IDF: Regime Change Was Never Our Goal

Peloni:  This should be read as Netanyahu hedging his bets as Trump looks for the IRGC to take over in Iran.  This is a colossal mistake for Israel, the region, America and the world…and the Iranian people who just recently saw 30-50K of their friends and neighbors murdered after being so badly betrayed when Trump called for them to protest and gave them no support.  Then again, perhaps there is no real fight left in the Iranian people, but I would argue against this being true.

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Mar 11, 2026

Israeli tank and soldiers of Operation Defensive Shield, in Nablus, Israel Defense Forces, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 

The IDF has now said that Israel’s goal was never to change the regime in Tehran itself, but to so weaken the regime’s power to repress its citizens as to create the conditions for the Iranians themselves to change the regime. There is a difference. More on Israel’s goal can be found here: “Senior Israeli defense sources: Iran regime change not military goal, creating conditions for it is,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post, March 11, 2026:

As doubts about the prospect of imminent regime change in Iran spike, senior defense sources have told The Jerusalem Post this is not and never was a military goal.

Rather, the IDF always hoped to enhance the conditions that might make regime change in Iran possible if the domestic opposition to the government would be ready to take to the streets again in sufficient numbers to topple the regime, the sources said.

The military would look positively at regime change and wanted to try to help the process, but it never had illusions that military action by itself would guarantee such an outcome, they said.

The primary purpose of the current war for Israel was to destroy the immediate threat posed by the roughly 4,000 ballistic missiles that Iran was thought to possess, consisting of both those that survived the attacks last June, and of the roughly 200-300 missiles produced by Iran in each of the eight months since then. A second goal was to continue, along with the Americans, to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, by re-attacking those enrichment sites at Fordow, Natanz, and in Isfahan, that had been greatly damaged but, as we now know, not “obliterated,” in the Twelve-Day War, as well as a secret underground nuclear compound outside Tehran, recently discovered by the Israelis, where scientists were working on key components for nuclear weapons. The compound, known as Minzadehei, was targeted after Israeli intelligence tracked activities at the site linked to covert weapons.

The IDF attacks on weapons arsenals, the command-and-control centers, and the senior leadership of the IRGC and the Basij militia, and attacks on nuclear sites, are meant to remove imminent threats to the Jewish state. But another result of these attacks will be to weaken the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij to cow the Iranian people, 85% of whom are against the regime. Israel does not believe that it needs to keep fighting until regime change is achieved; that’s a tall order, and no more than the Americans do the Israelis want to be stuck for many months to a Tar Baby in Iran. They instead hope to “create the conditions” for the Iranians themselves, emboldened by the weaken ing of the forces of oppression, to return to the streets by the millions to demand an end to the regime. And the battering of Iran’s military will also, so it is hoped, cause members of the IRGC and Basij to begin to quit or even to defect to the side of the protesters.

The IDF has been destroying so many of Iran’s ballistic missiles, missile launchers — about 80% of those Iran had at the beginning of Operation Roaring Lion have been destroyed — and plants where the missiles are produced, that within a few weeks that threat from ballistic missiles will have been effectively eliminated. The IDF has also struck IRGC leaders and killed most of its senior leaders, and has destroyed their weapons storehouses.

The IDF has killed the supreme leader, and wounded his son who was chosen by the Assembly of Experts to be his successor. It has also killed about 50 members of he senior leadership, both civilian and military. But regime change was never the objective for the IDF, even if Prime Minister Netanyahu has suggested otherwise. Creating the conditions for regime change — meaning so weakening the regime militarily that it will no longer be able to frighten would-be protesters from going back on the streets by the millions — is quite enough for the IDF. And that is what the IDF is hoping to achieve before well-appareled April takes its bow.