🇮🇷 The covert plan to break Iran with a Kurdish uprising fell apart for the oldest reason in the book: nobody involved understood the people they were arming
Malcolm Nance saw the tell months ago, columns of unmarked armored vehicles rolling out of Camp Victory and vanishing into Kurdistan.
Somebody was arming the Kurds. But he's spent a career around them, and his verdict lands hard: two dozen fractured militias, interested in their own province and not a march on Tehran.
Trump himself later admitted the weapons were handed over and simply stolen.
And the Turks, who hate the Kurds beyond anything they feel for Israel, would sooner help Iran wipe those groups out than watch Kurdistan take shape.
His deeper point is the one Washington never wants to hear.
You cannot topple a nation of 93 million with money and airpower when your intelligence services don't recruit from their own two-million-strong Iranian diaspora and can't tell a Baluch from an Azeri.
His metaphor for it: everyone in the camel souk knows each other, and the Americans keep showing up thinking they can buy the market.
The contrast he drew was Israel's 2018 nuclear-archive raid, rehearsed for two years on a full-scale mockup, executed in a single night, made possible by officers who grew up inside the cultures they operate in.
On the Katz threat against Mojtaba, his read was chilling in its simplicity: the standing order never changed.
If the opportunity comes, they take it, deal or no deal.
@MalcolmNance
