Ben Rhodes

And look, I don't there was the inevitable story in The Times about the killing of the spring leader and all this great intelligence.

I mean, he was in his office.

I mean, I have no disrespect to the CIA, but it'd be like, you know, wow, we figured out that the president's in the White House, you know.

But it almost seemed like if the spring leader wanted to survive, like, you know.

He might have wanted to be, quote unquote, martyred.

I don't know.

I mean, he's a fucking asshole.

It's not at all someone you have any sympathy for.

But it may be that he delegated down and said, you know what, unload the clip.

In anticipation of this happening and some decapitation, they might have said to every IRGC commander with a drone or a missile, the orders to you are, if we die, just unload the clip.

Because that's what it feels like is happening.

And remember that those drones, those Iranian drones have been used in Ukraine by the Russians.

And the Russians were firing those drones at Ukrainian targets.

And there were air defense systems there, too.

I mean, these things, we've seen them on the battlefield in Ukraine have a huge amount of damage that they can cause.

So this is the point about the law.

This keeps dragging on.

And it's going to be impossible to eliminate all their drones.

These are like toy airplanes, essentially, but can do a lot of damage.

And so, yes, their ballistic missiles are a tool that is going to run out at some point, but I'm not sure that these drones will.