Behnam Ben Taleblu

to raise the alarm bell about we could be moving towards an Iraq situation, but not Iraq 2003, Iraq post-91.

And fortunately, I hear a lot of people saying that now after this war, because the limited war experience of this kind of adversary

you know, anti-American, anti-Israeli, oil-rich, authoritarian, doesn't control its own airspace, firing ballistic missiles, subject to UN sanctions, weak enough that it can't win a war abroad, strong enough to kill its own people.

That does sound a lot like Saddam in the 90s.

And if we're going to get this right, whenever the conflict is going to be turned off, the thing that is more important to me is what kind of political strategy are we going to bring to bear?

Where is maximum pressure going to come back in?

Where is maximum support going to come back in?

How are we going to fracture this national security deep state?

How can we extend the shelf life for the military win?

And by the Islamic Republic making all of those things harder for us, they're robbing us of the ability to have a political win or they're raising the cost of it significantly given the limited options that we have.

It's a great question.

It's hard to confirm it outside of the scope of the original reporting that did have that exclusive.

All I can tell you is looking at some of the fad raters that I've been in, looking at the fact that the regime was able to really hit on a tarmac where early airborne...

radar system for the AWACS plane had been hit, this does raise a lot of alarm bells for me.

And based on that report, there was the Russians basically taking snapshots, downloading higher resolution satellite imagery, giving these kind of targets to the Islamic Republic.

I am quite worried about that.

This would be, again,

More linkage, in my view, in my mind, of the Ukrainian theater and of the Iranian theater of Eurasia and the Middle East.

I know there's a lot of different views with Washington.

The left tends to be more hawkish on Russia these days.