The Middle East is now nine days into the war that the region and the world dreaded, with no real change in position — yet. The IDF continues to rack up successful missions in Iran, while the Iranians keep playing musical chairs at the top of their military and regime org charts. The Iranians did have a momentary success in their remote offensive in Israel, with a drone getting past Israeli defenses and striking a residence.
The Iranians are using a terror strategy, while the Israelis are systematically destroying Iran’s strategic and tactical capabilities. How long can that go on? The Iranians seem content with succession planning at the moment, both in the IRGC and in the theocracy itself. First, the IDF claimed to have taken out three more senior military commanders, an astonishing success (if true) on the ninth day of a war when their enemy should have better security around leadership:
Israel’s military said it killed three more senior Iranian military leaders overnight, including a key coordinator between the regime in Tehran and militant group Hamas. …
Israel also hit military targets including centrifuge production sites at the Isfahan nuclear site in central Iran, which had been targeted in previous attacks, a military official said.
The Israelis claim that Saeed Izadi, who ran the Quds Force division dedicated to supporting Hamas, was an architect of the October 7 massacres that started the war:
An Israeli airstrike in Iran killed Saeed Izadi, the head of the Palestine Corps in the IRGC Quds Force, who funded and armed Hamas ahead of the terror group’s October 7 onslaught as part of a multi-front plan to destroy Israel, the Israel Defense Forces said Saturday.
Izadi was “one of the architects” of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, “and among the few who knew of it prior to its execution,” the IDF said.
The military said he was killed overnight in a safe house in the Iranian city of Qom “following a prolonged intelligence effort.”
Two points come to mind with this explanation. First: If Izadi really did help set up the October 7 “Al Aqsa Flood” atrocities with Hamas, Ali Khamenei should have had him shot long before now. That may have been the worst military miscalculation in modern history. That one act led to the complete collapse of Iran’s defensive strategy against Israel, with the IDF crushing Hamas and Hezbollah, the latter of which led to the fall of Bashar al–Assad, and the opening of Iran’s skies to the Israeli Air Force. The IDF ought to name a weapons system after Izadi, although perhaps they should reserve that honor for a weapon designed to blow up in one’s face.
Second, and more importantly: The Iranians continue to get depantsed by Israeli intelligence. How can these military commanders keep getting exposed nine days into a war? Izadi in particular seems like a critical link to Iran’s proxy-army strategy, which may be crushed but is not yet entirely destroyed. Those operations were run by Qassem Soleimani before the US took him out in a targeted attack as a reprisal for Iranian attacks on US forces. Ismail Qaani then took over until the Israelis rendered him to room temperature in the opening hours of Operation Rising Lion. With Izadi now dead (if true), their proxy strategies are even less accessible and useful, a point that Hamas and Hezbollah are likely learning in real time now.
And yet, the IDF appears to get intel in real time about the location of these senior leaders. How? One might think that the IRGC and the mullahs are something less than popular these days, despite the show protests on their behalf in Tehran yesterday.
Speaking of the mullahs, Khamenei has decided to do some succession planning, along with the game of musical chairs at the IRGC:
Wary of assassination, Iran’s supreme leader mostly speaks with his commanders through a trusted aide now, suspending electronic communications to make it harder to find him, three Iranian officials familiar with his emergency war plans say.
Ensconced in a bunker, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has picked an array of replacements down his chain of miliary command in case more of his valued lieutenants are killed.
And in a remarkable move, the officials add, Ayatollah Khamenei has even named three senior clerics as candidates to succeed him should he be killed, as well — perhaps the most telling illustration of the precarious moment he and his three-decade rule are facing.
Not for nothing, but as the NY Times notes, this isn’t the way this theocracy is supposed to operate. The next Supreme Leader is supposed to be chosen in a process that is more comparable to a conclave than a succession act set by a monarch. If Khamenei is bypassing the clerics to set his own succession, that may not play well even in some parts of the radical-theocrat movement in Iran.
That may be why Khamenei has apparently left his son Mojtaba, long considered a front-runner in normal succession, off the list — in order to make it look less like a monarchy than it already does. Some clerics who likewise didn’t make the list may believe themselves to have been slighted, although that may be secondary to the fact that Khamenei and his team turned out to be a bunch of incompetents who are presently getting their asses kicked on an hourly basis by Jews. That stench will firmly attach itself to anyone with Khamenei’s anointing, sooner rather than later.
Speaking of sooner rather than later, guess who’s on the move … again?
American B-2 stealth bombers took off from the Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri towards a strategic base in Guam in the western Pacific, Israeli public broadcaster KAN reported on Saturday.
The bombers were reportedly accompanied by four Boeing KC-46 Pegasus refueling aircraft. Two of them have already performed refueling for the B2 aircraft over the Pacific Ocean, according to reports. The other two are about 75 kilometers behind them.
Missouri to Guam, Guam to Diego Garcia, and then … Diego Garcia to Fordow? The Iranians have to know that we don’t move B-2s around just for the frequent-flier points. Posting the B-2s to Diego Garcia in March finally got Khamenei to allow for some negotiation with the US, although the Iranians miscalculated about their ability to manipulate talks to stall an accounting for their nuclear-weapons development. This time, the B-2s will not arrive to foster negotiations but to put an emphatic end to 20-plus years of Iranian deception and terrorism on the issue of nuclear weapons.
The clock is ticking.
