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A few weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent held a news conference to herald Operation Economic Outcast, a campaign that he said was as important as Operation Overlord, which led to D-Day during the Second World War. The new plan, he said, was “to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.”
It was one of the most misleading and garbled speeches a US official has given since America went to war with Iran.
The targets, as Bessent failed to make clear, are not the religious leaders headed by the surviving Ayatollah and his acolytes, but the entity that actually has power over Iran’s economy: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The IRGC is known to have had no qualms about slaughtering thousands of anti-regime protestors, as they did in January. They also control at least half of the economic resources of the state, including foreign trade and, crucially, oil and gas production, the core of Iran’s economy.
It’s this fact that has led some US officials with decades of experience in Iranian affairs to push, with the support of Vice President JD Vance, for the policies that Bessent did not make clear: to find ways through the world financial system to squeeze the money flowing to the IRGC. The ultimate goal, officials involved explained to me, is to strip away the allegiance of its soldiers and weaken its morale to the point that a people’s revolution could take place, without a bloody IRGC-led massacre, and the government could finally be overthrown.
It would be a long shot, but there are some signs of progress amid the on-and-off US air war that Trump recently renewed—perhaps, as some suspect, though without evidence—at the suggestion of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in defiance of the alternative plan to strip the IRGC of its already diminished cash flow.
Some members of the IRGC, I have been told by a well-informed Israeli, have had little or no pay for months and have taken to begging neighbors for food to keep their families going. The plan’s most significant insight is that IRGC members are generally not religious zealots but, as one US official told me, “work for themselves and are not with the religious people. Most people do not get that. It’s a classic misread. Do you really think the ayatollahs run the nation’s oil production?
“What I am saying,” the official said, “is that we’ve been going after the wrong targets. It’s not the infrastructure of Iran but the financial assets of the IRGC. It’s the war that is not being seen. The IRGC is running out of money.”
One point of tension was the renewed US bombing attacks on military targets in Iran at the end of July, after a month of quiet. I asked the official whether Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, mockingly known to some inside the administration as “Pistol Pete,” was “going rogue” in opposition to the more sophisticated plans then being put in play. The answer was that the US intelligence community had picked up signs that a unit of the IRGC was intent on launching drones from “a heavily fortified cave on an island Iran controls along the Strait of Hormuz, and the Pentagon had authority to strike such targets.” There was, I was told, “no signal of a change back to strategic obliteration” of Iran. In other words, the strike was seen at the time as a one-off. The official added, crisply, “There is a difference between selective targeting against active IRGC military assets and carpet bombing the nation.”
The view of the Americans involved in the project is that a street revolution, given the lack of money, jobs, security, fresh water, food, and gasoline, could happen, with or without American and Israeli covert prodding. Current satellite intelligence, I was told, shows long lines at gas stations with customers limited to five liters per fill-up. (Iran has limited capability to refine gasoline.) These conditions would normally bring a nation to the edge of revolution, but now the thought is that a diminished IRGC past its willingness to shoot protesting masses would no longer obstruct such a revolt.
I didn’t ask the official whether, in his view, a new secular government in Tehran—if one were to be formed—would risk continued war with the US by carrying on with the current leadership’s policy of restricting access to the Strait of Hormuz. And would it continue to respond to US attacks by allowing a diminished IRGC or the feckless Iranian Army to fire rockets and drones at the gas- and oil-producing countries in the Gulf region?
All of this innovative thinking and planning may also put the old adage in play: beware of what you wish for.