Ben Rhodes

Well, so if the Supreme Leader is dead, I would definitely, how is that announced?

Who announces it?

Is there a succession plan?

I mean, I think we'll get a pretty quick understanding of the kind of political strategy and dynamic inside the Iranian leadership.

So I think that's an important thing to watch.

Do Iranians heed Trump's call to kind of rise up and start to create like a civil conflict, essentially, so that there are clashes in the streets, just like there are clashes in the

No, yeah, Netanyahu in particular, let me speak directly to the Iranian people.

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.