Mick Hartley

From the Times:

The team of Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s son, have urged President Trump to abandon his view of Venezuela as a model for Iran in an interview with The Times….

He has been stung by Trump’s references to the US military action to capture Nicolás Maduro and replace him with his deputy as a model for Iran, as this left most of the old regime in place.

Pahlavi’s team, based in Paris, called the Venezuela option a “lose-lose” for the US, and claimed it was impossible for a new leader to emerge within the country, as Trump said he would prefer. They spoke out after Trump told The New York Times that “what we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario”.

That, of course, is the worry. I’m agnostic as to whether Pahlavi might be a good choice as some kind of interim leader. Certainly a great many Iranians seem to support him – though not so many Kurds. But there’s every indication now that Trump just wants to settle on some Khamenei-light type figure, just as he settled on a Maduro-light figure in Venezuela. Given the power of the ruling cliques in Tehran, notably the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps., the IRGC, it’s almost certain that such a scenario would lead eventually to the same Islamist hard-line rule that Khamenei represented. It would be a colossal betrayal of the Iranian people, and a huge missed opportunity.

Saeed Ghasseminejad, the director of the Iran Prosperity Project and a member of Pahlavi’s inner circle, said: “President Trump looks at the Venezuela model and obviously, for any stakeholder that wants to avoid chaos, you would prefer someone who is inside the regime and can control the security forces. They found someone like that in Venezuela. But the situation in Iran is quite different.

“First, Venezuela is a leftist dictatorship. This [Iran] is an apocalyptic regime. They believe their task is to lay the groundwork for the reappearance of the ‘Hidden Imam’ who will initiate the end-of-time battle. So it’s very difficult to imagine that they will decide to be ‘normal dictators’ from now on and are not going to do anything outside the country. That’s not in their DNA.”