The Trump Administration’s Iran Plan Is Even Crazier Than We Thought

But even if this was a Mossad-driven operation, it is still damning about America’s handling of the war itself. President Trump and the Pentagon made “regime change” a stated goal of the operation, albeit in a typically ambiguous and confusing way. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth stated last month that “regime change has occurred” in Iran, an apparent reference to the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in the first day of airstrikes. But that statement is hard to square with the fact that the country is apparently being run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in consultation with Khamenei’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who was injured to an unknown degree in an airstrike. If this is regime change at all, well, it’s a more hard-line regime than existed before the war.

Now we have another data point about what the U.S. considers to be regime change, and it’s even more ridiculous: installing the U.S.- and Israel-hating Ahmadinejad as Iran’s new leader. An “associate” of Ahmadinejad told the Times that “Ahmadinejad saw the strike as an attempt to free him. The associate said the Americans viewed Mr. Ahmadinejad as someone who could lead Iran, and had the capability to manage ‘Iran’s political, social and military situation.’” That the U.S. deemed him an acceptable leader is difficult to fathom, but perhaps not inconsistent with how this administration operates: The associate suggested to the Times that the Trump administration saw Ahmadinejad as analogous to Delcy Rodríguez, the Venezuelan vice president who took over the country after U.S. special forces kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro in January.

It’s possible, as Spencer Ackerman notes in a typically shrewd and acerbic post, that this could mean that Ahmadinejad was a long-standing U.S. and Israeli intelligence agent, a mind-melting possibility, or that “this whole piece is a set-up job to discredit Ahmadinejad”—in other words, having failed to kill Ahmadinejad in the airstrike, U.S. officials planted this fanciful scenario in The New York Times in an attempt to discredit him and thus prevent him from taking power.