‘This Is Probably Not a Good Idea’: CNN Security Analyst Aghast at Reported Plan for Regime Change in Iran

CNN Security Analyst Nick Paton Walsh was aghast on Tuesday over reports that President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to rely on Kurdish forces to foment an uprising within Iran.

Walsh joined Erin Burnett’s OutFront to discuss the ongoing U.S. military operation within Iran that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei over the weekend. Burnett asked the veteran analyst about a recent CNN report claiming that the CIA was planning to arm Iranian Kurdish opposition forces along the border of Iran to aid in fostering a more significant regime change.

“The United States, the CIA, is planning to rely on Kurdish Iranian forces to somehow cross the border and awaken forces inside, some of which may have been earlier supplied with weapons or not, in some sort of an uprising,” she said. “Okay, what do you think?”

Walsh told Burnett that the alleged operation was deeply flawed, detailing the holes in the plan, which he called “a U.S. plan for a protracted sense of civil war.”

“Yeah, I mean, in the politest form, this is probably not a good idea for multiple different reasons. If you’re dealing with the United States, whose president is saying they didn’t really have time to put in an evacuation plan for U.S. citizens, then trying to enact this, which is essentially an insurgency, which you need weapons, that takes a lot of time for serious planning,” he said.

He continued:

Now, the Kurds in the region are desperate for autonomy. They’ll offer anything to anybody to have the shot at that, potentially. They’ve just been shut down, really– the Syrian Kurds in Syria by the new government there, right. Another reminder, when the Syrian Kurds were last used by the United States, before that betrayal in Syria then, they needed U.S. Special forces and air cover for two years to take out the ISIS caliphate which covered a much, much smaller area than 90 million people of Iran. So, the task is enormous and so, essentially, I think what we’re seeing here is a U.S plan for a protracted sense of civil war ultimately in Iran. The notion that this force, if magic out of nowhere, can distract Iranian security forces

[…]

Or it’s going to confuse the police and IRGC so much that the popular uprising will take over– naive, I’m afraid. It feels like a suddenly reached solution that someone’s desperately handed in the hope that it will give the Kurds some more traction here. And so it leaves me slightly concerned that this may be the beginning of the ground notion, the sort of next phase of all of this. Not well thought through, I think, is certainly a fair way to discuss it, and a departure which could potentially see something go on here for years.

Watch above via CNN.

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