Ben Rhodes

If you're one of the Iranian people that is thinking of rising up and then you hear Hexa say, this is not about democracy.

It's about killing.

It's about destroying their missiles and Navy.

Does that incentivize you to rise up?

I mean, it makes no sense.

Well, and because that's the most likely scenario.

Doesn't that feel like the most likely scenario now that like essentially we bond them for a few weeks, kill more and more people.

But then there's maybe some civil conflict.

But the IRGC and the Basij just massacre people in horrible numbers.

And then there's this kind of crazy rump IRGC regime.

And you can say that they've been defanged, but it's still a giant country.

And they'll rebuild some capacity, and they might be more dangerous.

They'll certainly try to get a nuclear weapon.

I mean, that's got to be a lesson they take.

So their desire to run this war by the news cycle

is so ahistorical because when you decapitate the regime of a country of 92 million people that is heavily armed, it's not going to end when you try to turn the news cycle off, which is what they'll do in four or five weeks or whenever it is.

And that – it's just astonishing to me how much they think – I mean that Venezuela thing must have gone to their head.

Oh, definitely.

That they thought that you could do the same thing in Iran, which is a fucking wildly different country and a wildly different part of the world where there's been a lot more war, conflict, and civil conflict.

A spine and a pulse would be the two things I'm looking for.