An Iranian in Exile: Military Defeat Not Enough, Regime Change Must Follow

Peloni:  Yes, regime change is vital in the wake of the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Indeed, the brazen resolve to possess nuclear weapons by the Armageddon seeking Twelver tribe which populates the halls of power in Iran demonstrates how necessary how necessary regime change in Iran is needed.  Either by efforts from abroad or by revolution from within Iran itself, Khameini’s rule must come to an end and the sooner the better.

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Iranians in exile are wishing and hoping, and hoping and wishing, that Israel will succeed in its demolition derby, taking apart bit by bit every aspect of the Islamic Republic’s military machine, so weakening it that the rulers can only with great difficulty suppress their domestic enemies should those enemies begin to demonstrate against them, and so humiliated in the eyes of the world that the number of those domestic enemies grows, as people have taken to saying, “exponentially.”

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One of those Iranian exiles, hoping that the end is nigh for the Iranian regime, is Saeed Ghasseminejad, whose appeal to Israel to keep on fighting, and to include regime change as one of its war aims, can be found here: “Israel cannot settle for a temporary military win, it must topple the Islamic regime – opinion,” by Saeed Ghasseminejad, Jerusalem Post, June 16, 2025:

The calls for restraint will come, as they always do. As Israeli military successes against the Islamic Republic of Iran mount, a chorus of international voices will urge Jerusalem to “take the win” and seek a diplomatic off-ramp. They will argue from a well-worn script, advising Israel to consolidate its victory from a position of strength. It is a tempting and logical-sounding argument that would be a catastrophic mistake.

For Israel, this is not a conventional conflict that can be concluded with a ceasefire and a treaty. It is a confrontation with an ideologically driven regime whose very identity is predicated on Israel’s destruction. To settle for anything less than the removal of the Islamist regime in Tehran is to merely pause a clock that is ticking towards a more dangerous future: a defeat in disguise.

A remarkable consensus is forming across the Israeli political spectrum on this critical point. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks directly to the Iranian people, urging them that “your light will defeat their darkness,” he is doing more than scoring rhetorical points.

His words, echoed by key opposition figures like former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who has long expressed a desire to see the Iranian people freed from their oppressors, signal a fundamental shift. The debate in Israel is no longer about whether to confront Iran, but how to ensure the confrontation yields a permanent solution. The answer is clear: the regime must go.

Israel has degraded critical threats, it must do more

Israel’s immediate military actions have, by all accounts, been successful in degrading Tehran’s most critical threats. The three pillars of the regime’s threat – its nuclear program, its ballistic missile arsenal, and its global terror network – have been shaken. But to believe these setbacks are permanent is to ignore decades of history….

Israel has accomplished a great deal militarily since October 7, 2023. It has systematically weakened every one of Iran’s proxies in the region. It has destroyed Hamas in Gaza, and brought Hezbollah to its knees in southern Lebanon. Neither terror group now poses much of a threat to Israel. Israeli strikes have destroyed 80-90% of the arsenals of both groups — missiles, rockets, and drones. Half of the fighters Hamas had on October 7 have been killed, and many more wounded. Hezbollah has lost thousands of its combatants, including 3,800 who were so seriously wounded by those “exploding pagers” prepared and distributed by Mossad, that they are no longer able to fight. By having destroyed Assad’s main ally, Hezbollah, Israel facilitated the victory of the Sunni Arab rebels over Assad’s Alawite-dominated regime, turning Syria from a firm ally of Iran into an enemy of the Islamic state. Syria is now run by Sunni Arabs who will never forget or forgive Iran’s support for the Assad regime. The IDF hasn’t forgotten the Houthis, either, and has managed to destroy in Yemen most of the airbase at Sanaa and the ports of Hodeidah and as-Salif.

In Iran, the Israelis have struck a dozen sites housing various components of the country’s nuclear program. These include two of the three main sites for uranium enrichment, at Natanz and Isfahan; the third, Fordow, has so far been spared as the IDF waits to see what assistance, if any, Washington will provide so that the facility built 300 feet deep inside a mountain can be destroyed. In addition, the IDF has severely damaged military airbases at Tabriz and Hamadan, destroyed a nuclear reactor at Arak, killed 13 of the most senior generals in both the IRGC and the Iranian army, and assassinated the nine most important nuclear scientists, all of whom — sleeping in apartments all over Tehran — were killed at the exact same moment by Israeli missiles. Israel has destroyed Iran’s state television. It has destroyed the last F-14 Tomcats in Iran’s arsenal. It has destroyed both ballistic missile factories and ballistic missiles, as well as missile launchers. Hundreds of ballistic missiles have been fired at Israel in the first week of the war but fewer the 10% have avoided interception, and even those that did have mostly fallen in open areas. Instead of its former barrages of 100 ballistic missiles in a single night, the Iranians are down to a few dozen. Every day brings fresh news of Israeli successes: more nuclear sites hit, more ballistic missiles and more missile launchers destroyed, more generals killed, more government offices, from internal security to the broadcasting authority, destroyed.

Saeed Ghasseminejad is grateful for Israel’s destruction of the Islamic Republic’s airbases, ballistic missiles, nuclear facilities, and its assassination of generals and nuclear scientists. But he insists that the war would have been in vain unless there is regime change.

The regime that has ruled Iran for 46 years will not change its spots. If it is not overturned, it will still have the power to suppress dissent and oppress its people. It will try to resurrect its nuclear program and to rebuild its ballistic missile factories. It may call on its ally Russia — so eager to re-establish a major presence in the Middle East, or perhaps its other ally, China — for help with both the nuclear program and the production of ballistic missiles. Of course the IDF will be watching, but may not want to risk hitting Russian or Chinese soldiers and defense technologists. The only way to finally put paid, permanently, to the Iranian threat is to overturn the present regime and hope that its replacement, ideally a government of technocrats uninterested in continuing a jihad against Israel, will see the folly of wasting more tens of billions of dollars on waging war against the Jewish state, which has no quarrel with the people of Iran and, furthermore, has been the most significant force in overturning the despotism that has been oppressing them for almost half a century.

June 23, 2025 | 6 Comments »

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6 Comments / 6 Comments

  1. @Peloni

    Jun 14, 2025 — Netanyahu urges Iranians to “stand up” against the regime after military strikes, highlighting government vulnerability amid external …Fox News

    • @Sebastien
      Yes, but within one day of addressing the Iranians to stand up, in the fox news interview with Bret Baier, Netanyahu stated that

      If they’re willing to accept Pres. Trump’s terms, that’s a different matter, and I said that months ago…

      So he was calling for Iranians to rise up and acknowledging that he was willing to accept the Mullahs cutting a deal with Trump, nearly at the same moment. These tow messages are mutually exclusive, and the Iranians are no doubt aware of this contradiction in his messaging.

      No doubt this is the point which Daniel Greenfield referenced when he confessed that

      Israel isn’t really trying for [regime change] (despite Netanyahu’s speeches)

      • @Peloni Trump and Bibi are working as a team and using confusion, deception, ambiguity and misdirection as a shield. I won’t make the mistake of second-guessing them again. The one writer who correctly predicted that there would be a strike this weekend was the author who wrote a history of Israel’s nuclear program that John Loftus frequently cites in his book, Seymour Hersh, along with anonymous retired spies, which is one of the reasons I take Loftus with a grain of salt, not Hersh, the spies.

  2. YNET reports that regime change was never an Israeli war aim with Iran. Also, Israeli source claims if Iran will stop shooting and calls to end the war, Israel “will accept it”.

  3. Regime says they moved the enriched uranium, (JNS)Rubio doubts it (Times of Israel) if so, focus must be on launchers.

    But, I remember Debka File reporting that lines of trucks transporting WMDs (probably chemical weapons) were entering Syria from Iraq and showed a photo just before President Bush’s deadline, 23? years ago. I think he had them.

    And Iraq was a major source of terrorism and haven for terrorists, eg, the first World Trade Center attack and the assassination attempt on former president Bush senior when Clinton was president.

    They found a downed airplane being used as a hijacking school, a factory workshop for putting sarin gas in perfume spray bottles, the ringleader of the terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro snd murdered Leon Klinghofer was found dead in his apartment the night before. And the scud missiles he fired into Israeli population centers. I remember the Ouk for Food program and how it was used to neutralize the sanctions, as the regime bribed key UN officials and stole it. Familar, huh?

    Remember how easy it became to capture European Communist terrorist groups like the Red Brigades when E. Gernany fell? I don’t think the war was a mistake, Just the way we carried it out and the aftermath when we went after Libya and Egypt instead of Iran.

    If we hadn’t invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, I think there would have been more 9/11s. I read somewhere that Bin Laden said as much in sn interview, though it was later claimed there was no such interview. But it makes sense. He thought the US. was a paper tiger that would always retreat under fire, eg, the marines under Reagan, Black Hawk down under President Clinton. Japan under McCarthur should have been the model.

    Can you imagine what would have happened if FDR had cautioned about escalation after Pearl Harbor? Sounds like the plot of a Harry Turtledove novel.

    Fortunately, that’s not necessary here. Israel has done its homework for decades and infiltrated Iran brilliantly. So, they know what to take out surgically by Mossad teams on the ground and the IAF with the help of the U.S. airforce and the brilliant team work of Bibi and Trump. As well as the Iranian resistance.

  4. Itshak Sharfati on FB

    If we are not for regime change but instead we keep eliminating every new one they install you think they will get the message when nobody will want to become one? 😀 😀