Chaos in Iran is a good endgame for Israel’s Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t even pretending there is a master plan for what happens after the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Indeed, chaos and internal strife in Tehran — and beyond — would suit him just fine.

For years, Netanyahu has been the driving force behind military action and sabotage against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and its clerical government. Now that Khamenei is dead, Netanyahu is close to realizing his greatest political ambition by neutralizing the Iranian threat.

The Israeli day-after plan now leaves a lot to luck, and to the bravery of millions of Iranians. From Tabriz to Zahedan, the people of Iran are supposed to overthrow the brutal security apparatus of their regime in mass street protests, without any clear idea of what type of government could succeed the theocracy.

On Saturday night, Netanyahu urged Iranians to “unshackle themselves from tyranny,” seizing a “once in a generation chance” to overthrow the dictatorship. “Take to the streets en masse” and “get the job done,” he added. Cleaving to the same strategy, U.S. President Donald Trump is insisting the Iranians have their “single greatest chance” to “take back” their country.

Netanyahu thinks he comes out on top, even if the popular uprising he is calling for plunges the nation into violent disorder. In an ideal world, a friendly regime appears in Tehran. But Israel often makes the Realpolitik judgment that turmoil can bolster its interests too.

That has been obvious in Lebanon and in Syria. Netanyahu has not assisted the Lebanese authorities in their efforts to discipline Hezbollah’s Shiite militia, or to get them to disarm. He has done quite the reverse, continuing air raids and drone strikes. Similarly, he’s stirred up trouble for the new leadership in Damascus by backing the Druze minority. In the Palestinian territories, Netanyahu is often accused of exploiting the divisions between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

The logic is clear. If countries are consumed by internal political strife — even civil war — they can’t get their acts together and turn on Israel. So it would be a mistake to think that Netanyahu’s only desirable endgame is stability in Tehran. Instability could work too. If Iran is too weak to run uranium enrichment centrifuges, and to support Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, that is also a victory.

The goal of the Iran war, according to Netanyahu’s foreign policy adviser Ophir Falk, is simple: “To win.” And in a text exchange with POLITICO he added that winning would be when “the threat posed by the Ayatollah regime and its proxies is removed.”

When asked what the Israeli government thinks is happening inside the embattled regime, Falk replied, almost nonchalantly: “We’ll see what happens.’

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told POLITICO that what Netanyahu and Trump had outlined didn’t amount to a plan — just optimism. 

“Bibi [Netanyahu] wanted the war and Trump was anxious to do something exceptional. But I don’t see any plan other than the hope that the government will collapse,” he said.

‘You break it, you own it’

The strategy of smashing an enemy with overwhelming force, and then hoping there will be a smooth succession to a benevolent regime has a poor track record, and there are already signs that things will be messy in Iran too.

Ahead of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Gen. Colin Powell famously cautioned U.S. President George W. Bush: “If you take out a government, take out a regime, guess who becomes the government and regime and is responsible for the country? You are. So if you break it, you own it.”

That seems not to be resonating with Netanyahu and Trump, who are taking the view that the Iranian people now “own it.”

That’s a big gamble, however.

According to Israel’s Kan public broadcaster, Netanyahu assured his cabinet ministers that Khamenei’s death would shorten the military operation, as it would embolden the regime’s opponents to rise up. 

Few doubt most Iranians’ desire for change, but for the regime to fall something would have to snap within the security services.

For now, the political and military backbone of the state is showing resilience in its command structure, and massive public unrest in recent years and months has been met with brute force, mass arrests and executions. To whom are the Revolutionary Guards meant to surrender and seek an amnesty?

Although Iran has lost many of its top leaders, it is has still managed to launch retaliatory attacks across the Gulf and eastern Mediterranean.

The Revolutionary Guards vowed to “revenge” after promising to conduct “the most devastating offensive” in Iranian history, saying it had carried out the sixth phase of its Operation True Promise IV against U.S. bases throughout the Middle East and against Israel. 

Regime resilience

That all suggests the regime’s structure is holding for now, even after Khamenei’s death. “We had prepared for such moments and have plans in place for all scenarios, even for the time after the martyrdom of revered Imam Khamenei,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker.

“You’ll see that after the leadership council is formed, the power and integrity of officials, defensive forces and the people will be beyond imagination,” he added in a video broadcast by state television.

Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council , announced a three-man council would be set up on Sunday, comprising Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian; the hard-line head of the judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei; and Alireza Arafi, a jurist member of Iran’s Guardian Council and head of the Basij, a volunteer paramilitary force. The council will govern while the 88-member Assembly of Experts picks a new leader. And that could happen soon.

No doubt Israel will be trying to disrupt the interim council and the process of picking a successor to Khamenei, much as it did with its decapitation strategy last year in Lebanon when it kept targeting possible successors to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

But so far, different arms of the Iranian state, many of which were allowed to operate semi-autonomously under Khamenei and weren’t micromanaged, still appear to be cohering and functioning.

Former Prime Minister Olmert was also cautious about potential collapse.

“I will be surprised if Iran will change its nature after this phase,” he said. [Syrian leader Bashar]Assad killed more than half a million of his citizens and got rid of millions who became refugees and it took 10 years for his regime to collapse. Iran is 90 million. The regime will kill many and even then may not lose control,” he added. Still, he acknowledged that the U.S.-Israeli war can set back Iran as a military power in the region and “that in itself is not bad at all.” 

No unified opposition

The big question remains: Can this work without a unified opposition?

“Can external military pressure realistically rely on an Iranian public that lacks cohesive leadership, particularly when facing a regime that has operated for 47 years under the disciplined control of the [Revolutionary Guards]?” asked Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of the Iran branch of Israeli defense intelligence and now a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a think tank.

“There is no unified, organized opposition capable of immediately capitalizing on elite disarray. Public dissatisfaction is real and widespread, but fragmentation and repression limit its political translation.” Khamenei is gone, but “predictions of regime collapse would likely be premature,” he said.

“The greatest danger may be a prolonged campaign that fails to produce dramatic internal change in Iran and lacks a clearly defined termination mechanism, resulting in an open-ended conflict with no visible conclusion on the horizon,” he added.

There are various feuding contenders jostling to take the helm should the Islamic Republic collapse. Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah deposed in 1979, is styling himself as an interim leader who can chart the course to democracy. The Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization opposition — previously listed as a terror group by the U.S. and EU — also casts itself as waiting in the wings.

The situation is complicated further by the potential for regional and ethnic unrest among communities such as the Kurds and the Baluchis.  

Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy said he feared the military intervention would sow chaos in the Middle East for years to come with unforeseen consequences and will be come to be seen as a “defining moment in Israel’s reach for regional domination.”