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Iranian Regime Cracks Widening By the Hour – HotAir

March 20, 2026
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Week three of the war to end the war Iran has waged for 47 years draws to a close today, and with it, another week of withering degradation of one of the most evil regimes the world has seen in nearly a century. 

Iran continues to fire off missiles in ones and twos, instead of dozens or hundreds, and has inflicted damage on infrastructure sites in Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and in Qatar. The fascinating thing about Iran’s decision to hit Qatari sites is that Qatar quite literally was the last friend Iran had in the Middle East. No longer. For a military campaign that reportedly none of the Arab states wanted the United States and Israel to wage, now that they’ve seen the targets to which a lot of these rockets were pre-selected and sent, they’ve had enough. 

Saudi Arabia released a little video package early Thursday meant to show that they’ve got some military muscle of their own. It’s no accident that they meant to release it after being hit by Iran. It looks like they’ve got a score to settle with their neighbors to the east. 





Both Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in different press briefings, promised another big round of activity in the overnight hours of Thursday-into-Friday. According to one report, Secretary Hegseth wasn’t fooling around. 

While the U.S. is bouncing the rubble anywhere Iran’s military junta once called home, the Israelis, according to N12 News, have different goals at hand, more in the enabling of regime change department. 

And to that end…

Regime change has been very clearly articulated multiple times by the White House and the Pentagon as not being a priority or mission goal in Operation Epic Fury, but don’t kid yourself. If regime change did happen, the Americans would welcome it openly. 

For the remnants of the regime leadership, which could be down to dozens or it could still be in the hundreds, the only weapon they really have in the arsenal, besides a lucky shot here and there, is the threat of attacks on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. It was believed even by U.S. Naval observers that such a relatively small choke point still had a lot of miles of potentially ambushable waters to protect. And despite the size of the armada we have there, several of them are serving as force protection for the carriers. There just aren’t enough resources available to provide a wall of guns on the water in order to create a safe lane of passage. 

Until yesterday, many of our NATO partners in Europe refused to cooperate with President Trump’s request for mine sweepers or other support ships. Never Trump, Inc. seized and pounced on that, criticizing the President for going to war without building a coalition first with what should be our allies. As usual, their criticism got way out in front of their skis. 

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was the first to signal that help was coming after all. 





It didn’t take too long after the President wondered aloud what NATO was good for if it’s only a one-way aid alliance. By midday Thursday, the rest of the coming security force for the Strait formed. 

In their statement, they saw the light…and $150 dollar a barrel oil and going up from there if they didn’t get into gear. 

Several 5,000-pound rounds of American ordnance dropped on Iran’s southern shoreline through the Strait, destroying countless tunnels from which to launch fast-attack boats, Stingers and mines. And for all the talk from Donald Trump that there are no plans for troops on the ground, in addition to a reported 5,000 Marines already on the way, this report Thursday afternoon that another 4,000, 2,500 Marines of which are coming from the West Coast, most likely coming from Camp Pendleton, an hour south of me. 

Amid all the damage to the regime, both in leadership, rank and file soldiers, infrastructure and assets, are there signs that cracks are widening that could lead to the ultimate ground force – the Iranian people themselves – being released? I think so. Lots, in fact. 

David Barnea, Israel’s director of the Mossad, has signaled for weeks, maybe months, that once the military goals are achieved, and that’s about the state of where the war is right now, the next phase would be to work on how to get the regime to fall. 





Every leader of Iran who has shown his face publicly in the last couple of weeks is dead. It’s gotten to the point where it’s easier to name the people in leadership still alive than it is to catalogue the roll call of the ex-regimists. Cardboard Mojtaba Khamenei, the newly minted, gay Supreme Leader, has yet to show himself. No one knows what he sounds or looks like. He was to have given another ‘first address’ two days ago. It never happened. The rumor mill inside regime opposition in Iran has kicked into overdrive, maybe with a little help from the outside. 

From a Persian X account translated into English. 

A single, unverified source says Mojtaba Khamenei was in a coma at Loghman Hospital and is now dead.

Message from one source, naturally unverified: “My friend came online from Iran and said he’s heard from Loghman Hospital staff that Mojtaba was in a coma and passed away today!!” 

[ Raw data on Mojtaba’s coma had reached Allo (Saturday, March 13). His hospitalization too (Saturday, March 6) ]

The expression allo means a tip from someone inside the hospital reporting this. Let me be very clear. This is absolutely unverified. Let me also be clear that variations of this report are absolutely rampant among anti-regime and opposition accounts in Iran. 

But in the end, whether it’s true or not that Mojtaba has traded in the surly bonds of his recycled pulp body for a more lasting resting place in an actual wooden box, that may very well be irrelevant over the next few weeks. If the population inside Iran begins to believe it’s true, if the perception is the Supreme Leader really is a cardboard cut-out and not really alive, the cracks in the regime grow wider as people begin to act as though the wheels are coming off the mullahcracy wagon.

This was the scene in Tehran on Thursday evening as the bombs were falling on sensitive sites all around them. 

Notice there were only a couple of women in the beginning of the clip that wore head coverings. But the rest of the women, and there were several in this short clip, were not. That simply would not have happened before the Americans and Israelis came to town. Yes, the Mullahs had, at least in theory, relaxed the Sharia Law rules a smidge, but not like this. This is a wholly different Iran of which we’re seeing sporadic glimpses. 

Iran has a population of 93 million people. On any Bell curve, there will be ten percent of those who have never known anything different than the brutal, oppressive life forced upon them. They are probably brainwashed, terrified that this illusion of freedom is just temporary, and/or afraid to act. There are ten percent at the other end of the curve that are literally dancing in the streets, thinking elections are right around the corner. The big question is what about the remaining 72 million residents of the terror state in the middle of the Bell curve?

It’s been estimated that around 750,000 IRGC and Basij have imposed the regime’s will all over Iran, which is a pretty big place – about the size of the State of Alaska. An ominous presence, indeed, except after three weeks of constant targeted air strikes by the United States and Israel, you can safely take at least 10-15% off the board. Now you’re down to 650,000, give or take. Against potentially millions of Iranians taking the streets once they get a signal to go, and are encouraged by the numbers of the mob ready to take their country back. 





This was from Tuesday, according to Israeli sources. In the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, in a story penned by Dov Lieber, Benoit Faucon, and Shayndi Raice, they report how much damage Iran’s command and control is taking systematically and relentlessly each and every day. This excerpt describes how deeply Israel has penetrated Iranian regime forces, and how they are exploiting it to remove the will to fight among the remaining IRGC and Basij commanders and further lower the numbers of forces left standing in the way of the Iranian revolution. 

The attacks hurt rank-and-file morale and drove some security forces to begin sleeping in their vehicles, mosques or other sports facilities, Israel’s assessment said. 

Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence officials began placing calls to individual commanders, threatening them and their families by name if they didn’t stand aside in the event of an uprising, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The Journal reviewed the contents of one call between a senior Iranian police commander and an agent of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service. 

“Can you hear me?” a Mossad agent can be heard, speaking in Farsi. “We know everything about you. You are on our blacklist, and we have all the information about you.” 

“OK,” the commander said in the recording. 

“I called to warn you in advance that you should stand with your people’s side,” the Mossad agent said. 
“And if you will not do that, your destiny will be as your leader. Do you hear me?” 

“Brother, I swear on the Quran, I’m not your enemy,” the commander said. “I’m a dead man already. Just please come help us.”

You’ve got to hand it to Israel and especially the Mossad. Who else but the Jews could engineer a whole bunch of remote control ‘Come to Jesus’ meetings with fanatical Islamists hellbent on their destruction? And with their technological prowess and vastly superior intelligence penetration in-country, actually pull it off successfully by creating more defections? 

Treasury Secretary Bessent last week, along with the Israelis, hacked the two leading Iranian banks, freezing them out so all regime employees, including IRGC and Basij, no longer got paid or had access to money. By Thursday morning, Secretary Bessent told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo that they can actually see defections happening because they’re following the money of known military commanders moving out of the country. 





President Trump said as much later in the morning from the Oval Office with Japan Prime Minister Takaichi Sunae. 

Secretary Bessent was also in the Oval, and the President gave him a moment to expand on what he said on Fox Business earlier. 

How many are bailing? How can we quantify the number of military commanders and unit leaders that are going full Steve Miller Band – Take the Money And Run? Impossible to put a hard number on it, obviously, unless you’re Bessent and can tally the number of accounts they’re tracking. But just ask yourself this. If it were just two or three people, or a small handful leaving, do you think Bessent would be putting his neck out with a claim like this? I don’t. If CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s intel, or Mossad’s shared intel, didn’t show roughly that same estimate, that forces are bailing out in wholesale fashion all throughout Iran’s military, there’s no upside for Bessent to go public with that information. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s press conference was full of these same types of suggestions of mass defections as well. 

So why is regime change so much more important to Netanyahu than it is to Trump? To the President, this excursion was always about removing the threat to the United States for a very long time, and hopefully, forever. Regime change, at least with the United States’ recent track record, is a tough sell because of a lot of misadventures that turned into forever wars. Trump doesn’t want to commit to that. But he’s also not opposed to regime change if it happens in the course of events. 

But if you’re Netanyahu and the Israelis, regime change is pretty important, because you now have in front of you the opportunity to cut the head off the snake in the Middle East once and for all. In Hebrew, Netanyahu said as much. 

No Iran, no Hezbollah. No Iran, no Houthis. No Iran, no Hamas. There are a lot of proxies that will dry up without Iranian patronage. The Middle East becomes a much less hostile neighborhood for Israel if Iran goes through a revolution and emerges into something other than what it has been for 47 years. 

He’s right. It would be an extraordinarily unique event in history if we could bomb the entire regime leadership out of existence from the air, and everyone else in the IRGC and Basij rank and file put their weapons down and waved the white flag. That’s not going to happen. 

Donald Trump has something big up his sleeve to pull on the Strait of Hormuz to open it up for good. He hinted that we have weaponry now that nobody has seen. But the way he has been talking, and threatening, all the while retooling and staging more resources, including thousands of Marines and other unspecified military servicemembers, tells me something big is coming, and it’s coming very soon. Trump wants oil prices to come back down, and if it means going postal on anyone nearby who even thinks about lighting off an Iranian firecracker or drone, so be it.  

Bibi Netanyahu, similarly, is teasing that something big is going to happen on his end, too – dealing with the internal power structure of whatever is left of the regime. Again, you can just sense it. Something is coming. 

Finally, in the time it took to write this column, which began with War Secretary Hegseth promising big things, a video has surfaced to show you what one of those big things used to be before being blown to smithereens and is currently on fire. 





This was Bandar Lengeh port. It sits in Southern Iran and is the last stop before entering the Strait of Hormuz if you’re leaving the Persian Gulf to open waters, or the first stop once you’ve navigated the Strait into the Persian Gulf. Either way, it was the primary customs area run by the IRGC, and its main job was transferring weapons and supplies in and out of the regime. 

Go back to that pre-war number of 750,000 IRGC and Basij forces. After killing 10-15% in air strikes, with more joining the 72 virgin waiting list with each bomb, which number in the hundreds every day, and then you factor in the psyops being done to them by the Israelis, reminding them that they’re doomed unless they leave the fight, how many do you think are left? 500,000? 250,000? 

Any number you come up with, the baseline number of Iranians fed up with the regime doesn’t change. It’s still in the tens of millions of people. The only thing that changes is the ratio of forces available to put down the coming revolution. And with that ratio continuing to thin out for the regime, the odds get longer for them to remain in power every day. 

Welcome to Week Four. Continued prayers for safety, guidance, and success in carrying out their mission.


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