Ossareh

Why Ahmadinejad? Why Now? The New York Times reported that the war Israel and the United States launched against the Islamic Republic carried more than its declared nuclear and military objectives. According to the report, Israel had designed a multi-phase plan for changing Iran's leadership — and in that plan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was being considered as an unlikely candidate for a post-Khamenei "alternative leadership." The plan ran in stages: airstrikes, the killing of top officials, freeing Ahmadinejad from house arrest, the mobilization of Kurdish forces, influence operations, and pressure on infrastructure, all meant to collapse the regime. That part of the plan failed. Ahmadinejad was wounded in the Israeli strike on his home and, according to the Times, has not been seen publicly since; his current whereabouts and condition are unknown. The expected wave of instability never came, and Washington and Tel Aviv had underestimated the Islamic Republic's capacity to absorb the blow. Some American officials, the report notes, had been skeptical of the plan from the outset. But the more important questions are these: Why is this report being published now? Who benefits from its release? And why does it matter politically? If a plan of this kind existed, it would by definition belong to the most closely held security scenarios, with its circle of insiders limited to small groups in Israel, the United States, and possibly Ahmadinejad's immediate orbit. The leak to the New York Times, then, cannot be read as straightforward news disclosure. The leak is itself a political act. Its implicit message is that the "war-and-collapse" model for the Islamic Republic has, at least at this stage, failed to reach its maximalist goal, and that the opposing tendency in Washington (exit from war, ceasefire, crisis management, and the possibility of a deal with the Islamic Republic) has gained the upper hand. That is not an absolute or irreversible proposition, particularly if the Islamic Republic fails to adjust to the new dynamics of the post-ceasefire moment. The central point, however, is the politics of postwar blame. This narrative is neither one of absolute defeat for Israel and the United States nor one of complete victory. They achieved a portion of their minimum objectives: damage to Iran's military and security infrastructure, the imposition of costs, the demonstration of operational reach deep inside Iran, and harm to part of the Islamic Republic's command network. But the maximalist objective, converting those blows into political collapse or the rise of an alternative leadership, was not realized. The New York Times report matters precisely because it sits inside that gap: the space between military success and political failure. Within this frame, the storyline runs as follows. Israel had a plan. Washington harbored doubts about its viability. The plan was triggered, or at least prepared for execution. But the expected local actor failed to step onto the stage, and the plan never reached its final objective. In Ahmadinejad's case, the narrative of failure is that he withdrew from the project after being wounded, and now, per the New York Times, has disappeared entirely; his whereabouts and condition are unknown, and the alternative-leadership scenario therefore collapsed. The same logic applies to the Kurds. The Israeli plan had counted on ground participation by Kurdish forces and on the creation of instability following the air campaign. That part did not materialize either. The post-failure narrative came this time from Trump himself, in April and May, after the war, when he publicly accused the Kurds, on more than one occasion, of having kept for themselves the American weapons meant for Iranian protesters. The Kurdish parties, PJAK, KDPI, Komala, and PAK, flatly denied the charge and warned that such statements expose them to Iranian retaliation. The same logic, in a different form, applies to the December 2025–January 2026 protests, though the structure is not identical. Those protests came before the war, not after. Israel and the United States publicly supported them, and Reza Pahlavi issued calls for street action. The demonstrations began on December 29, 2025, triggered by the collapse of the rial, and continued into January. The crackdown that followed was severe; according to human rights reports, thousands were killed. But protesters did not seize government buildings, and street protest did not translate into a decisive political stage. In practice, Trump's same narrative, that the Kurds had kept the weapons, later became the explanatory frame for the failure of the protest wave as well. Even in this case, where internal disagreement within Washington was not as visible as in the others, the eventual pattern of blame was much the same: the burden of failure fell on the local actor expected to deliver the outcome. This essay is not an attempt to fact-check each of these claims one by one, or to adjudicate their relationship to rivalries within the Iranian opposition. The larger frame is what matters. Within it, Israel and the United States were able to strike the Islamic Republic but were unable to turn the blow into a collapse. The political consequence of this narrative is the simultaneous spotlighting of two crises: the crisis of the Islamic Republic's legitimacy and the crisis of a credible alternative. This paradox benefits two camps above all: actors inside the Islamic Republic searching for a formula of survival and bargaining with Washington, and circles in Washington that have grown more conservative about Israel's more ambitious regime-change ideas. But why Ahmadinejad? Polling data from the Gamaan Institute makes the picture more precise. In its June 2024 survey, when respondents were asked which figures they would prefer in a hypothetical free election, Ahmadinejad drew 8.9 percent support, almost level with Ali Khamenei at 9.1 percent, and above Mohammad Javad Zarif at 6.2 percent. More telling than the raw number is the quality of the support: roughly 40 percent of those who chose Ahmadinejad chose only him. That puts his loyal core at about 3.6 percent of the target population. The figure is too small for national leadership. It is not too small as a lever inside the structure. Gamaan places Ahmadinejad within the "principlist" cluster alongside Khamenei, but at a noticeable distance from the Khamenei branch. His base is heterogeneous. Co-selections appear with Khamenei, with Reza Pahlavi, and with Zarif. That combination indicates that Ahmadinejad is neither fully outside the structure nor aligned with the ruling core. He stands at a point that looks attractive for engineering an internal rift, not for leading a transition. Ahmadinejad has simultaneously been a symbol of defiance toward two unrelated camps. First, toward the middle-class critics and opponents of the Islamic Republic who rose against him in the 2009 Green Movement and were crushed. Then, toward Khamenei and his inner circle, who later cast him and his entourage out as a "deviant current." That dual position may be exactly what makes him attractive to the designers of an internal-rift scenario: not as a transitional leader, but as a lever for activating part of the structure's internal contradictions. The same paradox, however, makes him unacceptable for much of the Islamic Republic's opposition, inside Iran and abroad. Ahmadinejad can be a marker of fracture. He cannot carry the legitimacy of transition. None of this needs to be read as a pre-coordinated, integrated program. The question may have more to do with the relationship between minimum and maximalist objectives. Failures on the ground are not simply being cleaned up. They can be converted into the language of a bargain. Every piece publicly identified as burned can simultaneously serve as a message to Tehran: this path was tried, it did not work, now let us talk about the next path. This is not only postwar narrative. It can also be pre-agreement positioning. The Trump administration can now send the ruling team in Tehran a signal of this kind: the Ahmadinejad option was raised and it failed; the Kurds were counted on, that path did not work, and Trump publicly shifted part of the blame onto them; the street and the opposition could not shift the balance of power. So Washington, at this moment, is neither backing a specific alternative nor insisting on immediate regime change. The practical meaning of this signal can be a return to a deal, not the elimination of the Islamic Republic, but the search for a formula to contain it, extract concessions, and reach an agreement. But the signal cuts both ways. Washington may read it from a position of strength: minimum objectives have been secured, and we can now negotiate from the upper hand. Tehran may read the same situation in reverse: we took blows, but we did not fall; the United States and Israel failed in their maximalist objective; we can therefore raise the price of any agreement. The question, then, is not just who won. It is which level of objective each side uses as its standard for victory, the minimum or the maximalist. All of this suggests that Israel and the United States are, at this moment, forced to redefine their understanding of shared interests in Iran. That does not mean ruling out a resumption of the war. It does reveal part of the complexity of the ceasefire. In this state, the war has not produced a full political victory, and the Islamic Republic has not been able to conceal its vulnerability. The main contest now is over the interpretation of that gap: are the military and intelligence blows capital for a deal, or the prelude to the next round of pressure? One reading that emerges from these threads is that the United States and Israel, however coordinated they may have been militarily, lacked a shared political strategy for the end state. They had a plan for how to begin. They did not have one for how it should end. Nor did either power engage in any serious strategic dialogue with the broader coalition of the Islamic Republic's opponents. That tactical approach meant that even real military and intelligence gains inside Iran could not be translated into a political order beyond the Islamic Republic. It also shows how the strength of powerful outside actors, when disconnected from the actual forces of opposition, can end up giving even a weakened Islamic Republic room to maneuver. But that is only one side of the story. The fragmentation, rivalries, and personal, factional, and organizational interests within the opposition have also prevented its various wings from presenting themselves as credible representatives of the Iranian people or of the anti-regime majority. So far, however unintentionally, they have helped create the space in which even the weakest version of the Islamic Republic can survive. The result is a regime that is neither victorious nor toppled, but one that, in the gap between two incapacities, has remained more alive than its own strength should have allowed.

آذر ماجدی: ‼️‼️‼️‼️ ۱۹۹۱ که بعداً کردستان عراق به یه معنا اتونومی بیشتری پیدا کرد تعداد زیادی از مردم کردستان عراق کشته، ویران، آواره شدن، درد کشیدن و روی درد اون‌ها دو تا خونواده بارزانی و طالبانی قدرت گرفتن. اینا الان به بیلیونر تبدیل شدن. ثروتی که تو آمریکا دارن وحشتناکه ولی معلم توی کردستان عراق، کارگر تو کردستان عراق بعضاً ۶ ماه به ۶ ماه حقوق نمی‌گیرن. وضعیت مردم کردستان عراق الان با آمار و ارقام بدتر از شرایطیه که زمان صدام سر کار بود داشتن. زمان صدام زبونشونو می‌تونستن حرف بزنن، مدرسه‌شون به زبون کردی درس می‌داد، کاملاً از یه خودمختاری برخوردار بودن ولی اینقدر فرق نبود. قتل‌های ناموسی از زمانی که این‌ها اومدن سر کار وحشتناک توی کردستان عراق بالا رفته. این کاریه که ناسیونالیسم کرد اینجا کرده. بحث دفاع از صدام نیست، بحث در اینکه اگر شما فریب ناسیونالیسم رو بخورید فکر می‌کنید اون‌ها رهایی میدن. ببینید تمام این معما در دو تا کلمه خوابیده، در دو تا عبارت خوابیده: خاورمیانه جدید، اسرائیل بزرگ. نقشه‌ای که از بعد از جنگ جهانی اول با تشکیل اسرائیل شروع کردن و با نابودی منطقه خرد خرد بردن جلو، الان دارن به آخرین مراحلش می‌رسن. مسئله کرد از اول که شروع شد، که بتونن این شرایط رو حفظ کنن با جنگ و خصومت. به خصوص همیشه بخشی از مردم، سازمان‌های ناسیونالیست کرد مسلح بودن. این اتفاق برای کسای دیگه نمیفتاد ولی تو کردستان عراق همیشه مسلح بودن، تو کردستان ترکیه مسلح شدن و بعد تو کردستان ایران یه دوره‌ای مسلح بودن و دوباره از بعد از شکست انقلاب ۵۷ مسلح شدن. این مسئله کرد یه ویژگی خاصی داشت به خصوص که سمپاتی و هم‌بستگی بسیاری از طرف مردم دنیا نسبت بهشون احساس میشد چون به طور واقعی زیر ستم بودن، سرکوب شده بودن. ولی الان چه اتفاقی داره میفته؟ ناسیونالیسم کرد به یک ابزار کامل مزدوری امپریالیسم آمریکا بدل شده. این هیچ ربطی به مردم کردستان نداره، این هیچ ربطی به احزاب چپی که الان مخالف جنگن و مخالف این حرکتان نداره. وقتی یک نیرویی خودش رو به این شکل در خدمت کی می‌ذاره؟ در خدمت (من الان دیگه نمی‌دونم چه لفظی استفاده کنم، بعضی وقتا آدم می‌مونه باید بگم شیطانی تنها لفظیه که به نظرم می‌رسه) به ارتش اسرائیل. ببینید چه‌جوری داره می‌کشه، به بمب‌های اسرائیل و آمریکا نگاه کنید چطوری دارن می‌کشن. بچه‌ها رو مثل پودر تیکه تیکه می‌کنن و شما هنوز حاضرید بگید من بدون قید و شرط از این دولت حکومت می‌گیرم؟ مردم رو الاغ فرض کردید؟ ابله فرض کردید؟ مگه میشه همچین چیزی؟ مگه میشه همچین چیزی؟ دولت آمریکا (تموم می‌کنم)، دولت آمریکا، دولت‌های غربی، اسرائیل، این‌ها به شما بدون قید و شرط هیچی نمیدن. حتی نونم نمیدن اگه گشنه باشید بخورید، همش با قید و شرطه. این‌ها خودشون رو فروختن، خودشون رو به فاشیسم و به جنایت و به نسل‌کشی فروختن و تاریخ در مورد این‌ها قضاوت خواهد کرد.

مسئله اصلا این نیست که جنگ میشود یا خیر. جنگ قطعی است. دیر و زود دارد سوخت و سوز ندارد. مسئله این است که ما تلاش کنیم جنگی که قطعا رخ خواهد داد از نوع جنگ اول خلیج فارس نباشد، از نوع جنگ دوم خلیج فارس و با هدف سرنگونی ج‌ا باشد. اگر این اپوزوسیون خائن به مخالفت با اقدام نظامی ⬇️