Danny Citrinowicz, a former Israeli military intelligence officer focused on Iran, explains to Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer (The Long Game Podcast) how boots on the ground will land.
Update: It’s a long podcast, so I’ve been asked to summarize. The following is what jumps out at me.
The core confirmation of what I’ve been writing on this blog is at mark 9:04:
Netanyahu told Trump: “we know where Khamenei will be on Saturday and we can kill him” and they decided to do it.
That’s the whole podcast in a nutshell. Trump did what no other American president would, which means you can’t blame this on Israel.
Nobody cared about implications beyond an extrajudicial grudge killing
The entire war origin is weak leaders trying to dominate the map by using excessive military force on a target of opportunity. This can not be mistaken for a strategy. Sullivan and Finer dance around this, showing their traditional “diplomatic” methods, while Citrinowicz says it flat:
…this is… I think a major flaw in the preparation.
The nuclear boomerang
Citrinowicz is clear that attacks on Iran are having the reverse to what is being promised. Ali Khamenei was the person preventing Iran from going nuclear; the fatwa against weapons, and his personal caution after 2003. Killing him didn’t remove a nuclear threat, because it removed the guy who served as a brake on nuclear threats. Now nuclear proliferation has been unleashed. The war that claimed it would prevent a bomb is what now will produce one. Israel went from a high, yet tolerable risk to generating their own existential failure.
US/Israeli permanent improvisation
Iran had a pre-planned response for exactly this scenario. Everyone knows this. Strait of Hormuz, proxy activation, attrition strategy were all prepared. The US and Israel couldn’t think more than 30 seconds, as if in “video-game eyes” they need someone to design and present their world to them. They had an assassination and then… nothing. America in particular is generating 1,000s of targets and hitting them like Mario Brothers, without any objective and lots of failures. The asymmetry isn’t capability, it’s strategic coherence. Iran has a theory of the war. The US has a sequence of barbaric, unthinking “smash, smash”.
The footshot
Citrinowicz says Iran offered more than JCPOA. On the table was an option for no accumulation of enriched material, dilution of the 440kg stockpile, and enhanced inspections. Witkoff’s team, blind and deaf, got stuck in their own head that everything said meant the opposite — build 30-40 bombs. They couldn’t understand what was on the table because, as Citrinowicz says, “they actually don’t know Iran” and couldn’t function in the room. The war was a product of American ignorance dressed as strength.
The obvious cul-de-sac
Citrinowicz framing at minute 20:02 is exactly what I have been writing on this blog: either stop now (Iran rebuilds with greater motivation to go nuclear) or continue (boots on ground, indefinite campaign, no exit). Neither make sense, and therefore nobody should have started this war. There is no third option because the assassination step lit the map on fire and didn’t have a step two. The diplomatic path was the third option, which was completely torched just to beat chests and feel dominant for a minute. Ooo-ooh-aah-aah me fire big missile from cozy chair. Boom boom. Now me need big clue.
Israel’s indifference
Citrinowicz is refreshingly blunt and also confirms what I wrote about the “apartheid” platform of Netanyahu. We need to hear more of this frankness from IDF intelligence officers: Israel “couldn’t care less” about chaos, civil war, or a failed state in Iran. The only metric is whether it poses a strategic threat to Israel. The Gulf states, the regional order, the humanitarian consequences are all irrelevant. That’s the southern Africa cordon sanitaire logic I have identified, stated from the Israeli security establishment itself.
The red team/blue team doesn’t matter
This part of the podcast is almost beside the point strategically. It’s a post-hoc rationalization for a war that has no achievable objective.
Finer’s “against” argument is stronger, but even he comically frames it as “take the win” to manipulate a toddler, rather than “this was a catastrophic mistake from the start.” Sullivan and Finer can’t quite bring themselves to say that because they’re still operating within the frame that killing Khamenei was somehow an achievement rather than the thing that created the problem.
Citrinowicz, who doesn’t have that constraint, comes closer to saying the facts directly. This dumb, deadly, endless American war of crimes was predictable and avoidable. Notably, Citrinowicz says this was Trump’s decision. Israel followed Trump.
I’m wonderimg what you think of this.
Is there something crucial that it leaves out of account?
=========================================
If it were allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, would Iran actually pose an existential threat to Israel (or to the United States)?
Consider: the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction (MAD) would remain in effect. It would not suddenly cease to apply to all mutually-inimical nuclear-equipped powers — just as it applies today, for example, between the U.S. and China, and between India and Pakistan.
Of course, MAD would be put out of effect if one of the parties were to achieve a credible first-strike capacity (by, say, acquiring a reliably effective “Star Wars” type defense).
But, in light of the fact that even the U.S. has not managed to develop such an interception system, it is unreasonable to assume that Iran will be able to deploy such a system simultaneously against Israel and the U.S.
Conclusion: it is illogical to suppose that Iranian acquisition of the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons would pose an existential threat to either Israel or the U.S.
In the section on “The Foot Shot” we read
Citrinowicz says Iran offered more than JCPOA. On the table was an option for no accumulation of enriched material, dilution of the 440kg stockpile, and enhanced inspections. Witkoff’s team, blind and deaf, got stuck in their own head that everything said meant the opposite — build 30-40 bombs. They couldn’t understand what was on the table because, as Citrinowicz says, “they actually don’t know Iran” and couldn’t function in the room. The war was a product of American ignorance dressed as strength.
This attributes the stupidity of the leadership-decapitation to the blindness of Wittkoff. But Wittcoff probably deferred to his nominal co- negotiator, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who had considerably more experience with the Middle East. (His family foundation has long help fund Israeli settlement in the West Bank, and who touted the real-estate opportunities in Gaza (once it was rid of Palestinians.)
And concerning Kushner, we should consider Thom Hartmann’s hypothesis, set forth nearly 3 weeks ago, which is quite compatible with what Citrinowicz says about the role of Netanyahu in getting the weakling Trump to take the fateful step.
Check out
‘Did Jared Kushner Negotiate Peace — or Set a Trap for Iran’s Leadership? ‘| As Iran’s leaders gathered to debate a U.S.-brokered nuclear deal, American and Israeli intelligence already knew their location. Was this diplomacy, or something darker? | By Thom Hartmann | Daily Kos | Mar 05, 2026 | https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/3/5/2371776/ || Re-posted as Jared Kushner has some explaining to do | By Thom Hartmann | AlterNet | 8 Mar 26 | https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/jared-kushner-iran-2675828070/
If Hartmann’s hypothesis is sound — as Citrinowicz takes it to be — this would not be the first time the U.S. has employed this tactic (and to ill effect). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Monday_raid and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)
The results of that tactic of bad-faith negotiation as a way of setting up leadership for elimination are an instructive parallel the “nuclear boomerang” to the “decapitation” Trump and flunkies are still bragging about as a great achievement.
Certainly the Trump Administration’s purges of the DNI and the Department of State reduced the probability that anyone was still around to recall that costly fiasco.
I discussed the ramifications of Hartmann’s hypothesis in point (4)(c) at https://www.nameer.cloud/uploads/lyman/Political/Iran_attack_overdetermined.pdf
@Lyman
MAD is a myth, just like bombing doesn’t win wars. Pape dismantled the bombing thesis empirically. The Cold War record dismantles MAD empirically.
We owe more to individual decisions by people like Stanislav Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov rather than the doctrine itself working as designed. Under MAD’s umbrella: Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Chad, Guatemala, Peru, Cambodia, Afghanistan, proxy wars across Africa and Latin America. Tens of millions dead. The Cold War was one of the most violent periods in human history.
It wasn’t nuclear, except in the development of nuclear, which also killed.
But the defense establishment needs both to be true because both justify the same procurement pipeline and the same concentration of decision-making power.
If bombing doesn’t win wars, you need diplomacy and institutions. If MAD doesn’t keep the peace, you need diplomacy and institutions. Both conclusions point to the same place, which is away from the people and budgets currently in charge.
People like LeMay and MacArthur repeatedly said nuclear war was winnable, the same way they said Korea would fold just from being obliterated by bombs.
MAD is therefore NOT a self-executing mechanism that reliably prevents the worst outcomes. Historically it didn’t. What prevented nuclear use was institutional: the UN, arms control treaties (NPT, SALT, START, INF), hotlines, diplomatic back-channels, inspection regimes. The human and institutional infrastructure of verification and communication. MacArthur was fired for being a dumb son of a bitch. Nobody is firing Hegseth and he’s even dumber.
So the argument isn’t wrong in a simplistic sense. It’s incomplete and doesn’t fit Israel. It describes the final theoretical equilibrium state and skips the reality of an unstable transition, which is where the danger actually lives.
Israeli strategic doctrine since Ben-Gurion has been that no adversary state can be allowed to reach nuclear capability, regardless of deterrence theory. This isn’t because Israeli strategists don’t understand MAD. It’s because they correctly don’t trust that MAD’s lofty assumptions (rational unitary actors, reliable command and control, no accidental launch, no transfer to non-state actors) will hold across decades with a revolutionary state.
Nuclear capability would give Iran a security umbrella under which it could reconstitute conventional forces, rebuild proxy networks, and act with impunity regionally the same way Pakistan’s nuclear status constrains India’s conventional response options. That’s a civil war partition dragging on and on. The existential threat framing is about strategic freedom of action.
The Palestinian question is Israel’s unresolved partition. An Iranian nuclear umbrella would freeze it in place, constrain Israel’s freedom of action, and sustain proxy pressure indefinitely. Israel could “lose” the way India “lost”, not militarily destroyed, but permanently unable to impose its preferred resolution.
@Lyman
The detail that Kushner and Witkoff chose not to bring nuclear technical experts to Geneva is damning either way. If negotiating in good faith, bring experts. If setting a trap, you don’t need them.
The absence of experts is consistent with both incompetence and bad faith, which is precisely why it’s such an effective piece of evidence and it works under either interpretation.
The Mogadishu/Bloody Monday parallel is apt. In both cases, negotiations or intelligence relationships were used to locate targets, the operation produced blowback that exceeded any tactical gain, and the institutional memory of the failure was later erased or ignored.
The pattern repeats because people who would remember are the ones targeted and being purged.