What is Trump’s true objective in the Iran war? U.S. targets provide a clue

WASHINGTON- The Defense Department last week laid out a concise set of military objectives in President Trump’s war against Iran, saying its ultimate goal is to dismantle Tehran’s ability to project power beyond its borders. Yet it may be the targets that the Pentagon has largely ignored that offer the clearest insight into Trump’s true intentions.

U.S. military strikes have focused on Iran’s ballistic missile, drone and nuclear programs, as well as its naval assets, according to U.S. Central Command. But the strikes also increasingly target Iran’s internal security forces, used by the Islamic Republic to suppress public dissent, according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project shared with The Times.

The strikes targeted at least 123 headquarters, barracks and local bases operated by Iran’s paramilitary organizations, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Basij militia. Regional police forces, mainly in the capital region around Tehran and in western Iran, near areas dominated by Kurdish groups hostile to the Iranian government, have also been targeted.

Some of these groups are armed and supported by the U.S. intelligence community, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

Nicholas Carl of the Critical Threats Project said the trend indicates the campaign is already underway to create the conditions for a revolution.

“By attacking these repressive institutions, we degrade the regime’s ability to monitor its population, to repress its population,” Carl said. “It therefore appears that the strike campaign is being organized to try to erode the regime’s ability to repress in these areas. »

Analysts said the strikes against internal forces could be larger than they have measured so far, highlighting the difficulty of tracking war targets based on publicly available data due to a strictly enforced internet blackout by the Iranian government.

An explosion broke out on Saturday after strikes near the Azadi Tower, near Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran.

(Atta Kenaré / AFP / Getty Images)

The quieter side of the U.S. campaign suggests a political strategy on the part of the Trump administration that goes beyond simply containing the Iranian government and may instead aim to lay the groundwork for its overthrow.

Trump and his top aides have been inconsistent in their messaging about their war goals, vacillating between calls for regime change and much shorter-term ambitions, such as an Islamic Republic that remains in power under more U.S.-friendly leadership.

Before the war began, Trump received an intelligence assessment that large-scale military action was unlikely to overthrow the Iranian government, two sources familiar with the matter said. This assessment led analysts at the CIA, State Department and Pentagon to advise the White House against pursuing the operation. The intelligence analysis was first reported by The Washington Post.

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Fostering domestic unrest, insurrection, or revolution could serve other strategic goals for the Trump administration beyond regime change, adding new sources of pressure on an Islamic Republic that, if still intact at the end of the war, would face new internal pressures at a moment of historical weakness.

Rob Malley, lead negotiator of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and U.S. special envoy for Iran under President Biden, said a sustained U.S. campaign that cripples Iran’s ability to maintain domestic control could mean “the collapse of the regime, in the sense that it can no longer, truly and effectively govern the entire country.”

“Right now, what Trump is saying suggests an extremely ambitious, very long-term, extremely perilous campaign that will only end with Iran surrendering, and it is very difficult to see Iran surrendering,” Malley said. But the campaign may already be working. “Their communications have certainly been infiltrated – they cannot meet without being targeted by Israel or the United States,” he added.

A woman holds a portrait of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei during a protest by medical professionals on Saturday outside Gandhi Hospital in Tehran, which was damaged in an airstrike earlier this week.

(Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

“Either the regime remains in place weakened, bloodied, finding it more difficult to govern a more fragmented and chaotic country,” Malley continued, “or the regime can no longer govern.”

An Israeli official did not deny that internal security forces were being targeted, although he said Israel was focused on assassinating Iran’s political and security leaders — “levels one, two and three,” the official said. So far, the vast majority of strikes against domestic security services have been carried out by the United States.

“Our goal is to weaken the ayatollahs’ regime until the Iranian people can choose their fate,” the official told the Times. “We’re not at the point yet where they can do it, but there’s still work to be done.”

By all accounts, the campaign against Iranian military assets has been successful. Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Israel, U.S. forces and their allies in the region have declined by 90% after just a week of combat, Defense officials said. Drone strikes have decreased by 83%. More than 30 Iranian ships, including those used as launch pads for drones and aircraft, have been destroyed – a significant number for Iran’s aging and poorly funded naval fleet.

Trump could simply declare victory based on these results alone, said Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative for Iran in 2020.

“They will become weaker as they exhaust resources and we will bomb more and more relevant sites. Air traffic is already restarting,” Abrams said, noting that commercial flights in the region began to resume this weekend. “So I doubt the president needs a prolonged campaign.”

But that would leave the regime in place, leaving open the possibility of a revanchist Islamic Republic that could replenish its military and further crack down on Democratic protesters — an outcome that could create a political backlash for Trump, Abrams said, after losing U.S. service members in combat.

A woman jogs among closed stores in south Tel Aviv on Saturday.

(Olympia de Maismont / AFP / Getty Images)

“The outcome remains completely uncertain: the collapse of the regime after a wave of protests, a civil war, a deal that leaves the regime in place behind a new face,” Abrams added. “If there was a wave of protests like in January and the regime started shooting again, that would be a real test for Trump. Can’t he do anything? Unlikely.”

In his initial speech announcing the start of the campaign, Trump addressed the Iranian people, telling them to shelter at home until the US bombing campaign ends.

“When we’re done, take back your government. It will be yours to take. This will probably be your only chance for generations,” the president said. “For many years, you asked America for help. But you never got it. No president was prepared to do what I am prepared to do tonight. Now you have a president who gives you what you want. So let’s see how you respond.”

But the president’s message has become muddled over the past week, after he offered conflicting goals in a series of interviews with reporters.

He immediately said he expected to hand-select the next ayatollah, having assassinated Iran’s longtime supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, in the opening salvo of the war. In other interviews, he said the joint U.S.-Israeli campaign killed many potential leaders that Washington could have worked with.

On Friday, Trump called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” He did not specify whether he was referring to abandoning Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missile program, or control of the country itself, and in a later interview said it could simply mean “when Iran no longer has the ability to fight.”

Over the past week, Kurdish leaders have shared accounts that Trump and his top aides contacted them and encouraged their involvement in the war, including a ground incursion into western Iran from Iraqi Kurdistan. But the president appears to have suspended those efforts for now. “The war is complicated enough without having to involve the Kurds,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday.

At Central Command Headquarters on Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters that Trump stood by his promise to the Iranian people at the start of the war that a time would come for an uprising.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addresses the audience as President Trump listens Saturday during the “Americas Shield Summit,” a gathering with heads of state and government officials from 12 countries in the Americas at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Doral, Florida.

(Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images)

“No one has done more than President Trump to reopen the possibility for those who want a free Iran to do so,” Hegseth said. “At the end of the day, it’s common sense, as he said up front, not to go out and protest while the bombs are falling in Tehran and elsewhere. There will come a time when he determines, or they determine, that it’s time to seize that advantage.”

Suzanne Maloney, vice president and director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution and an Iran expert, said she expects the government to survive the U.S. onslaught, “easily remaining capable of outwitting and outmaneuvering any challenges coming from the streets.”

But a concerted and prolonged campaign could change that assessment.

“Of course, months of full-scale war could certainly also break the system,” Maloney said, adding: “I don’t think the short-term result would be a stable transition to a more liberal system – but rather a collapse of the state itself and, at least for a while, a dangerous vacuum of power and order in the heart of the Middle East. »