Who is Trump negotiating with in Iran?

OPINION:

President Trump has said that Iranian negotiators have already conceded that they won’t obtain nuclear weapons. Both he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have said that the Iran war will continue for weeks, not months.

They cannot know that.

Mr. Trump has said that the Iranians have given him a present, which turned out to be free passage through the Strait of Hormuz of eight oil tankers, probably headed for China.

The strait remains closed to other shipping, and no matter what the president says, no nation other than Israel is committed to stopping the ayatollahs’ regime from its aggression.

It is odd that China hasn’t intervened in the Iran war, but it has had more than 20 years to prepare for an Iran oil stoppage. How long China’s economy and armed forces can survive the stoppage is a real quandary for Beijing.

The Houthis, an Iranian proxy, have attacked Israel with missiles and have joined the war as an ally of Iran. Neither the Israelis nor we will tolerate this. The Houthis should be bombed severely and silenced.

There has been no uprising of Iranian civilians to topple the ayatollahs’ regime, and none is in sight.

That means that whomever we are negotiating with must be the remnants of the ayatollahs’ regime, which has never, in its 47-year history, complied with any diplomatic agreement.

Mr. Trump and his negotiators are continuing talks with the Iranian government, which denies that any such talks have begun. So with whom is President Trump negotiating?

It’s not either former “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is dead, nor his son, the new “supreme leader,” Mojtaba Khamenei, who is either severely injured or dead. It’s not Ali Larijani, the former head of Iran’s “supreme national security council,” who was killed in an airstrike on March 17.

It’s probably not Ahmad Vahidi, recently appointed — and reportedly killed — commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The fog of war will confuse and conceal who has been killed and who has not.

The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, has threatened us against landing U.S. troops in Iran. He was reportedly killed, but that, for the moment, is incorrect. Mr. Qalibaf reportedly said Sunday, “As long as the Americans seek Iran’s surrender, our response is that we will never accept humiliation.”

On Monday, Mr. Trump said he was negotiating with Mr. Qalibaf, a former commander of the IRGC. We should remember that the IRGC is the principal terrorist arm of the ayatollahs’ regime and that all its members are fanatical believers in the ayatollahs’ revolution and sworn to extend it to other nations.

Mr. Qalibaf is said to be a “yes man.” So who is pulling his strings?

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, according to The Jerusalem Post, is clashing with Mr. Vahidi, both of whom are alive, for now. They are reportedly arguing about who has control and whether Iran should be striking at neighboring Arab nations.

Either or both could be controlling Mr. Qalibaf, and both are, like him, fanatics.

If we are negotiating with Messrs. Pezeshkian, Vahdi or Qalibaf, then we have given up on the idea of regime change, which we cannot do.

The question comes down to what power or authority anyone in the regime has to make a deal for a ceasefire or peace. If we aren’t negotiating with someone who has that power, then we are wasting our time. Negotiating with regime survivors is, by definition, a waste of time.

Mr. Trump is faced with the awful choices of either deploying ground troops, probably U.S. Marines, into Iran or not overthrowing the ayatollahs’ regime. It is probably impossible to change the regime without ground troops and establishing a new government. We tried both in Iraq and Afghanistan, with huge troop deployments, and got terrible results.

Mr. Trump must know the history of the ayatollahs’ regime and that it will not live up to any of its obligations in a diplomatic agreement for a ceasefire or peace. He must also know that the regime won’t end its ambitions for nuclear weapons. He also must know that if we land troops in Iran, we will face another long war lasting months or years.

The president’s options are both ugly, and neither may work. The Israelis won’t be happy with any deal he makes with the Tehran regime. Still, as other commentators have said, at least he has tried to do what other presidents didn’t: remove the regime’s capabilities for nuclear weapons.

• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.