A military expert flagged an "extraordinarily significant" statement from a high-ranking Israeli official that suggests its military campaign against Iran had shifted into a new phase.
Defense minister Israel Katz stated Thursday that Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei "cannot be allowed to exist," calling him a "modern Hitler," and CNN's John Berman noted that this marks an escalation in tone as U.S. president Donald Trump considers whether to join the military operation.
"This is the most explicit language we've heard from a senior Israeli official calling, really for the ouster, calling for essentially regime change here," Berman said.
A military expert agreed, saying that Israeli officials must be prepared to accept responsibility for taking out Iran's government.
"It's an extraordinarily significant statement that means that the Israelis are subscribing to the policy of regime change and how would that change the mission?" said Mark Kimmitt, former assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs under George W. Bush. "Well, it would just add on to the mission. That is classic mission creep, and while I appreciate everything that Israel has done up to this point about taking out the nuclear facilities, my question to Israel would be, okay, if there's going to be regime change, are you taking over the day-after operations yourself?"
Kimmitt, who served during the final months of Bush's second term, cited the failures of U.S. policies in Iraq and Afghanistan as a warning to Israel.
"It goes back to the Colin Powell comment, the old comment about, if you break it, you buy it," Kimmitt said. "We saw that in Iraq, we saw that in Afghanistan. I'm not saying that it's should be necessarily completely taken off the table, but there ought to be some considerations and a lot of planning because it's easy to do the regime change. But putting it back together is much like 'Humpty Dumpty.'"
"People seem to think about Iran as a homogeneous nation – well, that's not true," Kimmitt added. "Persians only make up about 65 percent, I think is the number of the population. You have Kurdish areas, you have Armenian areas, you have the areas out by Afghanistan, and we could unintentionally, Israel could unintentionally, be putting Iran into a civil war. That's an extreme case, but I don't necessarily believe that the right answer is bringing in expatriate Iranians who are out of the country for the last 40-plus years, as the solution. We saw that in Iraq, and the expats didn't make things better."