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IS TRUMP A LIABILITY IN HIS OWN WAR?
Trump's loose lips may be undermining the war against Iran he and Netanyahu started
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As the war in Iran expands—the US and Israeli air forces and navies have detailed schedules, as of Wednesday March 4, of what targets to hit inside Iran and when—there is increasing concern in the American intelligence community about President Donald Trump’s inability to differentiate between what is secret intelligence information and what is not.
After the killing by air strike of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, Trump was widely quoted this week as saying that “most of the people we had in mind” as possible future leaders of Iran “are dead.” He said that whoever takes over Iran could be “as bad or worse” than Khamenei.
Before the attacks on Iran commenced, US and Israeli operatives inside the country worked intensely under deep cover to recruit future leaders of Iran from various groups, including, perhaps, from inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that is responsible for protecting the Ayatollah. The president apparently spoke without recalling that this fact is top secret.
I have been told Trump’s casual comment has led to a Revolutionary Guard witch hunt to search out the insiders who may have been dealing directly or indirectly with Israeli or American intelligence agencies. Trump has also talked casually, clearly in response to a suggestion from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about bringing “in the Kurds” to help in what is beginning to look like a long-term war to end the religious regime that still remains standing in Tehran. There is no evidence that the president or his immediate advisers were aware that the Kurds, who once controlled an area in what is now northwest Iran, have never given up on their ambition to gain sovereignty as they’ve also struggled for land inside Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
The Kurds were described to me by one experienced US intelligence insider as being “massed at the border” right now, “armed and ready.” Bringing in the Kurds, he said, “was one sure way to guarantee ethnic civil war.” The American, who was pleased that Trump was elected after the foreign policy calamities of the Biden administration, was dismayed by the president’s recent lapses in judgment. “How do we protect ourselves from people like him?” he asked.
The war is expanding by the hour as Iran continues to launch missiles and drones at targets throughout the Middle East and now at sea. The Pentagon, headed by Pete Hegseth, the least qualified defense secretary in modern times, has authorized at least one deadly US Navy submarine attack on an Iranian warship off the coast of Sri Lanka. It was the first torpedo attack by the American Navy since World War II. Trump has authorized the Navy to escort oil tankers through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, now blocked by Iran, in an effort to limit the rise in the cost of gasoline. The Pentagon is claiming to have sunk more than twenty Iranian military vessels in the few days since the war began, but information about where and when they were sunk has not been made public.
No American ground troops have been so far committed to the current war against Iran—as Vice President JD Vance has publicly emphasized—but the president has been relying more and more on Marco Rubio, the hawkish secretary of state, to make the case for the ongoing war. Israeli warplanes have once again struck hard in southern Lebanon, and Israel has acknowledged its troops are operating on the ground there in yet another attempt to diminish Hezbollah influence.
I have learned that the war launched by the US and Israel did not have to be. One of the innovative Israeli plans for ousting Khamenei and his Revolutionary Guard enforcers, who murdered thousands of anti-regime demonstrators earlier this year, involved convincing the leadership of Iran’s standing army to confront the Revolutionary Guards.
A recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies characterized the Iranian army, with its 610,000 active-duty personnel, as the largest standing army in the Middle East. The army, full of draftees, understandably was chary of going to war against the battle-tested Revolutionary Guards, whose many fanatical members had no hesitation in gunning down young men and women protestors at will.
Nonetheless, I was told by a knowledgeable Israeli that there was agreement with the Saudis and the Egyptians, two longtime foes of Khamenei’s regime, that the Iranian Army could take on the Revolutionary Guards and free Iran from its religious leadership with no outside intervention. It was believed that re-equipped and retrained special Iranian Army units numbering forty or fifty thousand, with the right leadership and arms, would be able to hold its own by the end of May or June.
The immediate problem, the Israeli told me, was to find and recruit the right generals and colonels in the army—those with no love for the Revolutionary Guards—who would be willing to take on the assignment. The Israeli said: “We needed to talk to the generals and officers to see who would prepare an alternative leadership of military units in three or four months that would go into battle with the Ayatollah’s guards.” The senior officers needed to be assured that the junior officers and their draftee soldiers would fight when the crunch came.
It would take time and Trump and Netanyahu would have none of it, the Israeli told me, even though it was understood that there were senior members of the US intelligence community, especially at the top of the Central Intelligence Agency, who knew that the rush to war by Trump and Netanyahu was extremely risky.
The American president, once again in thrall to the duplicitous Israeli leader, is doing what Netanyahu wants, as he did last year with a massive US bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. This time thousands of Iranians are likely to die in the US bombing and the fighting it is likely to unleash between the forces of the religious extremists and their opponents throughout the nation.
Is there any evidence that Donald Trump understands the fire he seems eager to ignite?