“Can you or the American military or the Israeli military get to whats left of their third string and their fourth string and their fifth string? Do you know where they are? Can you kill them?”
I posed those questions to President Donald Trump Monday, July 13.
“Yeah, I do, but we dont want to talk about that,” the president replied.
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“But we certainly are watching, yeah,” he added. “I know a lot about that subject. I know a lot, but I dont think its appropriate to talk about it right now.”
Trumps restraint about clearing the bench of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is interesting.
The public faces of the rump regime in Iran â President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi â dont have any authority over the killers with the guns. (Trump puts the number of Iranians massacred by the regime over two days in January at 52,000, so we know the ruthlessness of the men in charge.) When the campaign against Iran by the U.S. and Israel opened on February 28, those strikes devastated the first and second tiers of “leadership” in Iran. Pezeshkian and Araghchi were not important enough to be in the command bunkers.
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Sixty-eight-year-old Ahmad Vahidi emerged from the wreckage and his “retirement” after the wipeout of the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic to take command of the IRGC. Imagine how utterly ruthless a benched and passed-over killer must be, and how many grudges he must hold against those who put him out to pasture in the first place.
Eli Lake is among the most respected national security reporters in the U.S. On Tuesday, July 14, Lake wholly agreed with what Trump told me Monday: It is unrealistic to expect the Iranian people to rise up only months after such a traumatic mass murder.
Instead, Lake explained, students of the history of regime collapses tell us we ought to be watching for splits within the ranks of the men with guns. Thats how revolutions against dictators and their henchmen at the top begin and then gain momentum. The lower levels of security services or a cadre within the military become unwilling to join in the killing anymore. They see the end game and they dont want to be around or on the wrong side when everything falls apart. Sometimes they flee. Sometimes they turn the weapons on the top men. When that begins, Lake added, it can accelerate quickly.
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With the first Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) torn up by the IRGC, all bets were off. Ive called the MOU the equivalent of “halftime” in the battle with Iran sin
