In October 2005, days after Israeli forces killed a commander of the Hamas-aligned militant group Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke out unequivocally. “As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” said Iran’s newly elected president, referring to Ruhollah Khomeini, the late ayatollah and leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”
It’s not hard to find quotes like this. During his two terms as president over eight years, Ahmadinejad said Israel has “no place in the region” and that “a devastating storm is on the way that will uproot the basis of Zionism.” The United States—whose president, George W. Bush, had listed Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil” alongside Iraq and North Korea in 2002—was another frequent target. “The accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible. And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism,” Ahmadinejad said, days after calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Even if some of Ahmadinejad’s fury could be chalked up to anti-imperialist anger, he was also an unrepentant Holocaust denier who repeatedly referred to the deaths of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis as a “myth,” a “lie,” and the “opinion of just a few.”
Ahmadinejad was the face of an Iranian regime that Israeli hard-liners and neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to wipe out. In other words, Ahmadinejad, who left office in 2013, was not someone whom the U.S. and Israel ever wanted to see return to power—or so you’d assume. And yet, that is precisely what the two allies attempted to engineer earlier this year, according to a bonkers new report from The New York Times. The story, which has to be read to be believed, reveals the utter incompetence and incoherent strategy of the Americans and Israelis who are responsible for the Iran war.
In the early days of the war, Ahmadinejad’s home—where he had been held in house arrest over critiques of regime leaders—was hit by an airstrike, and he was initially assumed to have been killed. But now the Times, citing U.S. officials, reports that the strike was intended to kill Ahmadinejad’s guards, allowing him to then be installed as the U.S.- and Israeli-approved leader of a post–Islamic Republic government. Ahmadinejad had even met with Israeli representatives on visits to Guatemala and Hungary between 2023 and 2025. But after the strike, in which he was injured, “he became disillusioned with the regime change plan,” the report states. (You don’t say?) His whereabouts now are unknown.
The Times reporting makes it clear that this plan was concocted and primarily driven by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency that is analogous to the CIA, and U.S. leaders only signed off on it shortly before it was executed. To a large extent it suggests that Mossad, once one of the premier intelligence agencies in the world, has not just lost its touch but fallen completely off the deep end: Installing a Holocaust-denying blowhard as president is absurd even by contemporary Israeli standards.
But even if this was a Mossad-driven operation, it is still damning about the United States’s handling of the war itself. President Trump and the Pentagon made “regime change” a stated goal of the operation, albeit in a typically ambiguous and confusing way. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth stated last month that “regime change has occurred” in Iran, an apparent reference to the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei in the first day of airstrikes. But that statement is hard to square with the fact that the country is apparently being run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in consultation with Khamenei’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, who was injured to an unknown degree in an airstrike. If this regime change at all, well, it’s a more hardline regime than existed before the war.
Now we have another data point about what the U.S. considers to be regime change, and it’s even more ridiculous: installing the U.S.- and Israel-hating Ahmadinejad as Iran’s new leader. An “associate” of Ahmadinejad told the Times that “Ahmadinejad saw the strike as an attempt to free him. The associate said the Americans viewed Mr. Ahmadinejad as someone who could lead Iran, and had the capability to manage ‘Iran’s political, social and military situation.’” That the U.S. deemed him an acceptable leader is difficult to fathom, but perhaps not inconsistent with how this administration operates: The associate suggested to the Times that the Trump administration saw Ahmadinejad as analogous to Delcy Rodriguez, the Venezuelan vice president who took over the country after U.S. special forces kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro in January.
It’s possible, as Spencer Ackerman notes in a typically shrewd and acerbic post, that this could mean that Ahmadinejad was a longstanding U.S. and Israeli intelligence agent, a mind-melting possibility, or that “this whole piece is a set-up job to discredit Ahmadinejad”—in other words, having failed to kill Ahmadinejad in the airstrike, U.S. officials planted this fanciful scenario in The New York Times in an attempt to discredit him and thus prevent him from taking power.
Under any previous administration, this Times story would be too batshit to believe. But nothing is beyond belief under the Trump administration—and indeed the more unbelievable the story, the truer it often turns out to be. (This week provided another case in point.) If it is true that U.S. and Israeli leaders really were trying to elevate Ahmadinejad, it’s hard to think of anything more damning for the war effort. The idea that he would have any credibility in Iran if installed in such a fashion is preposterous, not to mention that any attempt by the U.S. and Israel to justify installing him would have been instantly discredited by his litany of past statements about the two countries. Yet this administration has proven time again that it doesn’t actually think through its plans; it acts, then reacts.
But the main reason the Ahmadinejad gambit seems plausible is that it epitomizes something that has long been apparent about the Iran war: The American and Israel officials conducting it have no real idea what they want to accomplish. They certainly have no idea what kind of government in Tehran they would deem acceptable. And that is how, perhaps, you end up trying to install a Holocaust denier who wants to wipe you off the map.
