Ben Rhodes

The Kurdish areas and the Baluk areas of Iran, a lot of people may not follow this, but there are kind of longstanding separatist movements in those regions.

Do they start to try to rise up, which could threaten the territorial integrity of Iran?

So there's a lot to watch.

I think that I want to just echo something you said, Tommy, like,

We tend to consume these things in news cycles.

And even Trump loves that 12 day war, right?

Like this is going to play out for years, you know, and it's going to look terrible at some times and may look fine at other times.

But like we are in, you could argue that we are in this war now because we had a coup that we sponsored in 1953 in Iran.

That looked great on the first day too.

And like, look where we are now.

And so we just have to recognize this is going to unfold like over a long period of time.

Yeah, I mean, I think you probably know, Tommy, two people in the Iranian diaspora who are very supportive of this military intervention.

I understand the anger and trauma that people feel in the diaspora.

I just sincerely believe that the United States and Israel bombing Iran to bring about regime change creates more risks, frankly, than it does opportunities.

And principally, the reason I believe that is, to your point,

When I think of the places where there have been regime change, let's expand it beyond even US wars to Arab Spring.

Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, I'm leaving some out, but in every case,

Sudan, where the people did rise up.

In every case, you either had like a civil war that was hugely destabilizing and disruptive and a loss of life, or you had the guys with guns come back and be even more repressive, right?

Like the Egyptian government that emerged was more repressive even than Mubarak, right?