Without regime change, there will be no lasting peace with Iran and no end to the pursuit of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

The Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei aka Iran’s bloody, corrupt dictator said after the Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, military leaders, nuclear scientists and their residential areas: “With this crime, the Zionist regime has prepared for itself a bitter, painful fate, which it will definitely see.”

In reality, already the 2022 Mashi Amini protests have shown that the Iranian regime has no majority. Many observers estimate that only 20% to 25% of Iranians stand behind their regime. But as I wrote in 2018, the Iranian protests have little chance of success unless they become a mass movement with millions in the streets. The opposition is neither united nor armed. The regime has a monopoly on the use of force (Gewaltmonopol).

Since the October 7, 2023 massacres of Israeli civilians by the Hamas terror organization, the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had no scruples forming a government including extremists, is leading a bloody war against the Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip, which has led to the death of over 10,000 innocent children and teenagers below the age of 16.

Netanyahu is most likely corrupt, should have been forced out of office a long time ago and has damaged Israel’s credibility for years through war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza war. But he is right when he said and wrote, for instance on X: “The Islamic regime [in Iran], which has oppressed you [the Iranian people] for almost 50 years threatens to destroy our country, the State of Israel. As I said yesterday and many times before, Israel’s fight is not against the Iranian people. Our fight is against the murderous Islamic regime that oppresses and impoverishes you. The nation of Iran and the nation of Israel have been friends since the days of Cyrus the Great.”

Already with the first overnight attack with some 200 warplanes striking over 100 targets in Iran, Israel managed to kill several leading military figures, including Major General Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of the armed forces aka the number two of the Iranian military after the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; General Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps; and General Gholamali Rashid, deputy commander in chief of the armed forces, to name just three. In addition, Israel managed to kill several leading nuclear scientists.

Even if U.S. President Trump offered Israel the necessary bunker buster bombs and the warplanes to carry them to attack the Fordow underground uranium enrichment site, such successful strikes could only delay Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon, but not prevent it. Without regime change, there will be no lasting peace with Iran and no end to the pursuit of an Iranian nuclear bomb.

The Israeli prime minister is right to stress that the Iranian regime is both an enemy of Israel as well as of the Iranian people. Unfortunately, the unarmed, divided opposition without a leading figure seems neither capable nor prepared for an uprising at the moment. Let’s hope that I’m wrong and that the end of the disgusting Iranian regime is near.

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Photograph of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Via Wikipedia/Wikimedia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Article added on June 15, 2025 at 23:50 German time.