[A]nalysts, lawmakers, and former administration officials all are busily insisting that President Donald Trump’s (R) options for helping the Iranian people are limited. What’s limited, though, is their thinking on the matter.
A limited strike against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s main security force, is unlikely to decide the outcome of the popular uprising….
And
There are nonmilitary options to put pressure on the theocratic leadership, including cyberattacks on military and civilian institutions….
And
A raid like the one that targeted Maduro in his Caracas residence would be far-fetched in Iran, a much larger country with defenses built to protect Khamenei, including a Revolutionary Guard unit known as Vali-ye Amr, which counts several thousand forces.
These are being posited to occur in isolation from each other, though, and that would be unproductive. All of these and more (see below) would need to be done together and in coordination with each other. Nor is there any need to “raid” Tehran to capture Khamenei and his immediate deputies. American and Israeli intelligence are fully capable of tracking these folks’ whereabouts, and there’s no need to attempt capture. Having located them, it would be necessary only to direct the appropriate ordnance onto them in those locations. This is, after all, what both the Israelis and Americans have done with other terrorist leaders, whether Hamas, Hezbollah, Daesh, or Iranian.
There’s also the matter of sanctions, though these would need to be addressed only after the fact.
The US could also offer to remove sanctions that have crushed the Iranian economy, if moderate military and political leaders remove Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his circle of clerics from the government and promise elections for a secular state.
Sanction removal already is on the table as part of their imposition, on the condition that the Iranian government materially and sustainably alter its behavior. That alteration would require the actual removal of Khamenei, et al. Iranian government promises, in any event, are worthless, and actual, provably fair elections would need to be held before sanctions relief could be contemplated.
Peyman Jafari, a supposed expert on Iranian social movements at William & Mary University cautioned that an attack could rally millions in defense of the Islamic Republic.
The foolishness this sort of thing has been empirically demonstrated within the last few months by the Israeli and American attacks on Iran, which resulted in…no one rallying to the government’s defense.
This is one area where John Bolton is on the right track:
Trump would need to hit the Revolutionary Guard’s bases, its volunteer militia known as the Basij, its nuclear and ballistic weapons programs, and its navy, “and that is just to get started.”
Trump has naval and air forces getting positioned in and around the Arabian Gulf, from which broad, simultaneous, and sustainable actions can be taken—not in constant successive waves, ideally, but on a shoot-look-shoot basis, where the shoot is each wave of attacks. It’s necessary only to act.