Karim Sadjadpour

going along for financial, political expediency.

And so most people in that system recognize that it's not sustainable and they're waiting for the Supreme Leader to die.

Now, what happens if instead of dying a natural death,

or some kind of internal coup, he's taken out by American missiles.

That, in my view, is an enormous risk, an enormous gamble, that instead of this evolutionary process happening, it could...

further radicalize and mobilize the true believers in that system to actually try to preserve power among themselves.

That is something that I would be concerned about.

If Ayatollah Khamenei were 50 years old, perhaps I would think differently.

But martyring an 86-year-old, I think, is fraught with some risk.

So that is a very valid concern, that what are you going to do with 150,000 plus Revolutionary Guardsmen and their affiliated militia members, the Basij militia, who are usually much more ideological in their worldview.

And that is a concern that I have if the goal turns out to be...

decapitation operation to try to topple the regime.

Because these folks, as we saw in post-Saddam Iraq, they're armed and they're organized.

Now, I don't want to claim that they're monolithic.

They are not 150,000 true believers.

But what I learned from observing the Iraq war is that 1% of society can make life hell for 99% of society if they're

And things like that, if they feel like they're not going to have any role in the country's tomorrow.

And so that, I think, is so critical for Iran's future.

For any opposition movement or democratic movement to try to figure out a way to co-opt these folks under a very big tent.

So if you think about power in Iran is like a pyramid, shaped like a pyramid.