|
Iran – Trump Chickened Out
Yesterday U.S. President Donald Trump was ready and willing to bomb Iran. The most important target would have been the Supreme Leader, Ajatollah Khamenei.
But Iran was ready and Khamenei safe. The U.S. military, in contrast, was not ready to defend against the inevitable retaliation that would have come out of Iran. There are only three destroyers with air-defenses in the area that could offer protection against a ballistic missile onslaught. A few minutes after the first strikes their arsenals would have been empty.
Before the last bombing of Iran THAAD and Patriot air defenses from the U.S. and South Korea had been flown to the Middle East. A U.S. carrier group was stationed nearby and U.S. bases had been depopulated. The military was able to provide Trump with somewhat reasonable options.
U.S. allies, most importantly Israel but also some Gulf countries, were fully on board.
This round was way different.
The military was unable to give any good options for strikes. It had to ask Trump to stand down.
The Gulf countries were anxious and did not want to be part of a campaign:
“Bombing Iran goes against the calculus and interests of the Arab Gulf States,” said Bader al-Saif, an assistant history professor at Kuwait University. “Neutralizing the current regime, whether through regime change or internal leadership reconfiguration, can potentially translate into the unparalleled hegemony of Israel, which won’t serve the Gulf States.”
Even Israel suggested to wait until the ‘regime’ breaks down.
That is not going to happen.
The internal configuration of the Islamic Republic has made ‘regime change’ nearly impossible. A majority of the country and the security forces support the country’s political structure. No bunch of paid terrorists, who shoot at random people as well as security forces, can break that connection.
In consequence, at least for now, Trump chickened out.
The comments thread is already very long and no doubt quite a few MoA lurkers and barflies may have already left after 300+ comments but I would like to draw readers’ attention to this article on how Mossad lures and persuades individuals (and even threatens and blackmails them) in Iran into supplying it with information to use in its destabilisation efforts.
Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Their Country From Within
“… In the lead-up to June’s air attacks, according to Israeli planners, they arranged for unwitting truck drivers to smuggle into Iran tons of “metallic equipment” — the parts for the weapons used by the commando teams.
Israeli officials said these operations reflect a fundamental shift in the Mossad’s approach that began about 15 years ago. The agents in Iran who broke into the safes, set up the machine guns, blasted the air defenses and watched the scientists’ apartments were not Israelis. All were either Iranians or citizens of third countries, according to senior Israeli officials with direct knowledge of the operations. For years, such missions in Iran had been the exclusive work of Israeli field operatives. But officials said the growing unpopularity of the Iranian regime has made it much easier to attract agents.
S.T. was one of them. Israeli officials said he grew up in a working-class family in a small town near Tehran. He enrolled in college and was living a seemingly ordinary student life, when he and several classmates were arrested by Iran’s feared Basij militia and taken to a detention center where they were tortured with electric shocks and brutally beaten.
S.T. and his friends were ultimately released, but the experience left him enraged and eager for revenge. Soon after, a relative living overseas provided his name to an Israeli spy whose job was to identify disaffected Iranians. Messages were exchanged via an encrypted phone app, and S.T. accepted a free trip to a neighboring country.
A case officer from the Mossad invited him to work as a covert operative against Iran. He agreed, asking only that Israel pledge to take care of his family if anything went wrong. (Iran summarily executes anyone caught spying for foreign countries, especially Israel.)
He was trained for months outside of Iran by Israeli weapons specialists. Just before the attack was to begin, he and his small team slipped back into the country to play their role in one of the biggest and most complex military operations in Israel’s history …
… One key to the spy agency’s success is the ethnic composition of Iran. Israeli officials noted in interviews that roughly 40% of the country’s population of 90 million is made up of ethnic minorities: Arabs, Azeris, Baluchis, Kurds and others.
Shortly before he died in 2016, [Mossad Director Meir Dagan] told us that “the best pool for recruiting agents inside Iran lies within the country’s ethnic and human mosaic. Many of them oppose the regime. Some even hate it.”
Present and former officials said Dagan championed the shift to relying on foreign-born agents. In the early years of the effort to penetrate Iran, the spy agency had relied mostly on Israelis, known to Mossad insiders as “blue and white” — a reference to the colors of Israel’s flag.
Under Dagan, the Mossad’s leadership came to believe they could find highly effective agents in Iran or among Iranian exiles and others living in one of the seven countries that border it.
Present and former officials said the recruits fell into two categories. Some gravitated to the realm of traditional espionage, gathering intelligence and passing it on to their handler. Others expressed a willingness to carry out violent operations, including attacks on nuclear scientists.
“Convincing someone to betray their country is no small feat,” said a former senior Mossad officer who oversaw units handling foreign agents. “It’s a process of gradual erosion. You start with a minor request, an insignificant task. Then another. These are trial runs. If they perform well, you assign them something larger, more meaningful. And if they refuse — well, by then you have leverage: pressure, threats, even blackmail.”
Spymasters, he said, try to avoid threats or coercion. “It’s better to guide them to a place where they act willingly — where they take the first step themselves,” the former officer said.
Not surprisingly, given the risk of summary execution, many had initial doubts.
The most critical element is trust. “Your agent must be loyal and emotionally tied to you. Like a soldier who charges forward despite the danger, trusting his comrades, so it is with agents. He goes on the mission because he trusts his handler and feels a deep sense of responsibility toward him.”
Most of the people who agreed to work for Israel expected payment for the risks they were taking. But the present and former officials said the driving force for people who agree to spy on their own country is often more primal.
“Financial reward is, of course, important,” the former Mossad officer said. “But people are also driven by emotion — hatred, love, dependence, revenge. Yet it always helps when the recruit’s motives are supported by some kind of tangible benefit: not necessarily a direct payment but some type of indirect help.”
This is how S.T. was recruited.
His handlers said he was consumed by hatred toward the regime and what had been done to him by the Basij militia. But what finally pushed him to cooperate was the Mossad’s offer to arrange medical treatment unavailable in Iran for a relative.
For decades, medical care has been one of the Mossad’s signature recruitment methods. Israeli intelligence has links with doctors and clinics in several countries, and arranging surgery and various therapies was also used to penetrate Palestinian extremist groups. It has featured even more in approaches to Iranians, in the hope of persuading them to help Israel …”
The way in which the US and Israel together have turned economic sanctions against Iran and the Iranian government’s authoritarian style into tools to exploit people’s grievances and turn those people into expendable tools against their country is truly beyond cynical and sickening.
Posted by: Refinnejenna | Jan 15 2026 23:45 utc | 337
|
