Despite everyone knowing that Israel was going to attack, Iran appeared to be taken almost entirely by surprise.
The surgical strikes by Israel decapitated the Iranian military. The chief of staff of the armed forces and the second-highest commander after Ayatollah Khamenei, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, was killed along with his deputy, Gen. Gholamali Rashid. An Israeli bomb targeted Iranian army headquarters. Also, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, was killed after Israel hit the Guard's headquarters.
Why were the commander and his deputy in the same place while Israel attacked? Few details about the strike are known at this point, but it's inexplicable that so many senior Iranian commanders weren't better protected.
Beyond that, the Iranian government must be close to panic. There is a traitor in their midst, extremely well placed in the military hierarchy, who is feeding Israel real-time intelligence on the movements and whereabouts of various high-ranking officers.
In addition to the three general officers, two high-ranking nuclear scientists were killed. Mohammad Mehdi Tehranji, a theoretical physicist and president of the Islamic Azad University in Tehran, was assassinated along with Fereydoun Abbasi, the former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran. Abbasi was a member of the Iranian parliament and was long suspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be the driving force behind Iran's nuclear weapons program.
"Abbasi was a key scientist in the alleged Iranian covert nuclear weapons program headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi," reported the New York Times. "Abbasi personally directed work to calculate the yield of a nuclear weapon as well as work on high-energy neutron sources," the report added.
Israel tried once before to kill Abbasi in 2011 when a motorcyclist tossed a bomb into his car in broad daylight on a Tehran street. They didn't miss the second time.
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This was a raid designed to degrade Iran's retaliatory capabilities. But its primary target was the Iranian nuclear program. In addition to hitting several atomic research labs, the IDF targeted the nuclear enrichment site at Natanz, where most of Iran's most advanced centrifuges are located. It's possible that many of those machines had been moved to the underground site at Fordow prior to the attack.
Still, in addition to what the Iranians call "surface damage" to the facility, "Israel's military confirmed the strike, saying its air force had conducted a precision-guided attack on the underground sections of the Natanz facility, located in Iran's central province of Isfahan," reports the Chinese wire service Xinhua.
The IDF is warning that this could be a prolonged war. Is it possible that Israel wants to take out the "head of the snake" and go for regime change in Iran?
Ongoing Israeli strikes against Iran have raised the specter of whether Israel was trying to force regime change in Iran, according to two US officials and another source familiar with the latest intelligence.
That has long been a broad goal inside the Israeli government, according to one recent US intelligence assessment.
Although there is no direct intelligence to prove that was Israel’s primary goal with this attack, the source familiar with the intelligence said, some US officials believe that Israel saw it as a possible opportunity to do so. One of the US officials said it’s not clear whether the Trump administration would support Israel in that effort.
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz said the strikes were aimed at thwarting Iran’s capabilities and remove the threat of destruction from Israel.
Regime change would almost certainly require boots on the ground, which is the kind of operation that Israel is ill-prepared to carry out. They can still make life extremely difficult for the Iranians by destroying their oil industry, which could lead to an economic collapse and an end to the regime at the hands of angry mobs.
Israel isn't finished. There are still the underground sites at Fordow and the Isfahan nuclear fuel plant. It's probable that those sites will be dealt with in the coming days.
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