Ben Rhodes

This is not intended to kind of coerce the Iranian government into some negotiation.

Trump made clear in his words, and they're making clear in their targets, that this is an effort to remove the Iranian regime.

What is astonishing to me is not only is this illegal, but it's totally unnecessary.

The Iranian regime posed no greater threat to the United States yesterday than it did two years ago or four years ago or five years ago.

If anything, it posed less of a threat and was involved in negotiations on the issue that the United States has always seen.

as the most important security interest that we have, which is the nuclear program.

And absent from that bizarre statement last night in which he kind of casually referenced the potential deaths of U.S.

service members was any notion of what comes after the regime change.

You know, he made a call for the Iranian people to rise up.

And then what?

Because we've seen that even if you decapitate the regime, even if you remove the regime, that often in the case of Iraq, in the case of Libya, in the case of Afghanistan, leads to civil war.

They can drag on and have all manner of unintended consequences, human and geopolitical, and with the cost being borne by the American taxpayer.

So we are in a deeply, deeply uncertain point here right now.

And we don't need to be here.

I really can't see it, Rachel, because, look, this isn't like in Venezuela where you took out the leader and essentially left the regime in place.

And Delcy Rodriguez, the vice president, becomes president.

They are targeting not just the supreme leader.

They seem to be targeting all manner of regime targets.

So it's not even decapitation.

They seem to be trying to to kind of destroy some of the key edifice of the regime itself.