Dr. Bradley Thayer

But we always worry about essentially a surface-to-air missile

an ambush of an aircraft.

The ground war, Steve, we worry about that a lot because of the possibility if you're using Kurds, that's going to cause a Persian nationalist reaction.

If you're using Kurds to break down the door on the ground and to seize a chunk of Iran, the Persian people

are going to react to that, I would suspect, vociferously.

And that's going to feed support for the regime.

And that's not an outcome that we want.

And then, of course, the proxy front will be ongoing as long as this war is, right?

We will always be worried about a terrorist attack in the United States on American soil or against U.S.

military targets abroad.

or against allies, of course, as well.

I think it's a key element of the war.

I think what Iran has done, it has escalated the war horizontally by attacking the Gulf Sheikhdoms in Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan and many other states as well.

Their effort is to undermine support for the U.S.

There's a logic for what they're doing, a military logic, strategic logic for what they're doing.

They want to inflict pain on the Arab states.

And then by so doing, of course, that also reveals the cleavages, the tensions that exist between Sunni and Shia Arabs, Iranians largely Shia.

and between Persians and Arabs.

So Iran's efforts to hurt the U.S., to draw out the campaign and inflict pain on the Arabs is, to a degree, self-defeating because it's generating, at least at the elite level, support.

Another issue which needs to be addressed is that by attacking Azerbaijan, remember, 16% of the population of Iran is Azeri.