Opinion: The West must offer an ultimatum to Iran: Free your people or face attack

With its recent missile attack on Israel , Iran has stoked more tension and danger in the Middle East, but it has also given Israel and the West the opportunity to obtain the ultimate security guarantee: a free and democratic Iran.

The launch of about 200 missiles was Iran’s response to several daring Israeli actions in recent months: the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s Political Bureau, in Tehran; the jaw-dropping co-ordinated explosion of pagers directed at Lebanon’s Hezbollah fighters; and the decapitation of that terror group through the killing of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah .

Israel’s instinct may be to respond militarily to Iran’s attack. In the past year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has demonstrated that it will use force to confront the ever-present threats with which Israel had lived prior to Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks .

But there may be two other ways to respond to this threat.

The first is openly adopting a “people-led regime change” by working very closely with the U.S. and other democratic countries and going well beyond the usual bromides to support Iran’s people in toppling the Islamic Republic.

A true “people-led regime change” policy entails quickly training and massively funding Iran’s opposition to bring down the regime. It will mean flooding Iran with tools to access the internet, the first thing the regime blocks when Iranians take to the streets.

And it will require financing a massive strike fund for Iranian workers so that they can cripple Tehran by walking away from their jobs, especially in the oil industry.

In the past few years, Iran’s people have clearly shown they will risk their lives to achieve democracy and peace with the world, the very same things that Israel and the West want. So why not give them the real tools to do it, without endangering the lives of soldiers?

The second option is for Israel to communicate (either openly or secretly) an ultimatum to Iran’s security and military officials: if you put down your guns and agree to hold a genuinely free and fair referendum on Iran’s future — conducted by a neutral third party like the United Nations — you will be allowed to go into exile with some of your stolen money. If not, we will attack, and you will be killed.

On the surface, such an ultimatum seems like a non-starter. But it looks much more attractive when you consider that Iran’s regime is far weaker than its bluster would suggest — something that Tehran’s top officials surely know.

The regime’s proxies (Hamas and Hezbollah) have been humiliated and materially weakened in the past year. Its citizens despise it; its upper ranks have been so infiltrated by spies that Israel can easily assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists or people like Ismail Haniyeh, despite the seemingly strong security provided to them by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps; and its upper ranks are ideologically uncommitted to the point that many have foreign passports for themselves and their families.

All of this suggests that Iran’s regime has none of the things needed — ideological commitment, popular support, military and security system cohesion, foreign support — to put up a fight against a credible foreign military threat.

In such a situation, it would be perfectly rational for Iranian leaders to choose exile over near-certain death.

Helping to topple their oppressors without attacking their country would further endear Israel and the West to the Iranian people, allowing those countries to reap some of the immense economic benefits of a free Iran that welcomes foreign investments.

More importantly, Israel and the West will gain the thing they most desire: a genuine security guarantee. Every credible faction of Iran’s opposition is pro-Western. A free Iran, regardless of who leads it, will end its enmity with Israel and the U.S., and will end its funding of terror proxies.

Israel and its Western allies can get rid of a four-decade headache in Tehran without losing soldiers or paying the massive costs of a war effort. There is simply no better deal in the world.

Kaveh Shahrooz, a lawyer and a human rights activist, is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Center for North American Prosperity and Security.

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