The Ahmadinejad Gambit: The Most Embarrassing Plan Washington Ever Hatched
The New York Times has done Washington the considerable disservice of publishing what its own officials described as an “audacious plan.” That is one word for it. Farcical is another.
The United States and Israel went into the Iran war intending to replace the Islamic Republic’s leadership with none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Iranian president internationally known for his hardline position against Israel.
Washington and Tel Aviv, having spent years describing Ahmadinejad as one of the world’s most dangerous leaders, selected him as their preferred successor to the government they were bombing.
The irony is so dense it requires structural support.
The plan was developed by Israel with American approval and was built around a multistage strategy: a devastating air campaign to eliminate Iran’s supreme leadership, followed by a Kurdish ground mobilisation, with Ahmadinejad emerging as the acceptable face of a new Iranian order.
The strategy assumed that leadership decapitation would produce elite fragmentation, that pragmatic insiders would emerge, and that state continuity could be preserved under alternative management. Every single assumption was wrong.
The plan began unravelling on the war’s first day when an Israeli airstrike hit Ahmadinejad’s home in Tehran, supposedly designed to free him from house arrest, and injured him instead. Both Ahmadinejad and American officials subsequently became disillusioned with the regime change plan. Washington had bombed its own candidate.
His current whereabouts and condition are described as unknown.
The broader Israeli plan largely failed to unfold as designed. The Kurdish ground mobilisation did not produce the anticipated destabilisation, and the Islamic Republic did not collapse. Rather, its resilience confounded the planners’ assumptions.
There is a constitutional footnote worth adding.
Ahmadinejad served two presidential terms between 2005 and 2013. Iranian law prohibits a third term. The elaborate regime change architecture built around him rested on a candidate who could not legally hold the office being prepared for him. Washington had not done the basic constitutional homework on the country it was bombing and the leader it was installing.
The wisest fools have outdone themselves this time.
Iran’s leadership held. The plan collapsed.
And somewhere in Tehran, the Islamic Republic’s PhD-credentialed decision-makers are reading the New York Times account of how America intended to replace them, and reaching conclusions about Washington’s strategic competence that no amount of military spending can reverse.