: Ali Lariyani, the feared security chief, and Soleimani, head of the Basij militia. The objective is to decapitate the regime, one by one, through so-called selective assassinations.
Beyond moral and legal doubts, it is worth asking… Is it a good strategy? There are fewer and fewer Iranian leaders alive, it is true. Does that make the regime weaker or more unpredictable in its desperation? Is it a good idea to be at war with a country where you no longer know who is in charge? But with the power to destabilize the global economy, bomb neighbors and threaten terrorist attacks?
More and more I read experts on the Middle East and counterterrorism warning that this strategy of assassinations can be counterproductive. The Iranian regime is proving not to be as personalized as those in Washington and Tel Aviv calculated that by killing Ayatollah Khamenei, by killing the tyrant, tyranny would fall. But Khamenei dead, Khamenei in place. And the new one doesn’t even need to be alive, who knows if he is, to order revenge.
Destabilizing the regime is not making an uprising by the Iranian resistance that was risking their lives protesting against Khamenei Sr. more likely. Some regime change seemed imminent before. Now the only thing clear is the risk of destabilization. The Iranian government has blocked the internet to its 90 million citizens. They don’t know what is happening, they only know that the US and Israel are dropping bombs on them.
The Ayatollah’s regime was weak and very old when the war started, now they are rejuvenating it through assassinations. And the more unstable Iran’s situation, the more desperate its retaliation may be. They promise revenge, a lot of revenge, while those in power and missiles are increasingly out of control.
Meanwhile, bombing Iranians does not seem like a very reliable factory of democrats, rather of martyrs.
Moral?
Leaders continue to be killed in Iran,
but then there is no plan
