Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, said Sunday that the joint American-Israeli military campaign against Iran must press forward until the Islamic Republic’s regime is so thoroughly weakened that the Iranian people can overthrow it themselves.

Speaking in an interview with CNN, Leiter said the campaign would not end until “there is not an entity in Tehran that’s going to threaten the region.”

“What we have to focus on now is degrading to the point where they have no power left in this regime,” Leiter said. “Hopefully, that will trigger this combustion point where the people are able to take charge of their own lives.”

Asked what such an outcome might look like, the ambassador conceded that a change of heart from Tehran was theoretically possible, while immediately dismissing it as “hard to imagine.” A popular uprising, he said, was far more likely. “Probably, it’s going to take place because the Iranian people have had enough.”

Leiter reached for historical analogies to make the case that sudden regime collapse, however unforeseeable, is not without precedent. “Nobody knew when the Soviet Union would collapse,” he said. “Nobody knew when the Romanians would turn their guns against their government. But it happened at some point. And if we degrade them enough, the people of Iran are going to say, we’ve had enough and we want a different regime.”

“I think that we need boots on the ground,” Leiter said, “but they’ve got to be Iranian boots — and I think they’re coming.”

The ambassador also sought to reassure people that the campaign was not open-ended. “This is not something that goes on forever,” he said, adding that airstrikes by the US and Israel could be sufficient to bring about the desired outcome.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)