When in doubt, ask what the Founders would have done. This has been the American way for 250 years, since the United States declared independence in 1776. In this presentation, under ten minutes, I pose the question in relation to the Iran war and the dilemma of the closed Strait of Hormuz.
For George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, the choke point was the âBarbaryâ coast of North Africa. Corsairs operating under the sanction of Muslim-ruled states, especially Tripoli and Algiers, put a stranglehold on American maritime commerce in the Mediterranean.
I draw revealing comparisons between that crisis and todayâs Hormuz straitjacket, using the Foundersâ pithy words and the Truth Social posts of the eminently quotable Donald J. Trump. Rhetorical style aside, were they really saying the same thing? You decide. Watch here.
(The occasion was the Weinberg Founders Conference dinner of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. No better or feistier audience.)
There is much talk about how Israel promoted the idea of regime change in Iran to the Trump administration. Itâs been particularly primed by a New York Times piece by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan (âHow Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran,â April 7), based on interviews with participants. First, hereâs a recap of that report.
On February 11, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his case to Trump in the White House Situation Room. Haberman and Swan:
Mr. Netanyahu and his team outlined conditions they portrayed as pointing to near-certain victory: Iranâs ballistic missile program could be destroyed in a few weeks. The regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.
Besides, Mossadâs intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again andâwith the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellionâan intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.
According to the Times report, âNetanyahu delivered his presentation in a confident monotone. It seemed to land well with the most important person in the room, the American president.â
The next day, in a meeting with Trump, CIA Director John Ratcliffe called the Israeli regime-change scenarios âfarcicalââa judgment Secretary of State Marco Rubio restated more bluntly as âbullshit.â But Trump signed off on the operation anyway, more drawn to decapitating and degrading the regime than to changing it.
In mid-2009, Iran had just experienced an aborted âGreen Revolution,â which brought protesters into the streets and raised hopes for change. Barack Obama had been president since January, but Gates was not part of his original team. He had served as defense secretary under George W. Bush and was the first defense secretary retained by a president of the opposing party, carrying over into the Obama administration.
In his memoir, Gates called the July 2009 meeting with Netanyahu âour first no-punches-pulled discussion of Iran.â According to him,
Bibi was convinced the Iranian regime was extremely fragile and that a strike on their nuclear facilities very likely would trigger the regimeâs overthrow by the Iranian people. I strongly disagreed, convinced that a foreign military attack would instead rally the Iranian people behind their government.
âAll the experts can be wrongâ
Netanyahu, in his autobiography, gives a slightly more colorful version:
âBesides,â [Gates] said, âall the experts tell us that an American strike on Iranâs nuclear facilities would unite the Iranian public behind the regime. Can all the experts be wrong?â
âYes,â I said, âall the experts can be wrong. They often are. Most Iranians hate this tyranny. They just tried to rebel against it. Theyâll cheer when you deliver a knockout punch to the regime. It would be a tremendous psychological blow to the mullahsâ image of invincibility!â
I related to Gates what President Museveni of Uganda told me of the psychological effect of the [Israeli] raid in Entebbe [in 1976, to free hijacked passengers], that before the raid Ugandans had âbelieved Idi Amin was invincibleâ and after it they knew they could âbring him down.â
âYou have the power to achieve the same result with the Iranian regime,â I said to Gates. âYou are Gulliver.â
The conversation shifted to how Iran might respond to an attack. Gates:
Netanyahu also believed Iranian retaliation after a strike would be pro forma, perhaps the launch of a few dozen missiles at Israel and some rocket salvos from Lebanese-based Hizballah. He argued that the Iranians were realists and would not want to provoke a larger military attack by the United States by going after American targetsâespecially our ships in the Gulfâor by attacking other countriesâ oil facilities. Closing the Gulf to oil exports, he said, would cut the Iraniansâ own economic throats. Again I disagreed, telling him he was misled by the lack of an Iraqi response to Israelâs destruction of their Osirak reactor in 1981 and the absence of any Syrian reaction to destruction of their reactor in 2007. I said the Iraniansâthe Persiansâwere very different from Iraqis and Syrians. He was assuming a lot in anticipating a mild Iranian reaction, and if he was wrong, an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would spark a war in the region, I said.
Netanyahuâs account of this exchange is brief in comparison and frames it more as a disagreement over whether Iran would rebuild its nuclear program after an attack:
Gates argued that the delaying effects of any Israeli military action against Iranâs nuclear capabilities would be short-lived. I noted that the same thing was said of Israelâs strike on Saddam Husseinâs Osirak reactor, referring to our successful 1981 operation against a nuclear facility that never resumed operation. Gates countered that an Israeli strike would result in a full-scale war.
To which Netanyahu added this aside: âWhether it would or not, I was willing to sustain a conventional war with Iran in order to avoid a war with a nuclear-armed Iran.â
For at least sixteen years, Netanyahuâs argumentsâregime fragility, decisive action, and limited retaliationâfailed to carry the day in Washington. They were countered by U.S. objections: regime resilience, the rally effect, and the risk of escalation. At any point, Netanyahu might have left the political stage without achieving his prime objective. But he held on to power long enough for the churn of American politics to finally produce a president willing to take the leap.
Header image: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Prime Ministerâs Office, Jerusalem, July 27, 2009. Photograph: Moshe Milner / Government Press Office (Israel).
The Iran war has entered a new phase, a âdouble-sided ceasefire.â Eventually, we will learn the backstory, and it wonât look like anything we were led to believe while it was unfolding. Much of what seems true today will turn out to be false, and vice versa. If it werenât always so, the world wouldnât need historians like me.
In the meantime, I seek insights in the wisdom of mentors now gone. Bernard Lewis was one; I wrote about Lewis and Iran the other week. This time, Iâll consider Uri Lubrani (1926-2018), an Israeli diplomat and defense official.
Lubrani, who served the state from its founding, had the unusual distinction of being posted, time and again, to the epicenters of crisis. From 1967 to 1971, he served as ambassador to Ethiopia, which positioned him to play a crucial role in the emergency emigration of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991 (Operation Solomon). It was his greatest achievement.
But he was also known for serving as head of the Israeli mission to Iran (with ambassadorial rank) from 1973 to 1978. His claim to fame: he anticipated the rise of religious extremism and the Shah’s fall before anyone else did.
As early as 1975, he warned a U.S. senator visiting Tehran that âthe most serious problem that the Shah had domestically was from the religious elements who were hostile and very difficult for him to deal with.â The U.S. diplomat who accompanied the senator later recalled: âI never heard anyone say that in the American embassy. I never heard any journalists say it or any Iranians say it. This was the first time that I heard that analysis.â
Lubrani remained ahead of the curve. In a June 1978 dispatch, he reported to Jerusalem that the Shahâs position was undergoing an âaccelerated process of destabilization… a process from which there is no return and which will ultimately lead to his downfall and a drastic change in the form of government in Iran.â Again, he was alone. The State Department at the time estimated that the Shah had âan excellent chance to rule for a dozen or more years,â and the CIA held that âIran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.â Lubrani emerged from the Iranian revolution as an acclaimed oracle.
I got to know him in the mid-1980s, when he ran an office for Lebanese affairs at the defense ministry. Israel was occupying much of South Lebanon and rubbing up against Hezbollah, Iranâs Shiâite proxy. I was beginning to work on Hezbollah myself, and we had much to discuss. Lubrani was also an old friend of Lewis, and I often found myself at dinner with both of them. I wish Iâd taken notes.
âWe have to try”
Lubrani was renowned for his persistent assertion that regime change in Iran was not only feasible but inevitable. Initially, like Lewis, he hoped a strongman might overthrow the ayatollahs. âI believe that Tehran can be taken over by a relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel,â he told the BBC in 1982. âI mean the men who would lead that force would have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they would have to kill 10,000 people.â (In retrospect, the number seems modest.)
But Iran wasnât his formal brief, and only after Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 did Lubrani devote himself almost entirely to the country. Trading on his reputation for feeling the pulse of the Iranian people, he insisted that they would overturn the regime, but that it would happen sooner if they received a boost from the outside. From a small office in the defense ministry, on a minimal budget, he tried to stitch together a network of Iranian dissidents and informants who might one day deliver the goods.
By then, he had passed the formal retirement age, and the political and defense establishment viewed him as a holdover from the distant past. In Washington and Jerusalem, theyâd concluded that the regime wouldnât fall, neither now nor later. Policy focused instead on behavior modification. Lubrani admitted heâd come to be seen as an âalte kakerâ (an old fart) who âdoesn’t know what heâs talking about⊠Iâve become the village idiot.â He had a license to whisper to exiled Iranians in hotel lobbies and trawl Washington in pursuit of allies, but not much more.
Yet his faith never flagged because he believed the Islamic Republic was fundamentally alien to the Iranian character. âI believe that thereâs a popular basis for a change in Iran,â he said in 2006.
The Iranians do not want to be a nation that has religion forced upon it. Itâs true that this is a nation with a profound connection to religion, which incidentally includes antisemitic overtones. But the Iranians do not want religion to be forced on them.
Lubrani put the percentage of Iranians who wanted a change of regime at 80 percent âat least.â
The problem was that Israelâs intelligence agencies werenât detecting signs of a resistance that could be mobilized. Lubrani replied that he had a âgut feeling,â just as he had in 1978. âOn the matter of Iran, with all possible humility, I havenât been wrongâŠ. My feeling is that there is a green movement. Itâs mature. Itâs ripe. It ought to be helped. And itâs going to do the job.â As for intelligence, he acknowledged its absence: âI have no proof. But when they tell me that something is not possible, that Iâm a dreamer, I reply that as long as the opposite cannot be proved, we have to try what Iâm recommending.â
Just what did he recommend? In the first instance, good old-fashioned Cold War-type Psychological Operations:
What is required is an international effort to topple the regime. Exactly as the United States under the leadership of Ronald Reagan did to topple the Soviet Union and the communist Iron Curtain in EuropeâŠ. I am talking about propaganda, about psychological warfare, about financial assistance.
In particular, he wanted to create an anti-regime media outlet on a large scale:
I once dreamed that Israel would be strong enough and wealthy enough to set up an Israeli version of Al Jazeera, without visible Israeli fingerprints. It would cost a great deal [elsewhere, Lubrani put the cost at ÂŁ50 million a year], but only small change compared with our total defense budget. The hub should not be in Israel, but in London or Cyprus.
Alas, he couldnât find any takers in the Israeli establishment. âThere is no senior official in Israelâs finance ministry who would understand this and approve the budget. They would think Lubrani had lost his mind.â Instead, he had to make do with a modest Persian-language radio station that aired only two hours a day.
Lubrani had another idea, this one for the Americans: âPay [oil] workers [in Iran], in money and food, to stay home instead of going to work. It would make not going to work worth their whileâŠ. The United States has spent a hundred billion dollars on Iraq so far [2006]âand with just a fraction of that sum, the objective could be achieved.â The Americans didnât bite.
The one alternative Lubrani ruled out was military action. First, it would kill any chance of a popular uprising: âAny military action will only rally the Iranian peopleâa proud people with a developed national consciousnessâaround the regime.â Second, Iran would acquire a nuclear weapon anyway: âUnfortunately, I estimate that Iran will eventually reach nuclear weapons. Even if you bomb them, you will postpone the end by a few years until they once again achieve the capability.â
Lubrani regarded military action as âa doomsday weapon. Only if all ends have been exhaustedâŠ. I do not accept the talk as though there is only a military option in order to prevent Iran from getting the bomb.â At a 2010 conference of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, âthey asked me about the military option. I said I oppose the military option. For me as an Israeli, it should always be on the table. But thatâs only for the end of days. When the sword is at my throat, Iâll use it.â (Watch him here calling military action âthe very, very last resort for Israel, and I wouldnât use it.â)
This made Lubrani a dissenter. It wasnât just that he doubted the efficacy of military action. He thought highly of Iranian persistence and concluded that they would get a nuclear weapon sooner or later anyway. The only way to neutralize the threat was to change the regime itself:
People focus on the danger of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and argue that everything possible must be done to stop it. In my view, they will get such a weapon whether we like it or not. But the real issue is not the weapon itself, but who has their finger on the trigger. The answer is not one agreement or another, nor destroying the nuclear reactors, but replacing the current regime with a rational one.
This led him to a logical conclusion: âPractically, Iâm much more concerned about regime change than about the nuclear matter. Iâm absolutely convinced that the nuclear matter will resolve itself once there is a regime change.â
Unlimited patience
Years turned into decades, and Lubrani eventually became Israelâs oldest civil servant. In 2009, the press reported that his office was slated for closure. Lubrani received a reprieve when the Green Movement filled the streets of Tehran the following month. In 2015, he retired at 89 and died less than three years later. No representative of the Netanyahu government attended the funeral. âA prophet is not without honor, except in his own countryâ (Matthew 13:57).
In the rare instances when Lubraniâs name comes up today, itâs often as a synonym for Don Quixote. Yet Lubrani posed the key questions the present war must answer. Itâs not whether to resort to military force: that train has left the station. Would Lubrani have approved? Who knows? Iranâs nuclear program wasnât as advanced in his day, and its ballistic missile program wasnât even on his radar. Perhaps he would have thought that âdoomsdayâ had arrived, though he wouldnât have taken any politicianâs word for it.
Lubrani challenged conventional wisdom in a more profound way. He argued that any military campaign would only delay the regimeâs nuclear program; that no negotiated agreement would permanently block its path to nuclear weapons; that âa rogue regimeâ combined with nuclear weapons was a âlethalâ combination; that only regime change could neutralize the threat; and that the Iranian people could overturn that regime, provided the United States and Israel had their backs.
Has Lubraniâs premise finally taken hold in Israel? Last spring, Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, flagged âa sea change with respect to how Israel sees the Iran issue today. And I think for the first time ever in Israeli history, theyâve made maximum support for the Iranian people a central pillar of their strategy. And itâs not just rhetorical.â Just the other day, Mossad chief David Barnea doubled down: âOur commitment will only be complete once this extremist regime is replaced. This regime that seeks our destruction must pass from this world. This is our mission.â
That will take substantial resources, political finesse, cultural understanding, and steady resolve. Above all, it will require a virtue thatâs in short supply. âThe Iranians have a quality that we and others lack,â Lubrani once said. âPatience. Unlimited patience.â Whether Israel has it will determine whether this war is remembered as a turning point or a prelude to another round.
Header image: Uri Lubrani, 1991. Dan Hadani Collection, The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, National Library of Israel. CC BY 4.0.
Uri Lubrani (left) and Bernard Lewis at a conference in Jerusalem.
Martin Kramer on the Middle East 
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