Mark Mazzetti

Are they trying to parse them out over time?

Or were their capabilities hit so hard in the first wave of attacks that they're having trouble responding?

So that's another question that will only be answered in the days to come.

And I would add that as the experience in Iraq showed, even if you have the boots on the ground, you don't necessarily have all the control about what happens either.

If regime change is not happening or not happening easily without U.S.

boots on the ground, do you think that there's any circumstance under which we would actually put troops on the ground if the goal is regime change?

Like, do we think, for instance, that the U.S.

is considering putting together some kind of coalition of allied troops like we did after 9-11?

It is very, very hard to envision the Trump administration...

authorizing large-scale American military presence in Iran with an indefinite future.

It is against what Trump has said he believes in, which is quick use of American military power that sends a message and then you move on.

And that was why the Venezuela operation was the sort of platonic ideal of a Trump military operation.

And anything involving long, costly, messy operations

regime change, boots on the ground operations with indefinite outcomes is not really what President Trump's all about.

OK, but that's kind of my question, though.

Like, let's say that through some kind of combination of a campaign of attacks by the U.S., Israel, plus whatever kind of uprising we might see from Iranians, let's say the regime falls.

What do we think would happen next?

I assume that you do not think that there would be some kind of peaceful transfer of power to a democratic form of government.

That also sounds like the recipe for the kind of power vacuum that leads to chaos after U.S.

intervention.