Iranians in exile are wishing and hoping, and hoping and wishing, that Israel will succeed in its demolition derby, taking apart bit by bit every aspect of the Islamic Republic’s military machine, so weakening it that the rulers can only with great difficulty suppress their domestic enemies should those enemies begin to demonstrate against them, and so humiliated in the eyes of the world that the number of those domestic enemies grows, as people have taken to saying, “exponentially.”

One of those Iranian exiles, hoping that the end is nigh for the Iranian regime, is Saeed Ghasseminejad, whose appeal to Israel to keep on fighting, and to include regime change as one of its war aims, can be found here: “Israel cannot settle for a temporary military win, it must topple the Islamic regime — opinion,” by Saeed Ghasseminejad, Jerusalem Post, June 16, 2025:

The calls for restraint will come, as they always do. As Israeli military successes against the Islamic Republic of Iran mount, a chorus of international voices will urge Jerusalem to “take the win” and seek a diplomatic off-ramp. They will argue from a well-worn script, advising Israel to consolidate its victory from a position of strength. It is a tempting and logical-sounding argument that would be a catastrophic mistake.

For Israel, this is not a conventional conflict that can be concluded with a ceasefire and a treaty. It is a confrontation with an ideologically driven regime whose very identity is predicated on Israel’s destruction. To settle for anything less than the removal of the Islamist regime in Tehran is to merely pause a clock that is ticking towards a more dangerous future: a defeat in disguise.

A remarkable consensus is forming across the Israeli political spectrum on this critical point. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks directly to the Iranian people, urging them that “your light will defeat their darkness,” he is doing more than scoring rhetorical points.

His words, echoed by key opposition figures like former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who has long expressed a desire to see the Iranian people freed from their oppressors, signal a fundamental shift. The debate in Israel is no longer about whether to confront Iran, but how to ensure the confrontation yields a permanent solution. The answer is clear: the regime must go.

Israel has degraded critical threats, it must do more

Israel’s immediate military actions have, by all accounts, been successful in degrading Tehran’s most critical threats. The three pillars of the regime’s threat – its nuclear program, its ballistic missile arsenal, and its global terror network – have been shaken. But to believe these setbacks are permanent is to ignore decades of history….

Israel has accomplished a great deal militarily since October 7, 2023. It has systematically weakened every one of Iran’s proxies in the region. It has destroyed Hamas in Gaza, and brought Hezbollah to its knees in southern Lebanon. Neither terror group now poses much of a threat to Israel. Israeli strikes have destroyed 80-90% of the arsenals of both groups — missiles, rockets, and drones. Half of the fighters Hamas had on October 7 have been killed, and many more wounded. Hezbollah has lost thousands of its combatants, including 3,800 who were so seriously wounded by those “exploding pagers” prepared and distributed by Mossad, that they are no longer able to fight. By having destroyed Assad’s main ally, Hezbollah, Israel facilitated the victory of the Sunni Arab rebels over Assad’s Alawite-dominated regime, turning Syria from a firm ally of Iran into an enemy of the Islamic state. Syria is now run by Sunni Arabs who will never forget or forgive Iran’s support for the Assad regime. The IDF hasn’t forgotten the Houthis, either, and has managed to destroy in Yemen most of the airbase at Sanaa and the ports of Hodeidah and as-Salif.

In Iran, the Israelis have struck a dozen sites housing various components of the country’s nuclear program. These include two of the three main sites for uranium enrichment, at Natanz and Isfahan; the third, Fordow, has so far been spared as the IDF waits to see what assistance, if any, Washington will provide so that the facility built 300 feet deep inside a mountain can be destroyed. In addition, the IDF has severely damaged military airbases at Tabriz and Hamadan, destroyed a nuclear reactor at Arak, killed 13 of the most senior generals in both the IRGC and the Iranian army, and assassinated the nine most important nuclear scientists, all of whom — sleeping in apartments all over Tehran — were killed at the exact same moment by Israeli missiles. Israel has destroyed Iran’s state television. It has destroyed the last F-14 Tomcats in Iran’s arsenal. It has destroyed both ballistic missile factories and ballistic missiles, as well as missile launchers. Hundreds of ballistic missiles have been fired at Israel in the first week of the war but fewer the 10% have avoided interception, and even those that did have mostly fallen in open areas. Instead of its former barrages of 100 ballistic missiles in a single night, the Iranians are down to a few dozen. Every day brings fresh news of Israeli successes: more nuclear sites hit, more ballistic missiles and more missile launchers destroyed, more generals killed, more government offices, from internal security to the broadcasting authority, destroyed.

Saeed Ghasseminejad is grateful for Israel’s destruction of the Islamic Republic’s airbases, ballistic missiles, nuclear facilities, and its assassination of generals and nuclear scientists. But he insists that the war would have been in vain unless there is regime change.

The regime that has ruled Iran for 46 years will not change its spots. If it is not overturned, it will still have the power to suppress dissent and oppress its people. It will try to resurrect its nuclear program and to rebuild its ballistic missile factories. It may call on its ally Russia — so eager to re-establish a major presence in the Middle East, or perhaps its other ally, China — for help with both the nuclear program and the production of ballistic missiles. Of course the IDF will be watching, but may not want to risk hitting Russian or Chinese soldiers and defense technologists. The only way to finally put paid, permanently, to the Iranian threat is to overturn the present regime and hope that its replacement, ideally a government of technocrats uninterested in continuing a jihad against Israel, will see the folly of wasting more tens of billions of dollars on waging war against the Jewish state, which has no quarrel with the people of Iran and, furthermore, has been the most significant force in overturning the despotism that has been oppressing them for almost half a century.

AUTHOR

Hugh Fitzgerald

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.