Graeme Wood

But there's been a long period of kind of strategic bureaucratization that has washed away a lot of the ideological stuff and fewer and fewer people who believe it.

But, you know, the last time I was in Tehran was in 2009.

and I went to regime rallies, and I met lots of people who were still very enthusiastic about this belief.

Now, granted, many of them seem to have been bussed in from the countryside, so they were not the cosmopolitan Tehrani types, but they do exist.

They do exist in the country, and I would say that there's

possibly a double digit percentage of Iranians who still feel that way.

So it's not exhausted, but I don't think it would be wrong to say that the country as a whole has lost that faith and has moved on to another phase in its development.

And I mean, in addition to the IRGC, which is the main

regime loyalist military element, there are millions of Iranians who are part of the families of the IRGC, millions of people whose livelihoods depend on the regime as the regime remaining intact.

And I would not be surprised.

I mean, every Iranian I speak to, no matter what their view of things, says that a lot of these people are going to fight until the last drop of blood.

Yeah, I mean, there are a few wars that have been more intensely planned.

as you say, war gamed out than a war against Iran.

I think the fact that that's the case should make us maybe a little bit analytically humble about what's gone on so far, because any war that's been planned out is planned out in phases.

That is, there's a stage one, a stage two, and a stage three.

I would say whatever stage one is, it hasn't gone that well, but we have to be cautious about judging phase one or stage one against what may be objectives that were reserved for stage two or three.

Now, what do I mean by that?

It seems like we have, so far, almost no plan for leadership change, for regime change.

That may be because that's a stage that possibly we'll never get to, but possibly that was planned for a later point in this war.

So I'm a little bit cautious about just saying that the war looks like incompetence because some of the overall objectives have not been met.