The Heritage Foundation's vice president of national security, Victoria Coates, sounded the alarm Monday on Newsmax, warning that Iran's newly installed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leader, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, is a "very, very bad actor."
Coates said he has "a long track record of terrorist attacks in our own hemisphere."
On "Bianca Across the Nation," Coates said Vahidi's history of terrorism in the Western hemisphere makes clear he is not someone the United States can work with as Iran scrambles to reconstitute power after Saturday's joint U.S.-Israel strikes.
Those strikes wiped out many of the regime's top leaders, including Iran's president and supreme leader, leaving a power vacuum in Tehran.
With factions maneuvering amid the wreckage, Coates argued the United States has to judge potential successors by what they've done, and Vahidi's past makes him toxic for any reconstruction talks.
"He was responsible for the 1992 bombing in Buenos Aires," she said, referring to the deadly attack on a Jewish site in Argentina. "That goes back now 30 years."
With that resume, Coates said she has difficulty seeing a scenario in which the United States could work with Vahidi as Iran rebuilds.
She extended that warning to other regime insiders angling for power, including Ali Larijani, the leader of Iran's Supreme National Security Council.
Larijani "was responsible for the massacre, most recently in January, when some 30,000 innocent Iranians were killed," Coates said, calling the contenders for control "pretty bad, bad dudes, as the president might say."
She said that Washington cannot delude itself into thinking that regime loyalists can suddenly become constructive partners.
"It's hard for me to see us working with him or with Ali Larijani," Coates said, stressing that these are "not people with whom we can work."
She also addressed swirling reports about former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been reported dead by some outlets while Iranian state media casts doubt on those claims.
"A lot of these reports can be mistaken," she acknowledged.
Still, Coates added, "if he hasn't spoken up yet, it would surprise me if he springs back to life, as it were."
As Tehran's future hangs in the balance, she made clear that any U.S. strategy must start with a sober assessment of who is stepping forward.
If Vahidi — widely known as "the butcher" — is leading the Revolutionary Guard, Coates signaled that rebuilding Iran's power structure with U.S. cooperation is a nonstarter.
Nicole Weatherholtz ✉
Nicole Weatherholtz, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
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