AP (“Trump vetoed Israeli plan to kill Iran’s supreme leader, US official tells AP“):
President Donald Trump rejected a plan presented by Israel to the U.S. to kill Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.
The Israelis informed the Trump administration in recent days that they had developed a credible plan to kill Khamenei.
After being briefed on the plan, the White House made clear to Israeli officials that Trump was opposed to the Israelis making the move, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment on the sensitive matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Trump administration is desperate to keep Israel’s military operation aimed at decapitating Iran’s nuclear program from exploding into an even more expansive conflict and saw the plan to kill Khamenei as a move that would enflame the conflict and potentially destabilize the region.
Asked about the plan during an interview on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report with Bret Baier,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not directly address whether the White House rejected the plan.
“But I can tell you, I think that we do what we need to do, we’ll do what we need to do,” Netanyahu said. “And I think the United States knows what is good for the United States.”
Netanyahu spokesperson Omer Dostri later called reports about the Israeli plan to kill Khamenei “fake.”
Netanyahu in the Fox interview also said regime change “could certainly be the result” of the conflict “because the Iranian regime is very weak.”
Trump’s rejection of the proposal was first reported by Reuters.
Meanwhile, Trump on Sunday issued a stark warning to Iran not to retaliate against U.S. targets in the Middle East.
Trump in an early morning social media posting said the United States “had nothing to do with the attack on Iran” as Israel and Iran traded missile attacks for the third straight day. Iran, however, has said it would hold the U.S. — which has provided Israel with much of its deep arsenal of weaponry — responsible for its backing of Israel.
“If we are attacked in any way, shape or form by Iran, the full strength and might of the U.S. Armed Forces will come down on you at levels never seen before,” Trump said.
Reuters is paywalled these days, so I haven’t read their original report. The AP version is thinly and vaguely sourced. But, certainly, in a normal US administration of either party we would see an attack aimed at killing Khameini as as wildly dangerous. That the Trump administration is outwardly signaling the same is reassuring.
Netanyahu’s language is cagey but not unreasonable. The longer the back-and-forth strikes between the two countries continues, the more likely it is that Khameini is either killed in one of the attacks or taken out by a military desperate to preserve the country.
Regime change has been our soft-spoken goal in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. On a bipartisan basis, there has been a remarkable faith that “Iranian moderates” would somehow do the job for us and replace a totalitarian Islamist regime with something more amenable to our interests.
The recent examples of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya should provide caution that regime change doesn’t always have the imagined happy ending. But, from an Israeli standpoint, it might well be worth the risk of ending a fanatical regime that has spent more than four decades killing Israelis through regional proxies.
