Anybody who claims the architects of the Iran war knew what they were doing should now read Monday’s New York Times and reconsider. Anonymous American officials, briefed on what they called an “audacious plan,” have told the paper that one of the opening moves of Operation Epic Fury — the joint US-Israeli air campaign launched on February 28 — was an Israeli airstrike designed not to kill Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but to free him. The bodyguards of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who had been monitoring the former president in his Narmak neighborhood were to be incinerated; Ahmadinejad himself was to be plucked out of the rubble and installed at the head of a new Iran.

The strike came. The bodyguards died. Ahmadinejad took shrapnel in the leg and vanished.

Before we proceed, an important caveat: the story rests on US officials speaking anonymously, and on one unnamed “associate” of Ahmadinejad. Spencer Ackerman, who has been tougher on this war than most American commentators, wonders if the leak itself may be the operation — “a set-up job to discredit Ahmedinejad,” or perhaps to “preempt an Ahmadinejad comeback.”

Either way, the war planners, in Washington and Jerusalem alike, come out smelling of industrial effluents. These people looked at the Iranian state and decided that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was their best bet to lead it. The judgment does not survive ten minutes with anybody who actually knows the country.

Nobody, but nobody, in Iran wants him back in charge. Begin with Tehran’s clerical establishment, which has spent the better part of a decade trying to be rid of him. The man Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to elevate has been barred from the presidency three times running — in 2017, 2021 and 2024 — by the Guardian Council, the body that vets candidates for high office at the supreme leader’s pleasure. Two of Ahmadinejad’s vice presidents, his chief of staff and his media adviser have all been jailed. By the eve of the war his phones had been confiscated and his guard detail expanded, according to The Atlantic, to roughly 50 IRGC men whose job was to watch him, not to protect him. The regime had not yet figured out how to dispose of Ahmadinejad, but it had long since stopped pretending that he was one of them.

Then there is the question of who runs Iran now. Nine days after Israeli munitions killed Ali Khamenei in the war’s opening hour, the Assembly of Experts named his second son, Mojtaba, supreme leader. Mojtaba is not merely Khamenei’s heir; he is, according to a credible accusation made in 2005 by the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi, the man who rigged the election that brought Ahmadinejad to power in the first place. He rigged 2009 for him too. The IRGC and Basij forces that beat, jailed and shot the Green Movement protesters of that summer were Mojtaba’s allies. The president later fell out with his patron, Khamenei Sr. — but the idea that the Guards or the clergy would receive him back as Iran’s new face, under American bombs, instead of the patron’s son, beggars belief.

Ordinary Iranians have their own view of the man. Whatever sympathy Ahmadinejad once enjoyed among the rural poor and the Basiji faithful, he forfeited in the summer of 2009, when up to three million people poured into the streets of Tehran demanding to know — where is my vote? — after Mojtaba helped him to a second term. Ahmadinejad’s answer was to dismiss the marchers as “dirt and dust.” His government’s answer was batons, bullets and Evin Prison. Mir Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the Green Movement, whose election was stolen, and his wife Zahra Rahnavard, who led the campaign for him, remain under house arrest to this day. The Iranians who took to the streets again late last year, and who died in their tens of thousands doing so according to The Guardian, are the political children of the Green Movement.

As for his fitness for the world stage — well. This is the man who told an audience at Tehran’s “World Without Zionism” conference in October 2005 that Israel must be “wiped off the map”. He told NPR that survivors of the Shoah were peddling “the opinion of just a few.” He sponsored a Holocaust denial cartoon contest. At Columbia University, he announced that Iran had no homosexuals. He accelerated the nuclear program that wrecked Iran’s economy.

This is the man who Trump and Netanyahu decided was the right vehicle for a new beginning in Iran.

So how, after all that, did the planners settle on him? Through his social-media feed, apparently. Since 2017 — the year of his first disqualification — Ahmadinejad has run an English-language account, @Ahmadinejad1956, on a platform he himself banned in Iran during the Green Movement. The feed opines about Colin Kaepernick, LeBron James, Serena Williams and the University of Michigan football team; it sends Throwback Thursday photographs of the young Mahmoud in his university football kit; it deploys the hashtag #DictatorshipOfDollar. Slate called him a “loveable Twitter rascal”. The Atlantic Council, more soberly, asked in 2018 why on earth he was tweeting at all, and pointed out that the posts — exclusively in English, a language Ahmadinejad scarcely uses in public — are almost certainly written by aides. The Iranian journalist Kourosh Ziabari, writing in Responsible Statecraft the following year, warned readers in plainer language not to fall for “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Twitter public relations campaign.”

The man himself eventually conceded that he was not the sole author of the posts, telling Radio Free Europe’s Golnaz Esfandiari: “I consult with my friends. They suggest important regional issues, world issues, we create a list, we prepare a text and then we tweet.”

What those friends have spent nearly a decade producing is a laundering operation. A Holocaust denier has been recast, one tweet at a time, as a kind of bumbling internet uncle who likes the Wolverines and gets ribbed by sports-radio types. And the laundering apparently took. The Times notes that Trump’s people seem to have been particularly taken with a 2019 interview in which “Ahmadinejad” praised the American President as “a man of action” and “a businessman” capable of “calculating cost-benefits.” That sort of flattery, in that sort of vocabulary, is not the voice of the man who used to call the United States the Great Satan. It is the voice of an aide who has read The Art of the Deal and knows which buttons to push. The Trump White House, never knowingly under-flattered, bought it.

The bill for ignorance about Iran is now coming due. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of “war,” now tells the country that “regime change has occurred” — and it has, but not in the way he and his boss had hoped. Iran is now run by the IRGC in consultation with a supreme leader more hardline than his father and personally implicated in two stolen elections and the slaughter of thousands of Iranians. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted. The war has prompted the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs to downgrade its forecast for the global economy. Hundreds of Iranian civilians, schoolchildren among them, are dead. Hegseth is back on the Hill asking Congress for more money. Ahmadinejad’s leg is healing somewhere none of us is allowed to know about.

And what if Spencer Ackerman is right, and this leak to the Times is deception — a story planted by people who failed to kill Ahmadinejad and now hope to destroy him politically by hugging him in public? Set aside, for a moment, the question of whether American officials really do conduct character assassination through the front page of the country’s paper of record. The scenario still requires us to believe that the architects of this war think they can — or even need to — besmirch Ahmadinejad’s image in his own country. The disinformation reading, in other words, doesn’t rescue the planners. It just adds a second layer of misjudgment on top of the first.

There will be plenty for historians to debate and dispute when this war is over — about strategy and tactics, about messaging, about a great deal else. But they will struggle to reckon with the sheer stupidity and credulity of the people who started it.