Israel’s wars have a history of mission creep. And in that tradition of relentless escalation, the Israeli campaign that began early Friday against Iran’s nuclear program is now moving inexorably toward regime change.

Watching the television images from Tehran, you see that Israel is widening its lens. On Sunday, it was the billowing flames surrounding the Greater Tehran Police Command, loathed by many as a center of repression. On Monday it was an attack on the headquarters of Iranian state television, dispenser of state propaganda — driving the stolid anchorwoman in a dark hijab and chador from her chair in the middle of a broadcast.

The clearest sign that Israel is going for the heart of the regime came in a comment Monday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Asked by ABC News whether Israel plans to target supreme leader Ali Khamenei, Netanyahu answered: “We are doing what we need to do.”

Assassination isn’t the path to a strong country. But we’re clearly in new territory, described by the best Iran-watchers I know. “The Islamic Republic has spent decades seeking to eradicate Israel. Now, Israel seems to be pursuing the end of the Islamic Republic,” said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace during an interview Monday.

You’ll get no argument from me that it’s long past time for political change in Tehran. The clerical regime has been shedding the blood of Israelis, Americans, Saudis and anyone else who opposed its dictates since the 1979 Islamic revolution. The question is how change will come. What’s the road toward a dynamic country that’s worthy of Iran’s creative, cultured people?

Here’s one obvious fact: Israel can’t bomb its way to this new Iran. A campaign of bombing of the kind Tehran is experiencing makes people hunker down, turn inward and often fight harder. Strategic bombing didn’t break the will of the British, German or Japanese people during World War II. It hasn’t yet destroyed Hamas in Gaza, either, for that matter.

Israel rolled the dice with this attack, and I don’t mean to minimize the danger, for it or the region. Sadjadpour succinctly describes the twin risks: “This could end up destabilizing the regime or entrenching it. It could halt the nuclear program or accelerate it.”

Talking with Iran experts, I heard one consistent theme: The best way to rally Iranians is to help them build a wealthier, more advanced and integrated country. So often in the past, Israeli and American intelligence planners did the opposite. They tried to use Iran’s ethnic divisions — its mix of Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluchis — against Tehran.

And don’t try to reimpose an old monarchy, I would add. Some advocates of Iran change are rallying around Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah deposed in the 1979 revolution. But surely the United States and Britain made that mistake before, in the 1953 coup that installed the shah in place of Mohammed Mosaddeq, the democratically elected prime minister.

The message that will resonate with Iranians is that this regime has reached a violent dead end — through its own mistakes as much as Israeli actions. Its weakness and corruption are a national embarrassment.

Iranians have been posting black-humor messages even in the mayhem since Israel began its attack early Friday, according to friends who call Tehran and read Iranian social media. When top military leaders were killed in their apartments, a jaundiced Iranian asked why they were all living in penthouses.

What angers Iranians is that the regime has squandered money supporting anti-Israel proxy forces such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, rather than spending more at home. Police were arresting women for not wearing headscarves even as Mossad agents were smuggling in the drones that killed top military leaders Friday. “While the ideologues were securing the windows, they left the front door wide open,” argued Ben Taleblu, expressing an opinion he said is being voiced widely in Tehran after Israel’s attack.

The right approach in thinking about regime change, argued Sadjadpour, is to encourage patriotic nationalism, without the mullahs. “What should come next is a group of leaders whose organizing principle is not Islamic revolution but national interest,” he told me. “Instead of ‘Death to America,’ the slogan should be ‘Long Live Iran.’”

The Iranian revolution in 1979 was an earthquake whose aftershocks are still rumbling across the Middle East. Israel and the United States were the main targets, but the whole region has suffered. The idea that Iran’s mischief and meddling might gain a permanent nuclear umbrella is intolerable.

Watching the disaster that is now unfolding for Iran, one can only hope that a path will emerge out of this moment, offering Iranians a chance to build something new.