Mark Dubowitz

So in the span of three weeks, I think there's been some extraordinary military accomplishments.

I could see this campaign lasting for another three weeks.

I think it would be a big mistake to pull the plug right now, but it'd also be a mistake to continue this war for months in phase one.

Yeah, phase two is very much what the Israelis are already embarking on right now, which is severely degrading the repression apparatus of the regime, right?

They began that on February 28th with that initial strike that took out the former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his top IRGC commanders, generals, and advisors.

And they have been systematically, methodically, patiently taking out the repression apparatus day by day.

And this is the IRGC, the Basij, the police forces,

the intelligence services, the people that are responsible for crushing Iranian opposition and did so in January, they have been eliminating those people.

I would see that from a military point of view, continuing in sequence with phase one, when major military operations are over, that the strikes- You're still gonna have essentially decapitation strikes against a wide range of Iranian military and political leaders.

Yeah, now it depends on what happens on the negotiations, which I'm sure we're going to talk about.

If there is some deal where Trump has now negotiated an agreement with this regime, there's an open question about whether Trump would then greenlight continued Israeli military strikes, airstrikes on the regime, or would he say, okay, those strikes are over, but then greenlight the Israelis to continue to do what they would do covertly

And then phase three is really what I call this maximum support campaign, where you're actually providing serious support to the opposition so that the next time they come to the streets, and they're coming to the streets again, but this time, unlike in January, you have changed the equation and you've strengthened the opposition so it's not defenseless in the face of that repression apparatus as it was in January.

And you've given Iranians perhaps a fighting chance to...

to take back their country, as President Trump said, once in a generation opportunity.

Yeah, so before answering the question about what we do about it, I just wanna touch upon something that I think gets lost in the current debate, right?

Because I think we all are moving so quickly, things are changing so quickly.

It's worth a little bit of sort of historical perspective on this.

And that is that if you could imagine today's regime,

not severely degraded militarily, not having lost its missile launchers and ballistic missile production capability and had its nuclear program severely degraded and lost its Navy.

Imagine this regime, even under the Obama nuclear deal, a regime that would pocket a trillion dollars in the lifespan of that agreement,