The Plan? We Install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as A Puppet in Iran

Edited by Sam Thielman

I HAVE NO TIME to write this piece. I owe a script by Friday to a comic-book publisher. More on that when I can announce it, but because of a personal scheduling conflict, my work week needs to end tomorrow, so I've got that script deadline looming. I don't have time for this newsletter. This was supposed to be a one-edition week here at FOREVER WARS. 

But the New York Times reported something about the Iran War I simply cannot believe is true. The idea that it might, somehow, be true, is forcing my brain to leak out of my nostrils. 

The Times claims that the Trump administration, in what they say was a plan "developed by the Israelis," was going to install Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as leader of a decapitated Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a witting accomplice in this scheme, at least at first.

The story is vague. That's not disqualifying for a piece about a regime-change scheme like this, but the vagueness sure feeds my incredulity. The easiest thing here is to say this is bullshit and move on. But I cannot move on. 

Because, first, it does fit the template of January's decapitation in Venezuela. Washington didn't destroy the remnant-Chavismo regime of Nicolas Maduro. It instead elevated his deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, at gunpoint and attempted to use the suborned Rodriguez to offload the responsibilities of resource extraction and internal stability that the U.S. doesn't want to perform itself. 

And second, because this is Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, we're talking about an endeavor so fucking insane, cynical and ideologically script-flipping that it possesses a certain irresistability. 

Perhaps you're wondering why I'm reacting this way. That is because the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 to the Iranian presidency is in no small part what catalyzed the 20-year panic about a nuclear Iran that brought us precisely to the failed 2026 U.S.-Israeli war of aggression. 

A boastfully defiant figure whose understandable opposition to the U.S. and Israel crossed the line into Holocaust denial, Ahmadinejad often spoke about a world without Israel, and it was open to interpretation whether he was speaking about a grand sweep of history in which all is ephemeral or was making a promise. He provided a face at which the bellicose strain in elite foreign-policy circles could point and say That is the danger from a nuclear Iran: Someone who will use a nuclear weapon against Israel—and who knows, maybe the United States. The mid-2000s was a period when Iran was exploiting the disaster of U.S. occupation of neighboring Iraq, thanks primarily Qassem Soleimani, not Ahmadinejad; and when the aforementioned strain in elite foreign-policy circles needed a new Middle Eastern enemy to draw attention (and accountability) away from just how badly it had fucked up Iraq. A few years later—when the faction aligned with Ahmedinejad straight-up stole Iran’s 2009 presidential election—the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, opined that it was better for Israel if a widely demonized figure like Ahmedinejad ran Iran, rather than a reformist. The rise of Ahmedinejad occasioned deeply cynical reactions in Washington and Tel Aviv.

But that is not to say the fears of the warmongers were not genuinely felt. I remember working at The New Republic back then and seeing its hawkish owner Marty Peretz and literary editor Leon Wieseltier shook. Whether they truly feared Iran would actually wipe Israel off the map with a nuke or thought instead that  Ahmadinejad merely signalled an unacceptably assertive Iran, their alarm was real. A Time magazine story from 2006 portrayed Ahmadinejad as appealing "to audiences beyond Iran who resent U.S. power and feel emboldened to challenge it." The implication was that such a thing was unacceptable, rather than a rational reaction to a supremely powerful United States presently engaged in a foreign policy more aptly understood as a psychotic episode.

And if this story has any truth to it, Netanyahu and Trump were going to make that guy the next leader of Iran. This is some last-page-of-Animal Farm shit. 

But then—again, if this story has any truth to it—they bombed his house to get him out of house arrest. "After the near miss," the Times reports, "he became disillusioned with the regime change plan." Oops! 

There have been rumors for years—rumors that I frankly did not credit—that Ahmedinejad, a guy who comes across as something of a weirdo, was actually an asset for Western/Israeli intelligence. You can read about them in the bottom of the Times piece. I don't know if this whole piece is a set-up job to discredit Ahmedinejad—maybe the story comes from Baby Shah supporters who don't like that foreign sponsorship settled on a much different figure? Could it come from Mojtaba Khamanei supporters or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to preempt an Ahmadinejad comeback?—but if somehow this story represents the truth or something like it, Ahmadinejad joins Dagan as an epic cynic. Ahmadinejad told Time back in 2006, "Everyone knows that the Zionist regime is a tool in the hands of the United States and British governments." While it's interesting to see him endorse the Aircraft Carrier Theory of U.S.-Israel relations over the Lobby Theory, the idea that Ahmadinejad became a tool in the hands of the United States and Israeli governments would be a historical development for the fucking ages. 

Again, I have no idea if this story is true. I simultaneously have off-the-charts levels of skepticism about it and excitement about the insane prospect that this, this, was the plan Trump settled on: to make Iran Ahmadinejad's again. 

I HAVE NO SUCH feelings about the slaughter at the Islamic Center of San Diego this week. The Times reports that the manifesto left by the murderers "lays out an expansive list of hatreds, attacking Jews, Muslims, gay people, and also includes racist and misogynistic passages." The normalized devaluation of Muslim life in America is responsible for this bloodshed, and it is past time to understand how that devaluation feeds the other devaluations contained in the Times description. I can only reiterate what I said in this piece about the murder of Wadea al-Fayoume.

ONE LAST THING about Iran and Ahmadinejad for now. This is more about the dynamic of a forever war, but: the longer the U.S. is unable to military break the Iranian throttling of the Strait and is similarly unable to achieve its goals diplomatically, regime change/regime collapse will re-emerge as an attractive option in Washington. Be wary about this.