Karim Sadjadpour

And I do think that impacted people's risk calculations.

I guess what I would advise the president is,

I think an operation which can degrade the Islamic Republic's malign capabilities, whether it's missile capacity, it's repressive capacity, and it serves to not further unite the regime's security forces, but divide the regime's security forces.

If that happens,

Operation is tenable.

I think that's an operation which I would be prepared to.

And, you know, who am I?

I'm an analyst sitting in my home in Washington, D.C.

But I think that that is a defensible operation.

Exactly.

And David Petraeus said this earlier.

Earlier today, I was listening to him.

And it's a very important point.

And that is that the Venezuela model seemed to go much more smoothly than anyone expected.

And

Nicola Maduro is sitting in a jail cell now in New York.

And the seeming success and facility of that Venezuela model

has maybe distorted our understanding of how challenging this operation in Iran might be.

And this is why you're starting to see leaks internally from the Pentagon wanting to pump the brakes before we get ourselves into something which could be totally different than what we anticipate.

Karim, thanks so much.