⚡ BREAKING: Trump’s Iran War Aims in Chaos — Netanyahu Pushing Bold Regime Change Strategy! Read What’s Really Driving This Conflict.

As they launched their war on Iran, both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu called on Iranians to rise up and overthrow their dictatorship.

But while Trump gave four different reporters different timelines for bringing the war to a conclusion, Netanyahu is putting a Kosovo-style plan into practice by weakening the regime’s security forces from the air to create the conditions for local regime opponents to act.

Though the Israeli military has stated its aims are to destroy as much of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs as it can, Netanyahu has gone further. For him, bringing an end to the Iranian regime has been his life’s mission. Could it finally be within his grasp?

Many people’s instinctive response is extreme skepticism. Far better-resourced attempts at regime change in Iran’s neighbors Iraq and Afghanistan proved costly, deadly failures. If the United States could not achieve regime change, how can a much smaller Israel possibly manage where America has failed?

The comparisons to Iraq are coming thick and fast: a US president aiming at regime change; massive US firepower; condemnations from the Western left as violating international law; oil price spikes, and predictions of doom, chaos and the destabilization of the Middle East.

There are, however, important differences. Iraq and Afghanistan were ground invasions. The US and its allies landed tens of thousands of troops to remove the incumbent governments, occupy the countries and establish new administrations. Attempts, rather more successful in Afghanistan than Iraq, were made to bring the UN onside. Nevertheless, in both cases US-led forces, including Polish troops, were faced with an insurgency they did not have the political staying power to defeat, and withdrew.

Sending ground forces turned out to be a huge mistake, in that they became targets for insurgents. Israel had also committed a similar blunder. In 1983 it managed to install a friendly government in Beirut, but that collapsed under an insurgency stoked by the then vigorous new regime in Tehran.

This time no overt ground operation is envisaged. Three days in, this operation has had some successes, in particular the killing of Ayatollah Khamene’i, Iran’s Supreme Leader, and other senior military and intelligence chiefs. Germany, France and the United Kingdom have joined in to defend their bases and allies in the Gulf that have been attacked by Iran.

Yet even if the air campaign manages to set back Iran’s nuclear and missile programmes, Iran’s regime will rearm. The country is already under extremely strict Western sanctions which have failed to stop the growth of its missile arsenal and uranium enrichment. The uncomfortable reality, demonstrated by Russia, is that sanctions can only have a limited effect on the behavior of a regime that can export oil and gas to China.

The impossibility of controlling Iran through sanctions was what lay behind the Obama Administration’s attempt to conclude a nuclear agreement (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – JCPOA). Both Trump and Khamene’i rejected the arrangement.

Netanyahu preferred to imagine the Ayatollahs’ downfall but lacked any reasonable hope of carrying it out. That has now changed.

The first reason is Israeli tactical innovation. Israel is able to turn the pervasive electronic communication of modern societies into an attack surface and accurately target the senior leadership of hostile organizations. Last June it even used drones smuggled into Iran to attack the guard posts of Evin prison, where political prisoners are held, possibly in an attempt to allow them to escape. New technology has made new kinds of ultra precise military intervention possible.

The second is the regime’s savage crackdown on January’s protests. Precise estimates of citizens killed by their government have still not been calculated, but the toll ranges between 7,000 and the tens of thousands. This changed attitudes among many Iranians. Whereas they had previously looked upon foreign interventions with ambiguity, tending to oppose both the regime and foreign attacks on their country, the mood has shifted towards acquiescence in anything that weakens or, if possible, removes the regime.

Official Israeli military communiqués present Israel’s part in the air campaign as “broad strikes on the Iranian terrorist regime’s fire arrays.”

The pattern of strikes suggests another mission, however. An open-source intelligence analytics dashboard produced by Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies collates evidence of numerous strikes indifferent Iranian cities. As well as recording strikes on airfields and government buildings, a number of others can be located to individual houses, and sometimes roads. The dashboard itself recorded approximately 45 “targeted killings” early afternoon on Tuesday 3rd March. Though the dashboard does not identify strikes on private buildings as assassinations, it does suggest a pattern of assassinating regime figures and destroying smaller scale regime assets even in smaller cities across Iran. The pattern of casualties recorded by independent human rights organizations, such as Hengaw, that cover Iran also contributes to the picture. While their figures are necessarily provisional (the government has shut own the internet in Iran), two features stand out. If the attack on the school in Minab, which was hit by mistake instead of the IRGC naval base nearby is excluded, civilian casualties have so far been extremely low. Hengaw’s figures assess there have been 1,300 members of security forces killed, and 35 civilians. Second, the bulk of those security forces killed on 2 March were in Kurdish regions of Iran beneath Israel’s area of air operations.

It is certainly notable that these Israeli strikes have been concentrated on military installations in a region with a history of rebellion: in Kermanshah, for example, Iran Human Rights Monitor documented 49 protesters killed by security forces in early January. This is a campaign not only aimed at the Iranian missile threat against Israel, but also against the threat Iran’s security forces pose to their own people.

Announcing the latest round of war Netanyahu had pledged to “create conditions that will enable the brave Iranian people to cast off the yoke of this murderous regime.” It appears his military has begun to do exactly that: will Trump give now him the time to weaken the regime sufficiently to give rebellion a chance of success, or will he bail out, and leave Iranians to face the wrath of a weakened, but enraged regime?