Iran in the vortex: what's really happening |
As protests unfold in Iran, Israeli and US figures openly talk of regime collapse. Foreign interference risks worsening violence and derailing change from within.
Former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant told Israeli army radio this week that Israel must be ready to act when the Iranian ‘regime’ is ready to fall.
“At this moment, when what matters most is the mass action on the ground, we need to stay in the background and steer things with an invisible hand," said Gallant, who is the subject of an ICC arrest warrant.
Former CIA director and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted this week: “Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them."
I don’t believe this was a case of letting the cat out of the bag; I think this is both true and a form of psy-ops (psychological warfare), trying to unnerve the Iranian government and encourage the kind of harsh crackdown that regimes resort to when they feel cornered. MI6, CIA and Mossad are active in Iran, much to the frustration of many of the large numbers of anti-government protesters determined to end the rule of the clerics.
According to Israeli and Western sources, tens of thousands of Starlink terminals were smuggled into Iran to bypass any Internet shutdown. Yet the government – apparently using sophisticated Chinese ‘kill switches’ – were able to disable most of them, thus decoupling people within Iran from external coordinators.
“Help is on the way,” Trump said on 12 January. How did that kind of ‘help’ go for Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan or so many other countries going back to the Guatemalan Silent Genocide or the Vietnam War? American ‘help’ resulted in the overthrow of the democratically-elected Mossadegh government and the installation of authoritarian rule under Shah Pahlavi in 1953. The West got their hands on the oil.
This time, if they can’t get regime change they will be happy with regime destruction, civil war and the end of the multi-century project for a unified and sovereign Iranian state. So far, things have not gone to plan.
Long-standing Israeli security analyst Ehud Ya’ari told Israeli Channel 12 this week that the Iranian government remained........