WHAT COMES NEXT IN IRAN?
The question hinges on Trump and the Iranian army
My favorite foreign policy guru these days is Eliot A. Cohen, a professor emeritus at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, who has emerged in what should be his dotage as an innovative critic of President Donald Trump. In a recent essay for the Atlantic, he suggests that the appropriate honorific for Trump ought to be “Dear Leader,” the one enjoyed by North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who ruled, as does Trump, without criticism of anyone in his government.
I have been told that America’s Dear Leader has been given what should be a very delicate assignment: dealing with the increasing tensions inside Iran as the nation struggles with the fallout from Ayatollah Khamenei’s brutal repression of a recent revolt that led to “several thousand” deaths, by his own admission. The official death toll to date is 3,117, but that is viewed as grossly underestimated, with some counts reaching as high as 16,500. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, a force close to 200,0000 troops, was given authority to shoot to kill protesters and did so with vengeance.
Overthrowing the religious leadership of Iran has long been a goal of Israel and many in America and Europe, as well as untold numbers of Iranians, but doing so will not be possible until the Iranian army, with its 760,000 active and reserve troops, excluding the Revolutionary Guards, agreed or was persuaded to take part. Planning for that possibility is actively under way again.
I was told weeks ago that David Barnea, the soon-to-retire head of Mossad, Israel’s lethal foreign operations and counter-terrorism unit, made a little-noted visit last month to Washington, accompanied by some military commanders, to discuss how to proceed when and if a decision was made to aggressively seek the overthrow of the Iran’s religious regime.
