MARK ALMOND: Benjamin Netanyahu can smell the air - and Tehran reeks of weakness

Daily Mail​

11 hours ago

Dazzling as Israel 's initial 48 hours of bombing Iran 's nuclear installations, military leadership and key scientists have been, victory in this war requires much more than precision strikes.
Iran is a huge country and might absorb a lot of such punishment before cracking.
Unlike America's 'shock and awe' attack on Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 2003, the Israelis are not intending to use their amazing aerial superiority to invade Iran.
It is because Tehran's terrorist ally Hezbollah has been defanged – following Israel's invasion of the group's stronghold in southern Lebanon last year and its audacious detonation of pagers used by Hezbollah fighters – that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has felt emboldened to strike Iran now.
Nonetheless, Israel's army is bogged down fighting Iran's other insurgent ally, Hamas, in Gaza and needs to control millions of Arabs in the occupied West Bank, so it is not looking for another front further to the east.
But on Friday night, Netanyahu indicated that this campaign was about more than just disabling Iran's nuclear weapons capability.
He directly called on ordinary Iranians to 'rise up' and overthrow the 'evil and oppressive regime' in Tehran.
Fomenting a revolution from 50,000 feet is a tall order but Netanyahu can smell the air – and Iran reeks of weakness.
At 86, its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, hasn't many years left, and his response to this attack has been inept and scattergun, with the vast majority of his drones and missiles destroyed by Israeli defences.
Operational incompetence aside, for years billions have been squandered on terrorist proxies abroad like Hamas and Hezbollah and weapons systems that don't work well enough to deter Israeli missiles. Meanwhile economic sanctions eat away at living standards of ordinary Iranians.
For this reason, they have chafed at their rulers' priorities, taking to the streets in several uprisings since 2009. Yet the regime's thugs have suppressed them viciously – until now.
Insurrection in Iranian cities could well pressure the Brutuses within the regime to act. But Israel must be careful what it wishes for.
If the regime implodes, Khamenei – a leader who specialises in making bad military decisions – could be replaced by someone infinitely more able.
The Ayatollah has spent decades marginalising slightly less hardline, but rather more competent, rivals. Veterans such as Mir Hossein Mousavi, the prime minister who steered Iran through the war with Iraq in the 1980s, but lost office when Khamenei came to power in 1989. In leading the protest movement in 2009, Mousavi's anti-Khamenei credentials are sound and he could be a plausible 'moderate', but he is an old man himself at 83 and an advocate of an Iranian atomic bomb.
Having kneecapped the country's nuclear programme, could the West and Israel live with that? Under Donald Trump, pragmatism reigns. Since Syria's pro-Iranian dictator, Bashar Al Assad, was toppled last December, Washington has cosied up to the country's new ruler, Ahmed Al Sharaa, on whom it had placed a $10 million bounty as an Al Qaeda terrorist. So the Trump Administration could deal with a new Iranian regime made up of old enemies provided they reverse course.
An ex-Islamic Republic insider, cynical enough to pull the plug on the incompetent fanatics running Iran, could be the best way out for Israel and the West. A bloodless coup at the top is one thing, but chaos throughout the country could endanger the safe-keeping of its nuclear technology and chemical weapons, so some kind of orderly transition is vital.
It won't be ideal. Certainly not for those Iranians who have borne the brunt of the Ayatollah's cruelties and hardships. But it might well be the fastest way to end this war and offer some hope of a better future.