Iranians who want regime to be bombed

Kenneth Timmerman:

As Barack Obama and John McCain thrash it out over how they would deal with Iran, voices from inside Iran are weighing in with an unusual message: If the United States strikes hard and fast, we will support you.

Emissaries from inside Iran have been meeting with Iranian exiles in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in recent weeks to deliver this provocative message, which they claim comes from pro-U.S. dissidents at the upper-most levels of the regime.

“U.S. airstrikes must be powerful and sustained enough to break the myth of the regime’s absolute power and reveal the weakness of the leadership,” a former official who traveled outside of Iran recently said.

The United States should target the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as the headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards Corp, the offices of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and that of his predecessor and rival, Mullah Hashemi-Rafsanjani, Iranian sources say.

The goal should be to carry out sustained airstrikes over a 48-72 hour period that would “decapitate” the regime.

Such a strike would send a clear message to the Iranian people and to disgruntled officials throughout Iran’s faction-ridden government that the United States is serious about confronting the regime over its bad behavior in Iraq and is willing to strike the leaders responsible for that behavior, the Iranian sources argue.

Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton has urged the administration to launch airstrikes against Quds Force bases and facilities in Iran that have been used to support Iran’s campaign to help terrorist groups in Iraq to kill Americans.

But many Iranians contend that limited strikes would have a limited usefulness, and might even be counter-productive.

“The conventional wisdom is that limited strikes will allow the regime to rally the people around the flag,” says Mohebat Ahdiyyih, an Iran media analyst at the office of the director of National Intelligence.

“However, if the U.S. launches a major strike that goes after the leadership in Iran, that’s different,” he told Newsmax. “Most Iranians hate the regime. People would be very happy to see a major strike that took out the leadership.”

Mr. Ahdiyyih and other Iran analysts speaking at an American Enterprise Institute conference on Monday painted a picture of a bitterly-divided regime in Tehran that is “unstable” and fighting for its survival.

“The situation is so bad that former president Mohammad Khatami has said that the hard-liners [close to president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] are worse than al-Qaida,” Ahdiyyih said.

Mr. Ahdiyyih regularly scans the Iranian media, including Web sites close to Ahmadinejad and his rivals, to find clues about the factional infighting in Tehran.

Mullah Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a rival to Ahmadinejad who is often mistakenly portrayed in the U.S. media as a “moderate,” has been warning that Iran “faces a serious threat of being attacked by the United States,” Ahdiyyih said.

“Ahmadinejad’s people say it’s just a psychological war. But if Iranians found out the risks of their nuclear program, the regime would face serious problems” from opposition inside Iran, he added.

...

As the Amir Taheri post below points out, Obama's appeasement of the Iranian regime is undermining the opposition and giving hope to our enemies in Iran. Any bombing attacks on Iran would need to be sustained over a much greater period than that suggested by this article. They would need to be on the order of six to eight weeks destroying weapons production facilities and Iran's war making infrastructure. Finding the political will to do that would be more difficult than the kinetic operation.