Former CIA director Bill Burns has described the U.S.-Israeli war launched against Iran as \u201ca war of choice\u201d that may have only further empowered the most hard-line elements within its theocracy.<\/p>\n
Burns, a former State Department diplomat, made the observation in a podcast by Foreign Affairs magazine.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a regime that is inept at many things like managing its economy, but it is designed to preserve itself and designed to repress its own people and designed to withstand even the decapitation of its senior leadership,\u201d said Burns, who secretly negotiated with the Iranians ahead of the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers during the Obama administration.<\/p>\n
Burns also disagreed with U.S. President Donald Trump\u2019s assessment that there had been a \u201cregime change\u201d in the airstrike campaign killing top leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s certainly a much weaker regime, but it\u2019s also one that\u2019s even nastier and more radical and, you know, less open,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He added that Iran\u2019s theocracy thought \u201cvictory is survival.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve believed for a long time that this is a regime that\u2019s on a kind of one-way street to its eventual collapse, but I worry that, you know, in this war, what we\u2019ve done rather than accelerate that moment of collapse is slow it down a little bit,\u201d Burns said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former CIA director Bill Burns has described the U.S.-Israeli war launched against Iran as \u201ca war of choice\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[6420,85,117780,46,47,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-372483","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-donald-j-trump","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-iran-war","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-middle-east","13":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}