Ben Rhodes

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.

And that leads a vacuum in place in Iran.

Now, inside of Iran, the people that are most heavily armed and therefore prepared to seize some vacuum are the more hardline Revolutionary Guard Corps.

If you look at the only potential

play that has been made about some future government.

It was outside of the country with some of the engagement with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah of Iran, who has some support outside the country.

But if you talk to analysts inside of Iran, the idea that you're just going to re-import the son of the Shah into a country of 93 million people