MBS and Netanyahu asked Trump to attack Iran
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MBS and Netanyahu asked Trump to attack Iran, according to John Kiriakou, who gives the joint approach as the origin of the 2026 war and treats it as the fact that makes the surrounding Saudi diplomacy inexplicable.

The reported approach

Kiriakou was asked about news that Saudi Arabia had said it would help the United States in efforts to change the Iranian regime. He confirmed it: "The news that you've seen that Saudi Arabia said that they would help us in regime change operations is true."

He then supplied what he regarded as the more important fact. "Over the last couple of years, Mohammed bin Salman uh uh Al Saud, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, actually worked very hard to improve Saudi relations with Iran. But as it turns out, it was Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu who went to Donald Trump and asked him to invade Iran or to attack Iran."

Kiriakou's reading of it

The contradiction between the rapprochement and the request is left standing rather than resolved. "So, I'm not sure what kind of game MBS is is playing. It's a dangerous one," Kiriakou says.

On the object of the war he is unambiguous, and treats it as admitted rather than inferred: "The goal is indeed regime change. Donald Trump told us to our faces a couple of nights ago the goal is regime change."

What follows from it

Kiriakou's objection is not that the aim is concealed but that it is unachievable, and he moves straight from the admission to the record: "the United States is very very bad at regime change operations." That judgement is developed at length in his account of the difficulty of getting out, where the twenty years in Afghanistan and nineteen in Iraq serve as the measure of the cost.

Elsewhere in his commentary on the same war, Kiriakou identifies Marco Rubio as the official actually driving the policy inside the administration, with Netanyahu alongside him, a structure in which the two men who asked for the war were, in Kiriakou's account, pushing against a national security establishment that largely did not want it.

See also

- The Difficulty Of Getting Out
- Marco Rubio And Iran Policy
- Benjamin Netanyahu
- Chaos As The Israeli Objective
