When world leaders gathered at the G7 conference in August, the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani mentioned his willingness to meet with his American counterpart. Shortly thereafter, Amir Taheri received a late-night phone call from a contact claiming that, if President Trump would take up the offer, he could hand a major victory to the “moderates”—led by Rouhani—over the “hardliners”—ostensibly led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Taheri explains how this unsubstantiated interpretation of Tehran’s politics is as old as the Islamic Republic itself:

Weeks after the mullahs seized power in 1979, the Carter administration identified Mehdi Bazargan, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s first prime minister, as “the man with whom we can work.” After he was kicked out, attention was turned to more ephemeral figures. . . . With Khomeini supposedly too old to last long, these were the men who would shape Iran’s Thermidor, emerging from the reign of terror. Fariba Adelkhah, then a young researcher in Paris, and later an ardent apologist for the Islamic Republic, even wrote a book bearing the title Iranian Thermidor. She is now a hostage in Tehran held by the very men she had so passionately defended in the French media.

Both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair told me at different times that they had identified “men with whom we can work” in Tehran and that the key to success was getting rid of Khamenei and his “hardliners.”

Western analysts and their imitators inside Iran missed two crucial points. The first was that, like most revolutionary regimes, the Khomeinists had no mechanism for reform in the direction desired by the Iranian middle classes and the Western powers. Thus, even if its leaders tried to introduce reforms, they would be doomed to failure. . . . The second point Western powers ignore is that Iranians today are divided into two broad camps. . . . One camp consists of those, perhaps even a majority today, who are disillusioned with the Islamic Revolution and seek ways of [bringing it to an end] as soon as possible. . . . In the second camp, we find all those who, for different reasons, are still committed to the Khomeinist revolution.

Thus if Trump, or anyone else, wishes to make a deal with the present regime in Tehran, the man they should talk to is Khamenei, not Rouhani, an actor playing the president. [T]hat fact was demonstrated [when] Khamenei ordered Rouhani to eat humble pie and publicly recant his [offer of] a summit with Trump.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.