U.S., Israel winning but Iran revolution needs ground component
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that “a large part of Iran has been destroyed” as the United States and Israel targeted its ballistic missile and nuclear programs from the air, but added that meaningful regime change would require a “ground component.”
“You don’t want to replace one ayatollah with another,” Netanyahu said at the press conference. “You don’t want to replace Hitler with Hitler.”
He said the Iranian people must eventually “get with the moment.”
“We can create the conditions, but they have to, you know, at a certain point, take advantage of those conditions,” he said.
A revolution cannot come “just from thin air,” he continued. “You can do a lot of things from the air, and so do we. [them,] But… there also needs to be a core component.”
His words left open the possibility that such actions on the ground could take many forms. “There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of not sharing all of these possibilities with you.”
The comments came hours after President Donald Trump said in an Oval Office speech that he would not send US troops to the Middle East.
Netanyahu has also repeatedly denied accusations that Israel is effectively dragging the United States into war. The Prime Minister said that Trump did not need convincing about the nuclear threat posed by Iran, “he explained it to me, I did not explain it to him.”
