There is something almost incomprehensible about the idea that American or Israeli intelligence planners could contemplate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a leader of Iran after the collapse of the Islamic Republic. If the reports are substantially correct, the problem is much bigger than Ahmadinejad himself. It tells us something profoundly disturbing about how the people designing regime change in Iran understand the country, its people, its politics and, perhaps most importantly, power itself.
Start with Ahmadinejad.
What exactly is the theory here?
This is a man whose disputed reelection in 2009 brought millions of Iranians into the streets. Whatever one thinks about the precise extent of electoral fraud, the election produced the Green Movement and one of the greatest crises of legitimacy the Islamic Republic had experienced. Iranians marched demanding to know what had happened to their votes. People were beaten, arrested and killed.
And now we are supposed to believe that Iranians would flood the streets again, this time to overthrow the entire Islamic Republic, so that foreign powers could help return Ahmadinejad to power?
What are they smoking?
Even leaving 2009 aside, Ahmadinejad is a peculiar choice. He has been out of office for more than a decade. He does not command an obvious national political organization capable of taking over the machinery of government. He does not appear to have an army of governors, administrators, military commanders and political operatives waiting to assume control of the country. He is polarizing. His present political power is extremely limited.
In other words, he has a famous name but very little demonstrated power.
Then there is the Israeli dimension, which makes the whole proposition even stranger. Ahmadinejad became internationally notorious for some of the most inflammatory rhetoric about Israel uttered by any modern Iranian president. Yet somehow this is the person Israeli strategists might consider useful in constructing a post-Islamic-Republic Iran?
Perhaps there is some brilliant piece of intelligence unavailable to the rest of us. Perhaps Ahmadinejad has a vast underground organization nobody knows about. Perhaps divisions of the Iranian military are secretly waiting for his telephone call. Perhaps millions of Iranians have quietly rediscovered their affection for him.
But absent such evidence, the proposition looks less like sophisticated intelligence work and more like a fundamental misunderstanding of political power.
And Ahmadinejad is not an isolated example.
Look at the alternatives foreign policymakers repeatedly seem fascinated by.
There is the MEK. It has organization, discipline and international connections. What it does not appear to possess is broad legitimacy among Iranians. Its history, including its relationship with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War, carries enormous baggage. Being organized is useful. Being organized, while much of the population wants nothing to do with you, is considerably less useful if your objective is to govern a country of roughly 90 million people.
Then there are the monarchists. They have a recognizable brand, substantial diaspora visibility, money, media exposure, and a famous name in Reza Pahlavi. But again the fundamental question is not how many television interviews someone can obtain in Washington, London or Los Angeles. The question is how much political machinery actually exists inside Iran.
Who are the provincial leaders?
Who controls the municipalities?
Who commands the loyalty of important elements of the security services?
Who can keep electricity flowing, airports operating, hospitals functioning and food moving through the country?
Who can assemble a government?
Who can persuade competing factions to accept its authority?
Who can prevent Iran from descending into civil war?
These are questions about power, not publicity.
And that brings us back to Ahmadinejad.
The three alternatives reveal three different versions of essentially the same mistake.
The MEK offers organization without broad legitimacy.
The monarchists offer an internationally recognizable brand without the demonstrated domestic machinery to govern Iran.
Ahmadinejad offers experience in office and name recognition, but lacks an obvious contemporary political base capable of taking power.
It is shit piled on top of shit, because none of these choices addresses the central problem: Who inside Iran possesses sufficient legitimacy, organization and institutional support to govern the country?
That is the question that matters.
And perhaps intelligence agencies are structurally poorly equipped to answer it.
The CIA and Mossad are intelligence services. They are extraordinarily capable organizations in the things intelligence organizations are designed to do. They penetrate networks. They recruit assets. They intercept communications. They sabotage facilities. They identify targets. They conduct covert operations. They discover secrets.
But none of those skills necessarily translate into an understanding of a country’s political sociology.
In fact, intelligence organizations may have an inherent bias toward exactly the wrong people.
An intelligence officer naturally values someone who is accessible, connected, cooperative, recruitable, predictable and perhaps controllable. A political society values something completely different. It values legitimacy, authenticity, constituency, organizational strength and the ability to represent competing interests.
The ideal intelligence asset and the ideal national leader may therefore be almost opposites.
This distinction becomes enormously important when intelligence operations metastasize into political strategy.
Finding someone willing to cooperate with you is not the same thing as finding someone an entire country is willing to follow.
And Iran presents an even larger problem because foreign strategists repeatedly appear to underestimate Iranian nationalism.
There seems to be an assumption that because millions of Iranians dislike the Islamic Republic, those same millions will automatically assist foreign powers trying to destroy it.
But the Islamic Republic of Iran is not the same as Iran.
An Iranian can hate the Islamic Republic and love Iran.
An Iranian can want political change and simultaneously oppose foreign intervention.
An Iranian can despise the clerical establishment and nevertheless fight anyone attempting to fragment the country.
That distinction is absolutely fundamental.
If the regime-change strategy depends upon Iranians flooding the streets while the country is being bombed, the leadership is being decapitated, and ethnic separatists are being encouraged around the country’s borders, then the strategy may contain a fatal contradiction.
The foreign planners are effectively saying:
Help us destabilize your state.
Trust us about what happens afterward.
Don’t worry about the armed ethnic movements around your borders.
Don’t worry about the possibility of national fragmentation.
Don’t worry about the MEK.
Don’t worry about the monarchists.
And, by the way, perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will run the place.
Why would a rational Iranian accept that bargain?
The strategic planners may think they are presenting Iranians with a choice between dictatorship and freedom.
Many Iranians may perceive an entirely different choice:
A government I dislike versus the possible destruction of my country.
Once the choice is framed that way, nationalism becomes more powerful than opposition politics.
This is hardly unique to Iran. Foreign invasion frequently strengthens national identity. People who bitterly oppose one another domestically can suddenly find themselves on the same side when they perceive an external threat to the country itself.
Iranian history should make this particularly obvious. Iran is not an artificial state assembled recently by colonial administrators drawing lines across a map. Iranian national identity is ancient, deeply embedded and capable of transcending governments, dynasties and political ideologies.
The Islamic Republic has existed for less than half a century.
Iran has existed in recognizable civilizational and political forms for thousands of years.
Confusing opposition to the former with indifference toward the latter is an extraordinary analytical mistake.
This is why the Ahmadinejad story matters.
It is tempting to laugh at it. Ahmadinejad? Really?
But it shouldn’t be funny.
If foreign intelligence services genuinely considered him an important component of a post-regime political order, the episode may reveal something far more serious than a poor personnel decision.
It suggests that the people designing the strategy may be optimizing for entirely the wrong variables.
They see contacts where they should see constituencies.
They see personalities where they should see institutions.
They see opposition groups where they should see political legitimacy.
They see regime vulnerability where they should also see Iranian nationalism.
And perhaps most dangerously, they mistake the ability to destroy a government for the ability to construct another.
Those are not remotely the same thing.
Bombing can destroy buildings.
Intelligence operations can eliminate leaders.
Cyberattacks can disrupt institutions.
Covert operations can weaken governments.
None of these things creates political legitimacy.
That has to come from Iranians themselves.
And if your strategy for overthrowing the Islamic Republic ultimately depends upon millions of ordinary Iranians voluntarily walking into the streets, risking their lives and bringing down their own government, then understanding what those Iranians actually want is not some secondary cultural consideration.
It is the entire strategy.
Which brings us back to the simplest question.
If your plan requires millions of Iranians to rise up against their government, why would you even contemplate replacing that government with the man millions of Iranians once rose up against?
That is not a minor contradiction.
It may tell us everything we need to know about why the strategy was doomed before it began.
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