General James Mattis

What are the indicators of an autocrat staying in power?

There's over 70 indicators and they look at all these things.

One of them, one of those indicators outweighs all the rest.

Will the regime murder their own people at the industrial level?

If they will, they're going to stay in power.

You have an unarmed population up against a very well-armed regime that is fighting a total war right now.

Total war.

We're fighting a limited war.

The American president a week ago called it a little excursion.

But they are fighting for their lives, the mullahs are, because the people probably will kill them if they overthrow them.

They're just that angry at them.

So they're fighting like that.

What have we learned from it?

It's going to be a darn difficult problem, a darn difficult problem.

I hope we learned it.

That and some other things.

But what happened in 1979 when this was being filmed

is that changed everything in the middle east in iran the shah falls uh and this regime that we're now dealing with comes in some 47 years ago whatever it is the the grand mosque falls to the nutcases the political islamists uh the terror what eventually becomes the sunni side of the terrorist uh

organizations coming out of the Mideast.

And so out of that, the question when this war started some couple of weeks ago, were we going to fundamentally change from a strategic point of view, fundamentally change the construct of the Middle East?