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a deeper similarity, and one that may be more telling: the domestic political dynamic in Israel at the time of the strike, which may be playing out again today

As widely expected, Netanyahu’s political future really depends on one man: his former chief of staff Naftali Bennett. Bennett’s Yamina party has seven seats, meaning that Bennett could either rescue Netanyahu or complete the anti-Netanyahu bloc. If he sits under Netanyahu, Bennett will likely take the defense ministry, a portfolio he briefly held—one year (or about four governments) ago. The timing could work out for both. Bennett needs security credentials, and the defense ministry has historically been a stepping stone to the top job, to which Bennett aspires. Netanyahu, meanwhile, may well be in his final term as prime minister. Both are looking for a legacy achievement, with Bennett aiming to step forward and Netanyahu to step back. The two have reason to combine forces and provide the missing piece of the Osirak moment: a stable coalition government and a hawkish security cabinet.

Like Begin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has used the media, sabotage, and assassination to delay Iran’s nuclear program over the last decade.

Netanyahu’s political position at home is significantly weaker

From 1977 to 1981, Israel used assassination, sabotage, and unconventional diplomacy to slow down and degrade the Iraqi program. The Mossad launched a media blitz, leaking intelligence to create political pressure against the program. The head of Iraq’s nuclear program was killed in his Paris hotel, and other Iraqi nuclear scientists in Europe met similar fates. French and Italian companies producing components for the program were bombed.

For almost 20 years, Netanyahu has warned the world that an Iranian nuclear weapon is around the corner. For about the same length of time, news outlets, often tipped off by anonymous “senior officials,” have warned that an Israeli strike on Iran is imminent

the United States is backpedaling from its Middle East commitments; the 2015 nuclear deal, a diplomatic framework to contain Iran’s nuclear program, has since been built and collapsed; and Israel and its neighbors have never been closer

The hands of Iran’s disgraced outgoing president, Hassan Rouhani, who negotiated the agreement, are tied: one by a hard-line legislature, and the other by an increasingly hawkish clerical establishment. The Iranian public will vote for a new president in June. According to a University of Maryland poll, while around 75 percent of Iranians supported the nuclear deal when it was signed, barely half of Iranians now approve of it.

Iran continues to drift further out of compliance with the agreement, making irreversible progress with its nuclear research

for several political and regional reasons, it would make sense for Israel to strike Iran sooner rather than later. There are the changing calculations of regional governments, but also the changing fortunes of Israel’s other main foe: Hezbollah. The group still has roughly 150,000 rockets and missiles and a commando force of around 20,000 that could respond to an Israeli strike on Iran. But since Hezbollah is also a political party—an increasingly unpopular one given its role in Lebanon’s economic disintegration—it seems less likely than ever that it would be able to respond on Iran’s behalf and survive politically

today, Iran has the bandwidth to respond to Israel. Were Israel to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran would have no option but to punch back. U.S. Central Command estimates that at least a few hundred Iranian ballistic missiles have Israel within their range, which means that those would be the most likely avenue of response. It is most unlikely that Israel could intercept all of the missiles. Yet a hawk would argue, as did Begin, that a barrage of conventional missiles is better than a single nuclear one.

ballistic strikes on Israel would make it politically unfeasible for the Biden administration to resurrect the nuclear deal or withdraw the Trump administration’s sanctions from Iran

Netanyahu is not Begin. And Iran today is not Saddam’s Iraq. The two nuclear programs diverge in significant ways. But the Israeli domestic drivers of the Osirak strike nevertheless offer a striking parallel to the present. If Netanyahu returns to power with Bennett as defense minister, Israel is looking at a hawkish cabinet with an additional dose of ego and political ambition

why would Iranians downplay the extent of the events and deny Israeli involvement? There are a few plausible explanations. First is to avoid embarrassment. The explicit admission of sabotage, coupled with Iran’s inability to stop it, would make the regime and its security institutions look completely powerless, incompetent, and fragile in the eyes of the Iranian people.Second is to avoid falling into a trap. Iranians believe that these explosions represent a paradigm shift in how the US-Israeli political and security establishments deal with Iran. According to the Iranians, the United States and Israel are working very hard to provoke Iran into retaliation, either in terms of a kinetic attack or in terms of ramping up its nuclear program. The latter outcome would give them more grounds to declare Iran noncompliant with IAEA safeguards and eventually return international sanctions via the UN Security Council. Because retaliation would risk uncontrolled escalation and could result in a full-scale war with Israel and the United States—an outcome Iran wants to avoid—officials may be taking ample precaution.

The bottom line, given the silence of Iranians, is that it is highly likely that there will be more incidents at sensitive military and nuclear sites, and Iran seems to be unable to do anything to stop them.

nuclear latency

The regime has every reason to maintain latency and no reasons to go further and construct a nuclear device. The latter step would attract severe international sanctions.

As for the general Islamic law of war, it forbids killing innocent non-combatants such as women, children and unarmed men; ipso facto it forbids deploying nuclear weapons. It was suggested that Iran has chemical weapons and that these would as much violate the stricture above as nuclear warheads. I do not agree that Iran has a chemical weapons program, but in any case chemical weapons have for the most part been battlefield weapons used against massed troops or in trenches. Having such a program does not imply intent to kill innocent civilians. Whereas making a bomb does imply such intent and is therefore considered by most Muslim jurisprudents incompatible with Islamic law

Nuclear latency has all the advantages of actual possession of a bomb without any of the unpleasant consequences, of the sort North Korea is suffering

Scott Sagan noted in one of his essays that one impetus to seek an actual bomb is regime and national pride in the country's modernity. But this motivation does not exist in the case of Iran, since the Islamic Republic is a critic of the alleged horrors of modernity and because it defines nuclear bombs as shameful, rather than something to boast about.

nuclear latency is not illegal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treat

The even greater threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program is its potential to unleash a cascade of proliferation in the Middle East, beginning with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. For both of these states, the idea that Jews and Persians could have a monopoly on nuclear weapons in a region demographically and culturally dominated by Arabs is shameful. For Saudi Arabia, a security motivation will be at play as well, given its physical proximity to Iran and the strategic imperative of deterring any Iranian threat to Saudi Arabia’s oil-production facilities.

The possibility that Israel may no longer be capable of forcing peace upon those who deny its right to exist is beginning to dawn on many Israelis. Whether Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or not, the time has come for Israel’s defense community to develop a strategic doctrine for long-term coexistence that does not rely on a posture of invincibility.

Today’s tensions stem, in many ways, from the original foundations of the odd-couple relationship: an oil-for security bargain that always sought, but never fully managed, to bridge the divide between a liberal democracy and a conservative religious monarchy

Some experts believe U.S.-Saudi ties will ultimately weather the storm, as they always have, because of the need for a large, wealthy, and anti-Iran anchor for U.S. interests in the Middle East

“But we don’t need the Saudis anymore—this comes in a very different geopolitical environment than previous crises.”

Saudi Arabia was one of the only countries in the world that continued to receive U.S. Lend-Lease aid after the end of the war.

essentially underwriting the security of an oil-rich desert sheikdom to keep oil supplies flowing—and to keep the Soviets out of the Middle East.

Roosevelt had met Ibn Saud hoping for Saudi support for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, which the king vehemently opposed, and the U.S. president—in Saudi eyes—gave his word not to press the matter. But Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, eventually supported the creation of Israel, sowing years of distrust and cries of betrayal in Saudi Arabia

“In my conversations with the king, the crown prince, and the deputy crown prince, they favored the effort to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. But they wanted more: They wanted us to push on Iran’s actions in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and we didn’t do that.”

The Iranian revolution, as well as an assault that same year on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, terrified Saudi leadership, who saw how vulnerable their own position was. The revolution, by removing the shah and creating permanent enmity with the United States, left Saudi Arabia as America’s main linchpin in the Middle East, all the bad blood from the oil embargo notwithstanding

Fearful of being toppled by religious radicals, Saudi leaders embraced a much more conservative line and empowered hard-line religious leaders in their own country, the first steps toward a decadeslong program to export the austere Wahhabi brand of Islam particular to the kingdom. Soon, wealthy Saudis, including one Osama bin Laden, started funding the Muslim mujahideen who were fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began the same year as the Iranian revolution. Two decades later, that Saudi lurch toward a harsher official line on religion would end up creating the biggest crisis yet in the special relationship.

“The relationship never really recovered from 9/11,”

the George W. Bush administration, despite vehement Saudi objections, decided to invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein. Saudis feared that would open the door to greater Iranian influence on their doorstep, as in fact happened.

In the end, the United States and Saudi Arabia patched up the dispute, and the oil embargo ended by the spring of 1974. But the scars it left were deep and long-lasting, permanently damaging Saudi Arabia’s image in American popular opinion, and leaving deep-rooted fears that the Saudis could and would use their oil weapon to damage U.S. interests—a fear that has persisted even though the nature of the Saudi oil threat has changed.

“King Abdullah was very respectful and liked Obama personally, but there were things they couldn’t understand,” said Westphal, who was present for three of Obama’s record four trips to Saudi Arabia. “‘Why are you supporting Maliki, who is essentially handing over his country to the Iranians? How can you not depose Assad?’”

Since 1979, Saudi leaders had seen Iran as the gravest threat to the region and their own security, and U.S. efforts to reach a nuclear deal while seemingly letting Iran continue its destabilizing behavior in the region unsettled the Saudis.

“There’s no question that the Arab Spring unsettled the U.S. relationship with the Saudis. For them, the U.S. response [to calls for reform in the Arab world] was way too sympathetic, and the relationship cooled,”

Saudi leaders famously rolled out the red carpet, and a glowing orb, for Trump’s first overseas trip as president. It seemed a surprising about-face after Trump’s attacks on Muslims, and repeated attacks on Saudi Arabia, on the campaign trail, when he accused the kingdom of carrying out 9/11, criticized it for sponging off American protection, and threatened an economic boycott. Saudi leaders were happy to overlook Trump’s comments, eager to forge ties with an untested and unorthodox president before other foreign leaders could. “Washington is like Rome in the Roman Empire, and we are like a satellite state—you pay homage to the emperor,” Shihabi said. “You could put a monkey in the White House, and we’d pay homage.”

The playbook that has reliably worked since 1945 to ground the bilateral ties in personal relationships with the president now seems to be backfiring. Mohammed bin Salman, reviled by many in Congress for his alleged role in the Khashoggi killing, as well as other continued human rights abuses inside Saudi Arabia and in Yemen, is seen as being exceptionally close to Kushner and Trump. Riding the coattails of a historically unpopular, already-impeached president isn’t the best way to improve Saudi Arabia’s image.

Despite decades of close economic ties and military and counterterrorism cooperation, Saudi Arabia never seemed to plant deep roots in the United States that would institutionalize the relationship beyond kings, generals, and presidents. This meant when tensions flared up between the two countries, Riyadh didn’t have many outside allies to come to its defense in Washington

Mohammed bin Salman’s foreign-policy excesses: the disastrous war in Yemen, the bizarre virtual kidnapping of Lebanon’s prime minister to pressure Iran and Hezbollah, and an embargo on Qatar, its small neighbor and a key U.S. military partner. At home, there was the regular drumbeat of reports on human rights violations, plus a $100 billion shakedown on wealthy political rivals to consolidate power under the guise of an anti-corruption campaign.

As long as they’ve been a country—they’re so young—they really don’t know what their place in the world would be like without the backing of the United States,”

Unlike in 1973, when Saudi Arabia used the oil weapon to jack up oil prices and hurt the United States, this time crashing oil prices did the trick. U.S. shale producers need oil prices above $40 a barrel to break even; the Russian-Saudi price war sent the price of oil to $25 and then into the single digits, ensuring a wave of bankruptcies and economic hardship from Texas to North Dakota.

“The Saudis have a deep problem with the Democrats, and that’s been clear for a long time. Now they have spoiled their relationship with Republicans,”

In the summer of 2019, when Iranian attacks on oil tankers near the Persian Gulf threatened the flow of oil, Trump’s response was to tell allies such as Japan and South Korea to protect their own ships, questioning why the United States should continue to carry out a mission it’s done for decades unless other countries coughed up cash. That fall, key Saudi oil facilities were attacked, allegedly by Iran, knocking out 5 percent of global oil production in a matter of minutes. The U.S. response, other than a Trump tweet, was to do nothing.

The bitter recriminations during this spring’s oil price war, coming on the heels of the Khashoggi murder, the continued war in Yemen, and other Saudi missteps, give many observers reason to believe that the relationship is due for a fundamental rethink.

as long as the United States continues to view Iran as a major threat, close relations with Saudi Arabia will have a strong appeal

Iranian officials have not publicly identified him as a nuclear scientist, referring to him only as an Iranian citizen.

Iran's foreign minister, on Wednesday accused the US of involvement in Amiri's disappearance.

"We have found documents that prove US interference in the disappearance of the Iranian pilgrim Shahram Amiri in Saudi Arabia,"

Meir Javedanfar, an Iran analyst based in Tel Aviv, said the most likely scenario was that Amiri had defected.

it is possible he is what some people call a 'walk-in'

we can't rule out that he perhaps walked in himself with the information in order to give himself up and work with the Americans."

Turkish, Arabic and Israeli media suggested he defected to the West, but his family has dismissed that.

Javedanfar also said Amiri's disappearance in Saudi Arabia would be of particular concern to Tehran.

"They scored a victory in the Lebanese elections where Hezbollah [which is backed by Iran] lost, and now we see the Saudi king in Damascus. The Iranian press see that as an effort by Riyadh to reduce Iran's hand.

"If you put all these together, I think the Iranian government is particularly worried that this happened on Saudi soil."

Malek Ashtar University, where Amiri reportedly worked, is involved in the implementation of "special national research projects" and has faculties in aerospace, electrical engineering and other topics, according to the university's website.

Amiri disappeared more than three months before the disclosure of a second uranium enrichment facility that Iran has been building near the city of Qom.

The underground plant was kept secret until Iran disclosed its existence last month.

Diplomats say it did so only after learning that Western intelligence agencies had discovered the site.

There may be plenty of Iranians who don’t like the clerical regime, but most of the population is also intensely patriotic and likely to harbor even greater resentment toward the distant superpower that is working overtime to cripple their economy

If we’ve learned anything from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria, it is that removing an unsavory regime often makes things worse, not better

Another possibility is that the administration is trying to use maximum pressure to goad Iran into restarting its nuclear program. Once it does, so the argument runs, Europe, Russia, and China would line up behind the United States and support (or at least tolerate) a military attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

it would be another one of those giant roll-of-the-dice bets that the United States keeps making (and losing) in the Middle East

Qaddafi was overthrown and killed after giving up all his WMD, Iran could get bombed because it doesn’t have nuclear weapons yet, but a murderous tyrant like North Korean leader Kim Jong Un gets repeated one-on-one meetings with Trump, who claims that the two of them have fallen “in love.” If you were a senior Iranian strategist, what lesson would you draw from this pattern of behavior?

There’s a final option, however, and I think it’s actually the most likely. The maximum pressure campaign—including the threat of secondary sanctions against U.S. allies and partners—is intended simply to weaken Iran and reduce its influence within the region. In this scenario, all the talk of regime change and hints that “all options are on the table” are just palaver—or the kind of boastful swaggering that Pompeo seems to enjoy. One could acknowledge that pressure won’t alter Iran’s overall policies, won’t lead to regime change, won’t produce a better deal, and may not even push Tehran into leaving the NPT and opening the door to preventive war. All it might do is force Iran to cut back on its support for some of its local partners and thus crimp (though not eliminate) Iran’s regional influence.

There’s only two problems with it: It does heighten the risk of war, and it doesn’t point the way toward any long-term solution to regional instability

Despite the threat inflation that pervades the U.S. national security discourse, the current situation in the Middle East has at most a small direct effect on the security of Americans at home. (To the extent that it does, it is more likely to be the relatively modest danger posed by Sunni extremists like the Islamic State, and even that danger is far from existential.) In other words, it is hard to see how continuing to whack Iran at every turn does anything to make Americans safer or more prosperous

Given that America’s core interests are to help maintain a stable balance of power (so that no local or external power can control the region), discourage proliferation, and tamp down violent extremism, a more evenhanded policy would make sense. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it

This morning’s story by Sanger is but the latest in a long line of leaks about classified programs that have two attributes in common: (1) they come from senior Obama administration officials; and (2) they are designed to depict President Obama, in an Election Year, as a super-tough, hands-on, no-nonsense Warrior. Put another way, the administration that is pathologically fixated on secrecy and harshly punishing whistleblowers routinely leaks national security secrets when doing so can politically benefit the President.

 Dear Vital Jewish Voters in Crucial Swing States: behold what this great leader did in secret to pummel Iran.

consider the Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to prosecute former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling under espionage statutes for allegedly telling The New York Times‘ James Risen — almost ten years ago — about dangerous mistakes the CIA made in trying to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program (mistakes which actually resulted in helping the Iranian program)

aside from the tried-and-true strategy of Democratic politicians benefiting politically from provoking criticism from the “Left,” Obama officials (and their apparatchiks) are eager to depict him as a violence-wielding aggressor. As Digby put it this week, “the [Obama] campaign is happy about all this condemnation” aimed at the drone program as it “proves [his] macho bona fides.” Obama officials will undoubtedly be just as pleased with any objections to waging undeclared, unauthorized cyber-warfare on Iran’s perfectly legal nuclear program, thus bringing the world yet another new means of destructive warfare

countries include Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — which are mentioned directly in the document — but the finding potentially applies to others as well

offensive cyber operations with the aim of producing disruption — like cutting off electricity or compromising an intelligence operation by dumping documents online — as well as destruction, similar to the U.S.-Israeli 2009 Stuxnet attack, which destroyed centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium gas for its nuclear program

freed the agency to conduct disruptive operations against organizations that were largely off limits previously, such as banks and other financial institutions

it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations

“as long as you can show that it vaguely looks like the charity is working on behalf of that government, then you’re good.”

Since the finding was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list, according to this former official. “This has been a combination of destructive things — stuff is on fire and exploding — and also public dissemination of data: leaking or things that look like leaking.” 

“We’re playing semantics — destabilization is functionally the same thing as regime change. It’s a deniability issue,”

“Our government is basically turning into f****ing WikiLeaks, [using] secure communications on the dark web with dissidents, hacking and dumping,”

critics, including some former U.S. officials, see a potentially dangerous attenuation of intelligence oversight, which could have unintended consequences and even put people’s lives at risk

“Trump came in and way overcorrected,” said a former official. Covert cyber operations that in the past would have been rigorously vetted through the NSC, with sometimes years-long gaps between formulation and execution, now go “from idea to approval in weeks,” said the former official. 

an unknown group in March 2019 posted on the internet chat platform Telegram the names, addresses, phone numbers and photos of Iranian intelligence officers allegedly involved in hacking operations, as well as hacking tools used by Iranian intelligence operatives. That November, the details of 15 million debit cards for customers of three Iranian banks linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were also dumped on Telegram.Although sources wouldn’t say if the CIA was behind those Iran breaches, the finding’s expansion of CIA authorities to target financial institutions, such as an operation to leak bank card data, represents a significant escalation in U.S. cyber operations

These were operations the “CIA always knew were an option, but were always a bridge too far," said a former official. “They had been bandied about at senior levels for a long time, but cooler heads had always prevailed." 

“It was obvious that destabilization was the plan on Iran,”

Neither these two Iran-related findings, nor the new cyber finding, mention regime change as a stated goal, according to former officials. Over time, however, the CIA and other national security officials have interpreted the first two Iran findings increasingly broadly, with covert activities evolving from their narrow focus on stopping Tehran’s nuclear program, they said. The Iran findings have been subject to “classic mission creep,” said one former official.

senior Trump officials weren’t interested in retaliating against Russia for the election interference

The CIA’s “deconfliction is poor, they’re not keeping people in the loop on what their cyber operations are,”

This more permissive environment may also intensify concerns about the CIA’s ability to secure its hacking arsenal. In 2017, WikiLeaks published a large cache of CIA hacking tools known as “Vault 7.” The leak, which a partially declassified CIA assessment called “the largest data loss in CIA history,” was made possible by “woefully lax” security practices at the CIA’s top hacker unit, the assessment said.

Removing NSC oversight of covert operations is a significant departure from recent history, according to Eatinger. “I would look at the intel community as the same as the military in that there should be civilian control of big decisions — who to go to war against, who to launch an attack against, who to fight a particular battle,” he said. “It makes sense that you would have that kind of civilian or non-intelligence civilian leadership for activities as sensitive as covert action.”

“People thought, ‘Hey, George W. Bush will sign this,’ but he didn’t,” said a former official. CIA officials then believed, “‘Obama will sign it.’ Then he didn’t.”“Then Trump came in, and CIA thought he wouldn’t sign,” recalled this official. “But he did.”

despite a Sunni-Shi’a divide in attitudes toward Iran, even Sunni Arab views were based on a number of issues extending beyond sectarian identifications

the Arab sense that “there is a double-standard” on nuclear issues when it comes to the response to Israel’s nuclear program

Iranian support for the anti-Israeli movements of Hezbollah in Lebanon and of Hamas, which controls Gaza, is popular among Arab publics, even though it is opposed by some Arab governments

“The Palestinian-Israeli question remains a prism through which Arabs make evaluations,”

Some Arab governments, particularly those allied with the United States in the Gulf region, believe that Iran poses a geostrategic threat both because of Iraq’s declining power in the region after the 2003 war and rising Iranian influence itself

Telhami described general Arab feelings for Iran as “not one of love or support for the regime.” However, Iran is seen favorably by many because, “It’s that a system can rise in the name of Islam and be fiercely independent.”

Dunne said she senses that Arab sentiment toward Iran recently “may have shifted in a more negative direction,” including because of Iranian support for the Syrian regime’s conduct in the civil war. Though Iran in 2006 won much popular approval for backing Hezbollah in its conflict with Israel that year, Dunne said “the conversation in the region has moved on.” Iran’s Islamic Republic does not offer as appealing a model to Arab publics as it once might have

Western states see a meeting set for September 27 in Vienna as a litmus test of any substantive Iranian shift

Rouhani, who has vowed that Iran will be more transparent and less confrontational in talks both with the IAEA and the big powers, said this week that time for resolving Iran's nuclear dispute with the West was limited.He said he would meet foreign ministers of some of the six powers - Russia, China, France, Britain, the United States and Germany - when he attends the U.N. General Assembly in New York this month.

A senior adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is expected to meet Rouhani on Friday, told reporters Moscow hopes that new talks between Iran and the six powers will be held very soon and that both sides need to be flexible. Russia has much warmer ties with the Islamic Republic than Western states do."It is important that Iran display the necessary flexibility and readiness to meet the international community's demands," Yuri Ushakov said. "The six nations, in turn, should also demonstrate a creative approach and be ready to respond adequately to the positive steps that we expect from Iran."

Iran has temporarily suspended visa-free travel with Turkey. Iran has explained this decision as part of security precautions it is taking in connection with the summit in Tehran, which currently holds the three-year rotating NAM presidency

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, Cuban leader Raul Castro, Armenian President Serzh Sarksian and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are expected to attend the summit. Also, Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani and Lebanese President Michel Suleiman are expected. Yet, there is no signal that Iran's close ally, Syria, will attend

Israel on Thursday warned Ban and other world leaders not to fall into an Iranian propaganda "trap" when they attend the summit

But having had weeks before the first inspection, the Iranians would have had plenty of opportunity to remove anything there that might have been incriminating, our correspondent says.

Our correspondent says that there has also been a setback in Iran to the IAEA deal.

With the IRGC’s profile expected to rise amid the tensions with the U.S., Alavi’s role as a principal troubleshooter for Khamenei and Rouhani — who have their own significant differences — is only expected to grow. The best way to check the IRGC’s legitimacy? Demonstrate that the government intelligence forces are adept at tackling the U.S.

Some professionals in the intelligence business who have scrutinized Alavi closely find him “an ordinary cleric.” “Either he conceals his smarts associated with a professional intelligence boss or he is a simple religious preacher in the wrong job,” says a diplomat who met him years ago and asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.

Contrary to the common view in the West, Iran is a noisy democracy where Rouhani can be chased by aggressive reporters during press conferences in Tehran. Normally, the criticism against government ministers is sharp, but much has changed since the U.S. withdrew from the nuclear deal Tehran negotiated with global powers, which had promised sanctions relief in return for curbs on Iran’s nuclear program. Now dissent is seen as subversion

Rouhani, who came in on the platform plank of signing the nuclear deal and reviving the battered economy, suddenly has to compete with fundamentalists, and that means turning Iran into a police state. “Iranian intelligence is very good. No intrusion by a foreign agency lasts beyond 24 hours,” claims an intelligence source who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

In 2017, FDD received $3.63 million from billionaire Bernard Marcus, which constituted over a quarter of FDD’s contributions that year. Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, is outspoken about his hatred of Iran, which he characterized as “the devil” in a 2015 Fox Business interview. Marcus is Trump’s second biggest campaign supporter, contributing $7 million to pro-Trump super PACs before the 2016 election.

by the end of the 2011 tax year, Sheldon Adelson, who went on to become Trump’s single biggest campaign funder, the GOP’s biggest funder in the 2018 midterms, and personal advocate for Trump to take Bolton as his national security adviser, was FDD’s third biggest donor, contributing at least $1.5 million. (Dubowitz says Adelson no longer contributes to FDD.) In 2013, Adelson publicly proposed the U.S. launch a preventive nuclear attack on Iran, targeting the desert, and threaten to launch a second nuclear weapon at Tehran if Iran didn’t abandon its nuclear program.

the Trump administration’s decision to seemingly enter into a collaborative arrangement with FDD or Ghasseminejad, an FDD “adviser,” points to the State Department, under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s leadership, moving to increasingly align itself with organizations and individuals pushing the U.S. towards another war in the Middle East.

Marcus and Adelson publicly endorse a militarist posture towards Iran and aren’t shy about writing big checks to politicians and organizations that share that mission. With Adelson and Marcus’s preferred national security adviser, John Bolton, evidently pushing the U.S. towards a military confrontation with Iran, it’s no wonder that FDD, possibly (until Friday) with the support of U.S.-taxpayer funding, is engaged in a public-diplomacy campaign against critics of Trump and Bolton’s Iran policy.