Richard Miniter

Great to be here.

So the shoot down happened last night.

The rescue occurred late last night, Washington time.

And the president and his people are scrambling to figure out what it means.

So there are different factions trying to understand this event.

It was apparently a Shahid drone.

The question is, was it intentional or not intentional?

This is a kind of very Washington question.

If it's intentional, it means that this institution called the government of Iran is signaling that it's no longer interested in peace and, in fact, wants to go back to war with the United States.

But that's the question one faction is asking.

Another faction is asking this question.

Is the Iranian government a unified entity?

In other words, are there Iranian Revolutionary Guards units that were given orders before the late Ayatollah Khomeini was killed?

that in the event of his departure from this earth, that he would, that they are to do the following.

And are they then sort of blindly following the commands of a dead leader?

And therefore, because it's a fractured government, they are not able to negotiate because some units are acting independently or independently of the current leadership.

There's a third faction, which is, hey, there's an election coming up in November, and Republican voters who are desperately needed for the Trump people to avoid a two-year cycle of investigations, impeachments, and accusations are not likely to turn up if gas prices are high.

And so let's wrap up this war however we do it, says the third faction.

in order to have some hope of salvaging the midterm elections.

So these are three different questions about three different things, none of which is really about the reality in Iran today.