Chaos as the Israeli objective
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Chaos as the Israeli objective is John Kiriakou's reply to a viewer who asked for the current Israeli assessment: whether Benjamin Netanyahu's government actually wanted an American invasion of Iran, or whether it preferred Iran weakened with the regime intact as a permanent justification for Israel's own military posture.

The question offers two options, and Kiriakou's answer rejects both. "No, I think that what the Israelis want in Iran is what the Israelis got in Libya. Chaos."

The content of the aim

He expands the word rather than softening it. "They want chaos. They want a civil war and they want as many dead Iranians as they possibly can get."

The formulation is deliberately about state collapse rather than regime replacement. A weakened Iran with a functioning government would, on the questioner's second option, still be a state capable of policy; Libya is offered as the alternative model, a country in which the question of who governs was not resolved by the intervention but abolished by it.

Where it sits in his account of the war

The judgement is consistent with the rest of Kiriakou's commentary on the 2026 war. He holds that Iran posed no threat, no weapon, no programme, no delivery system, which requires the war to have had some object other than disarmament.

He holds that the stated object, regime change, is one the United States is "very very bad at", and that the historical record is one of easy entry and impossible exit.

And he holds that the request for the war came from Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman rather than from any American assessment of danger.

Chaos is the object that makes those three positions cohere: an outcome that cannot be described as a failure of regime change, because it was never the government that was the target.

The regional cost

Kiriakou's own concern is with what a collapsed Iran does to everyone else. Asked whether the war would open schisms between Arab governments and their populations, he named the states he would be worried about if he led them, Bahrain, Pakistan, India over Kashmir, and the Saudi royal family, which he expects to crack down in the overwhelmingly Shia Eastern Province.

See also

- "Iran posed no threat"
- MBS and Netanyahu asked Trump to attack Iran
- The Libya policy reversal
- The difficulty of getting out
