The investigation into the secret plan of the Mossad to place former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the helm of Iran and rely on Kurdish forces illustrates above all how detached this move was from reality. This is a story of an unprecedented strategic gamble – a gamble that relied on a volatile figure, on forces whose chances of success were virtually zero, and on working assumptions that were closer to fantasy than operational planning.
Israel conditioned the entire move on the assassination of Ali Khamenei, even though he was considered a relatively moderate force within the Iranian system. In his place, a leadership has now emerged that is largely dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, with almost no figure capable of restraining them. To this was added the reliance on Kurdish forces, even though their chances of successfully seizing territory, holding it, and advancing toward Tehran were nonexistent. Beyond their operational weakness, Turkey – which views any Kurdish advancement as a direct threat to its stability – would never have allowed such a scenario to develop, as indeed happened in practice.
No less severe was the attempt to base the entire regime-change plan on Ahmadinejad himself. He is an unpredictable figure, lacking significant power centers within the regime and without a support base that would allow him to lead Iran on the day after. Even if the move had succeeded and Ahmadinejad had assumed office, it remains unclear who would have actually stood behind him. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would not have vanished overnight, and without a power mechanism to allow him to govern, the end of the story would have been written by their hands anyway.
Beyond the failure in the Iranian arena itself, this entire affair exposes how hastily we entered the war and how deep our misunderstanding of the Iranian system was. This is precisely the kind of event that demands an in-depth investigation, raising the question of how the Israeli intelligence community failed to make it clear how flimsy this plan truly was.
This is a chain of absurd working assumptions, failed intelligence assessments, and strategic planning detached from reality. This is clear material for a state commission of inquiry, because these mistakes not only doomed the move but also placed Israel, on the day after the war, in a strategic reality far more severe and dangerous than the one it faced before.
