US and Israel planned to install Ahmadinejad as Iranian leader, NYT says

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was being lined up by the US and Israel in Iran similarly to Rodriguez after Maduro in Venezuela.The United States and Israel went into war on Iran intending to replace the regime’s leadership with hardline former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, The New York Times reported.Quoting US officials who were briefed on the “audacious plan”, the newspaper said things “quickly went awry”, and Ahmadinejad’s “current whereabouts and condition are unknown”.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemslist 1 of 3Venezuela’s interim president’s oil law reform to break with Chavez modellist 2 of 3UN cuts global growth forecast, blaming Middle East crisislist 3 of 3Iran war day 82: Tehran warns of ‘new fronts’ as Trump sets deadlineend of listAfter the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, US President Donald Trump mused that it would be best if “someone from within” Iran took over the country, the Times reported.“To say that Mr Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement,” the newspaper said.“While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.”The newspaper noted, however, that in a 2019 interview, Ahmadinejad praised President Trump and argued for a rapprochement between Iran and the US.“Mr Trump is a man of action,” Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying. “He is a businessman and therefore he is capable of calculating cost-benefits and making a decision. We say to him, let’s calculate the long-term cost-benefit of our two nations and not be shortsighted.”The Times said Trump was relishing the success of the special forces raid that kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, and the willingness of his interim replacement, Delcy Rodriguez, to work with the White House, and believed the same model could be replicated in Iran.‘A jailbreak operation’However, the US-Israeli plan, which Ahmadinejad had been consulted about, “quickly went awry”, according to the US officials who spoke to the Times.