Remember him?
Photo: Ali Atmaca/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That’s who the U.S. and Israel reportedly planned to install atop Iran’s decapitated regime. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline former Iranian president whose fraudulent reelection win in 2009 triggered the largest mass protests in Iran since the revolution and who has blood on his hands from the brutal crackdown that followed. The anti-American 9/11 truther who once hosted a conference for Holocaust deniers, who helped facilitate the IRGC’s stranglehold on Iran’s economy, and whose vulgar and histrionic rhetoric prompted widespread condemnation and ridicule — including a vintage SNL digital short featuring Adam Levine. The guy who, after losing his clout within Iran, amid several stymied attempts to run for president again, eventually became a weird Twitter gadfly whose commentary on politics and pop culture were treated like a running joke.
It was already abundantly clear that Donald Trump’s war in Iran was poorly conceived, inadequately planned, and generally a recipe for geopolitical disaster. The war itself has been a strategic failure by most any measure. Iran’s decapitated regime didn’t just survive; it’s become even more hardline and inflexible. The war hasn’t eliminated the threat the regime posed; it has exacerbated it, prompting Iran to seize leverage it didn’t have before the war, over the Strait of Hormuz, over Gulf oil trade and infrastructure, and, as a result, over the global economy (and U.S. fuel prices). Iran’s military capabilities have been seriously degraded by thousands of U.S.-Israeli air strikes — at the cost of tens of billions of dollars and a huge percentage of the U.S. munition stockpile. But the scale of that military success has also been called in question in light of leaked U.S. intelligence assessments and other independent analyses that indicate Iran retains far more of its drone and missile capabilities, and did far more damage to U.S. military assets in the region, than Trump administration officials have acknowledged.
Trump started this whole mess, per numerous credible reports as well his own public statements, because he became convinced that it would only take a matter of days for the unstoppable U.S. military to dominate Iran and force it to capitulate to his demands. He was convinced that he could easily achieve another Venezuela-like outcome that would deliver a changed, more compliant regime, led by a Delcy Rodriguez–like figure, that would pay historic dividends for Middle East peace and the global energy market. Any credible expert who understood Iran could have told Trump this would never work — that Benjamin Netanyahu and other Iran hawks’ dire warnings and assurances were not grounded in reality — and some undoubtedly tried, but Trump pulled the trigger anyway. And according to a bonkers new report from the New York Times, the U.S. and Israel thought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could be their Delcy Rodriguez in Tehran.
As it turns out, per the report, an Israeli air strike near Ahmadinejad’s home on the first day of the war was a part of this plan, and he was in on it:
Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan. He has not been seen publicly since then and his current whereabouts and condition are unknown.
The strike destroyed a security outpost, killing IRGC members who were guarding Ahmadinejad.
It’s not clear how much collaboration there was on the plan between the U.S. and Israel, which developed multiple regime-change strategies ahead of the war. Notes the Times, “Some American officials were skeptical in particular about the viability of putting Mr. Ahmadinejad back into power,” which at least means that there are some American officials in the Trump administration who haven’t completely lost touch with reality.
It also appears, from the report, that Ahmadinejad was viewed as someone who would be sympathetic to the idea of replacing Iran’s theocratic leadership, who had thrice blocked him from running for office again:
Mr. Ahmadinejad has clashed with regime leaders, accusing them of corruption, and rumors have swirled about his loyalties. He was disqualified from numerous presidential elections, his aides were arrested and Mr. Ahmadinejad’s movements were increasingly restricted to his home in the Narmak section of eastern Tehran.
Ahmadinejad also made conspicuous foreign trips in recent years to countries with close ties to Israel, Guatemala, and Hungary, and he praised Trump in a 2019 Times interview, calling him a “man of action.”
Needless to say, if there were suspicions inside Iran that Ahmadinejad was some kind of spy, this new reporting could get him executed if he turns up again there. However, since the U.S. and Israel quasi-accidentally killed other regime figures they initially had on their shortlist for pliable alternative leaders of the country, he should probably feel pretty lucky to have survived the war at all.
This post has been updated.
Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter
Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice