Rory Stewart

Another one of my neighbors managed to talk to someone in Tehran.

So what am I hearing from them?

There's a random anecdotal.

First thing is their experience is they think that the US is mostly striking military sites, ballistic missile sites.

Israel seems to be, but how on earth they differentiate an Israeli bomb from an American bomb, I have no idea.

But anyway, their understanding is that it's Israel that's mostly hitting the government offices.

One of the things that you will realize when you go to Tehran is that these government offices, and you can go to Shiraz, are right in the middle of town, and there's residential neighborhoods all the way around.

It's not actually quite like hitting Whitehall here.

It's much, much more integrated into civilian life.

Second thing,

We talked about yesterday what's happened in the leadership change.

The Iranian people overwhelmingly detest this regime.

80-90% of the Iranian people want to see this horrible regime gone because

For almost half a century, they have been ruled by an increasingly brutal, cynical, repressive, theocratic regime.

But there isn't any credible opposition on the ground.

And so they are stuck in this horrifying situation where they're being forced to choose between a regime they hate

and American and Israeli bombs.

That's a really difficult issue because as an Iranian nationalist, you don't want either of those options.

Another thing I think that's so interesting when we talk about this is people talk about what Iranians think or Iranian public opinion, but it's a massive country of almost 100 million people.

It would be like saying, what do the British think?