The Ahmadinejad Option

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that at the outset of the war, the United States and Israel sought to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader, after the anticipated fall of the Islamic Republic. The inauspicious first step in this brilliant plan was to blow up part of Ahmadinejad’s compound in an air strike on February 28 in the Narmak district of Tehran. Days later, I noted that the attack—then assumed to be an assassination attempt—may have been intended to free him from house arrest imposed by the Iranian regime. The Times confirms this interpretation. It says that Israel and the United States had “consulted” Ahmadinejad about this plan, but that he “became disillusioned” with it after the strike.The idea that Israel and the United States might back Ahmadinejad in a coup has drawn guffaws from several different groups. The first is people who stopped paying attention to Ahmadinejad in 2010. Americans and reform-oriented Iranians reviled then-President Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial, his backward attitudes about gay people, and his advocacy of a strong, nuclear-armed, expansionist theocratic state. For Israel to support him in 2026 is ironic, even hilarious. But Ahmadinejad began breaking with the hard-liners in 2011, and the government kept him under guard because they knew his dissent was real and potentially significant.The second group to scoff at this plan is much better informed. Fully aware of Ahmadinejad’s turn, they note instead his irrelevance. Reformists still despise him because he blocked them as president. The regime despises him because of his dissent. He has not held office since 2013. “It is difficult to understand how anyone could have believed that Ahmadinejad might become Iran’s next ruler,” the Iran analyst Raz Zimmt wrote on X, “given his complete lack of an organizational support base upon which he could rely to serve as a genuine alternative to the Islamic regime.”This second group is correct: Back