Mark Dubowitz

But there's still the Battle of Hormuz to be won or lost, and I think that's going to be a decisive battle that will determine whether President Trump can legitimately claim at the end of all of this a major military success.

Yeah, I mean, I think what we're trying to do is severely degrade their war-making capability and also their repression apparatus.

That's actually been the Israeli piece of the military operation.

But I think over the past three weeks, we have now gotten enough evidence from Trump himself and from the White House that they're very much setting these objectives as missile, Navy, nuclear.

So it depends on the extent to which Iran can reconstitute its Navy, its missile capabilities, and its nuclear capabilities.

It's difficult to know exactly how far we set it back.

And I think one should always be careful about those kinds of estimates.

And we also should remember that even if a US president is not prepared to bomb again, as long as the US president doesn't block the Israelis from striking again,

If they just keep coming back and, as they call, mowing the grass, you can keep setting back those capabilities and degrading them over and over again.

Well, I think as we wrote in the piece, our vision of total victory is the end of the regime in Iran.

And that's been my longstanding position for now 22 years I've been working on this issue, because I believe that to permanently solve this problem, you have to replace the regime in Iran.

And I've been a longstanding supporter of boots on the ground to do that, but Iranian boots on the ground, not American boots on the ground, which I...

really believe that across broad swaths of Iranian society, that the level of enmity for this regime amongst Iranians is deep and profound and has gotten even more deeper and more profound since January of this year when the Iranian regime killed Iranians on January 8th and 9th.

in the face of a huge protest movement.

So I've long believed that providing maximum pressure on the regime, maximum support for the Iranian people, and using a variety of overt and covert means to fracture the regime support base will ultimately lead to the end of this regime.

That's total victory.

That's what I would define it.

Yeah, so phase one is major military operations.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with America for 47 years.

We've been fighting back against them for three weeks.