Israel and America Shoot for Regime Change in Iran

We were awoken just after 8 a.m. by a siren, followed within minutes by the notification that there were in fact no incoming missiles. It appeared the Israeli government had decided to use the alert system as a kind of national alarm clock, to let the country know that the war had begun. For the second time in nine months, Israel had attacked Iran. This time it was in coordination with the United States. And the goal, remarkably, appears to be regime change.

Within the hour we had already been sent to the shelter by an actual missile alert. By midday, we would make that trip five times. It has continued all day, and there is a siren going off right now. The country, as far as one can tell from the stairwells and the WhatsApp groups, is stoic. Irritated, tired, but stoic. This is absurd, people say, but they lace up their shoes and head downstairs anyway. Or to the reinforced safe rooms that the lucky few have.

The arguments initially presented for this round are not, on the surface, overwhelming. After the 12-day war in June, Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs had been set back many years, that the major threat to Israel’s existence had been removed “for generations.” Eight month is a generation perhaps for hedgehogs. Donald Trump, after American B-2 bombers joined on the final day, spoke repeatedly of the nuclear threat being “obliterated” at Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan. He bristled at intelligence assessments suggesting otherwise.

Trump, meanwhile, demanded that Iran forswear nuclear weapons; but Tehran has long said it does not seek them, even as it enriched uranium to levels with no civilian justification. No one believes them. But they have been saying it. And there has been little public evidence that Iran rebuilt that threat in the interim. Netanyahu said around midday in a recorded radio address that new capabilities were being placed underground. Maybe, but hardly new.

In the shelter, I had time to contemplate all this with the same cast of neighbors I got to know rather well in June. The divorced lawyer and her boyfriend. The mathematics divorcee with her enormous dog, which takes up the space of two folding chairs. The sweet ...