Graeme Wood

War is a great big thing.

And if Iran is slowly developing ballistic missile capabilities, if it's slowly developing drone capabilities, then...

At what point is the exact moment when the United States should do something about it?

And every president before Trump has decided that that exact moment was postponable.

And they may have been right.

I mean, they all, in that sense, get an A grade because there was no war, there was no nuclear weapon in Iran.

And so they can hand it on off to their predecessor.

But anytime the war was going to happen, it was going to have to happen as a kind of judgment call about an accumulation of things rather than one thing that could be pointed to.

I think there are a couple of things that he might have been surprised by if that was the plan.

One is how deep you have to dig before you get to the clink, that almost anybody who was in the inner circle of Iranian politics was going to be very difficult to work with because they had not just blood on their hands, but they had been at the intersection of many different types of people.

immoral activity that's kind of irredeemable in some way.

So that's the first thing.

I have also spoken to Iranian exiles who have asked why that wasn't the policy.

Why wasn't he constantly looking for digging deep enough to find someone he could work with?

Because they say,

actually, it seems like he's not looking for that at all.

He's just digging and digging and digging and trying to discard as much of the regime as possible.

And that is why everybody's fighting to the death is because it appears that the only resolution that the United States would be happy with would be some kind of complete scalping of the regime to a very deep level and its replacement with the Shah or something like that.

And they say, if the United States had just

announced pretty early on or found a way pretty early on to get someone in the regime to defect, then they actually would have possibly been able to do that with a lot less loss of life.