Events in Iran are going about as well as they possibly could, but the ultimate goal (my goal anyway) may remain elusive. The Jerusalem Post relates the current assessment from the IDF:
The IDF has destroyed an astounding 2,200 Iranian regime targets, mostly in the Tehran and western Iran areas, which it hopes will weaken the regime substantially as well as the regime’s ability to threaten Israel, the military said on Sunday.
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Despite those successes, the IDF is very conservative about how quickly these attacks will facilitate the Iranian opposition being able to topple the regime, if at all.For example, the IDF has noted a trend of some regime supporters deserting their posts, as some Israeli political officials have leaked.
Hard-nosed IDF defense officials still view the overall trend as too small to bring about any near-term collapse.
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Between 1,900 and several thousand Iranian regime supporters have been killed, but this is out of an estimated 125,000 IRGC, 400,000 military, and one to two million Basij, including around 200,000 harder core militia members.
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While complimenting the US on unprecedented cooperation, with American forces handling most southern Iranian targets, naval targets, and other issues, the IDF also said that the depth of US intervention in the current war means Washington will also have a dominant say on when the war ends.In that light, the IDF is trying to strike as many targets as it can every day to advance the potential conditions for regime change, while soberly acknowledging that there may be insufficient time to do so, or that the Iranian population may not be sufficiently organized to topple the regime.
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Regardless of whether regime change succeeds or not, the IDF said it has destroyed most of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.The military has dissected the Quds Force both by killing top officials in Iran itself, as well as top liaison officials in other countries, such as five top officials killed in the Ramada Hotel in Beirut recently.
In addition, 17 out of 20 IRGC Quds Force aircraft for exporting terror, arms, and funding have been destroyed during the war.
That accords with my own sense of the situation. The current attacks will set Iran’s homicidal regime back considerably, but absent troops on the ground the IRGC is likely to remain in control, and it will immediately begin reconstructing Iran’s military capabilities. I think the regime is sufficiently dangerous (as illustrated by the current conflict) that it would be worth a ground initiative to ensure that it is overthrown, but that appears to be politically impossible. So we may be dealing with Islamic Republic for some time to come.
