#WTH Q&A on the Israel-Iran War

Yes, Israel is winning

This week, I thought a Q&A might be a better format for a useful conversation about Iran. And below, you’ll find more extensive than usual set of highlights from our terrific conversation with Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur. Or you can just listen to the pod itself. He’s a superb analyst.

Why did Israel hit Iran now?

It’s important to understand that Israel (not to speak of the United States) has ignored its own red lines on Iran’s nuclear weapons program for many years. Israelis first started sounding the alarm in earnest in 1995, thirty years ago.

Successive efforts by American administrations to pressure or bribe Iran away from its nuclear weapons efforts all failed. By the end of the 20th century, Iran was well on its way. Successive revelations of major nuclear advances, most undetected by Western intelligence, indicated Iranian commitment not simply to a nuclear weapons capability, but also advanced weaponization and the miniaturization necessary to mount a nuclear weapon on a missile.

(If you want a deep dive, this study is an accessible read of the IAEA’s first finding of non-compliance with the NPT’s safeguards agreement. It’s also a preview of every future confrontation over transparency.)

Even during the period of the JCPOA, the Obama Iran deal, Iran nominally committed to only limited enrichment, however, Israeli intelligence has asserted that Iran continued research work on weaponization and delivery.

The proximate causes of the Israeli strike are reportedly two: Significant advances in both uranium enrichment and weaponization, including modeling, and new focus on explosive detonation and yield; and advances in missile range and manufacturing that could potentially overwhelm Israeli defenses.

If the strikes are maximally successful in destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, how long will it take Iran to reconstitute them?

Israeli estimates suggest that a thorough evisceration of both Iran’s nuclear sites, its research facilities, missile production, and the assassination of critical nuclear scientists could set Iran back 10 years in its quest for a nuclear weapon and the missiles to deliver it. Others believe the damage will be more limited, and will require regular Israeli returns to mow the proverbial lawn.

Will Iran withdraw from the NPT and seek to actually produce nuclear weapons now that it has been attacked and the weakness of its conventional forces revealed?

Iran regularly threatens to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea did precisely that after using the privileges of the NPT to develop its own nuclear weapons. News reports out of Tehran indicate that legislation to withdraw from the NPT has been submitted to the Iranian parliament, or majlis. However, it is clear that Iran does not really wish to withdraw, as the implications and sanctions (including the so-called snapback sanctions under the JCPOA) would be devastating to its economy.

Will the Europeans respond to the strikes by triggering a snapback of UN sanctions (which has to happen no later than October 18 if it is to happen at all) and reimposing their sanctions on Iran, or will the strikes have the opposite effect?

There are indications that the so-called EU three — the UK, France, and Germany — had decided that further nuclear transgressions would compel them to trigger snapback later this summer. Ironically, Israel’s devastation of Iran’s illegal nuclear facilities and research may forestall European action.

Why is the US considering joining strikes on Iran?

Donald Trump has been emphatic that Iran must agree to end its nuclear enrichment. Ayatollah Khamenei has been equally emphatic that Iran will not do so. However, Iran’s critical underground enrichment facility at Fordow is believed to be unreachable by Israeli munitions. Conventional wisdom in the Iran-watching community agrees that the destruction of Fordow will require a 30,000 lb Massive Ordinance Penetrator, which can theoretically only be dropped by a B2 stealth Spirit bomber. Israel does not have such an aircraft. So, must the US deliver the coup de grace, or can the Israelis jury rig a C-130 to do the job? (Read this if you’re interested.) Or could commandos destroy Fordow from the ground, a dangerous, but feasible operation?

What are the possible consequences for the US if it joins?

Iran has threatened “irreparable damage” to the United States if it joins Israel in attacking. While Khamenei’s rhetoric comes directly from his Dictator 101 course, Iran could activate allies in Iraq and Yemen to attack US bases and troops in Iraq and the Gulf. Will that be “irreparable damage”? Nah. Will it be a bad decision on Khamenei’s part? Yep.

Is the Iranian regime in peril?

Since uprisings in 2009, 2019, and the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, the Iranian police state has cracked down significantly, using technical means, paramilitary, and Soviet style purges to ensure its ideological grip. Nonetheless, the country has been riven by recent trucker protests over rising fuel prices, so the people are not entirely cowed. Most experts estimate that the regime is, for the moment, secure. However, arrests of so-called “Mossad agents,” increased penalties for “collaborators,” and a widespread internet blackout in recent days indicate that the regime is nervous about unrest. The question of who would come next, and whether the regime’s armed forces still stand with the Islamic Republic, are, as yet, unanswered.

What is the reaction in the region? Are the Chinese and Russians helping Iran?

The region has limited itself to pro-forma denunciations, and is quietly rejoicing that Israel has finally taken on public enemy #1, Tehran. While there have been rapprochements between the Saudis, Emiratis, and other Gulf states with Iran in recent years, that has not erased the fundamental fear and antipathy felt towards a regime that has done little but destabilize the Middle East since its inception. What about the axis of evil? Well, if you ask the Iranians, the answer is that Beijing and Moscow are fair-weather friends, doing little to either support or sustain Tehran in its hour of need. Sorry Tehran, nobody likes a loser.

Keep an eye on our Critical Threats Project site if you’re following the granular details, and don’t hesitate to share questions in the comments.

HIGHLIGHTS

Q: What triggered the Israeli government’s decision to strike now?

HRG: According the Israelis, according to the IDF, and Netanyahu himself, the Iranians were launching, or deep into, but escalating massively, an effort to be able to produce ballistic missiles that were much more advanced than what they have now, much more numerous than what they have now, an arsenal of a few thousand missiles that could reach Israel. I've seen estimates of 1200, I've seen estimates of 3000. I don't know the number, these are analysts coming in from different places. But they were going to be able to produce between three and 10,000 a year by the time they had escalated this thing. And so they would have a missile arsenal that could destroy Israel without talking about nukes.

So the conventional missile program was going to become something that could not be reined in, and so had to be dismantled now, and of course, most famously, the nuclear program. Last week, the IAEA put out this unbelievable report that it was over. Inspectors couldn't go in. They were breaking out. They were capable. The world was basically waiting on Khamenei's desire to find out whether or not he's going to go for a nuke. And that's not okay for the Israelis, that's not enough. And so this was the moment.

Q: Was Iran getting too strong?

HRG: We're seeing a lot of pro-Iran accounts on social media argue that Israel wants a weak Iran, and this is just Israel being an imperialist power in the region and things like that. And it's an interesting way to frame it because it allows you to really explain that in fact, the problem with Iran is that it is weak, is that it is desperately weak. The problem with Iran is that it built out this proxy system as a way to both bleed Israel dry, destroy Israel as part of its religious revolutionary ideology, and it wants to show that the Shia can destroy Israel after a century of Sunnis failing to destroy Israel within that internal Islamic competition.

And there's a whole lot of reasoning. And it's fascinating, but it's not the point. The point is Iran has really come for the Israelis. And on October 7th, the Israelis became convinced that we don't understand our enemies anymore. We thought we understood, we thought we had calculated their deterrence and their exact frame of mind. But it turned out we were utterly and catastrophically mistaken. And we looked from that lesson we learned with Hamas, where we were convinced for 15 years that Hamas was deterred and contained. And we discovered, actually, we'd been wrong every minute of those 17 years or whatever it was. We then looked at Hezbollah and we said, "Well, what if we don't understand them either?" And we looked at in Tehran that we said, "What if we don't understand them?" And so Hezbollah's arsenal of 200,000 rockets buried under 300 Lebanese villages in South Lebanon suddenly looked very dangerous because what if they're there to be used?

What if Iran's expenditure of billions at the cost of not supplying healthcare to its citizens was actually meant to actually achieve a specific goal one day, and that arsenal wasn't there not to be used? And so we discovered that we had to dismantle the proxy system. We had to dismantle the Iranian nuclear program. Everything was over. The Israelis discovered that because they don't understand the enemy, it's a new intellectual humility that drove us to basically what's happening over the skies of Tehran at this moment. That's Israel when it takes Occam's razor. If the Iranians spent 46 years telling us we're a cancerous tumor that they will remove in a great triumphant religious war, then we're going to believe them. And if somebody wants to be super clever sitting in a think tank or university out there in the west explaining to us, "No, no, they didn't actually mean it. You don't have to overreact, " hundreds of ballistic missiles later and building of massive proxies that have attacked us on all fronts for generation, at some point, we're going to believe them.

And the great tragedy for the Iranians is that we believe them. And so we began the dismantling of those proxies in a systematic way over the last 20 months. And what resulted was in astonishing thing, not astonishing for me, I'm going to toot my own horn here, I argue that they've been weak. I've been arguing that for many, many years. I've been arguing that if you look at Iran and you look at the regime and you realize the astonishing, unbelievable resources that this nation has, the oil and the human resources, the educated middle class, and what the regime has been able to do, or failed to do with that human resources and those extraction resources, you realize it's actually an incompetent, stupid regime, that all it's been able to do in 46 years is one success.

Q: When was it clear Israel would dominate?

HRG: The thing that demonstrated the regime's haplessness, and fecklessness, and incompetence was the aerial superiority that Israel achieved with F-15 that have, I think, an 800-kilometer flight distance, flying 2,400 kilometers to bomb Mashhad in eastern Iran. And just the capacity to extend our distances. We have planes launching ballistic missiles. Planes should not be launching ballistic missiles, ballistic missiles are missiles that go very high up so that they can go very far as they go down. Right? It's the ballistic arc.

Planes launch direct point-to-point missiles that go straight with fuel, but you can only carry so much fuel in a missile, you put on a plane.

So how does a plane launch a ballistic missile? Well you could program it to launch out of the plane and then go up, and then essentially glide vast distances, but it's very hard to guide a plane that glides a vast distance, except if you're Israeli and have been working on the problem for a decade. And then you develop ways to create these missiles that can glide to their targets over vast distances. And so Israeli F-15s flying within the range of an F-15 can shoot a ballistic missile over Iran that doubles the range of those. That's new. That's new, putting missiles under the wings of F-35s, that's not something that the designers of the F-35s over in America ever designed those wings to do.

And so there are all these capabilities, but as the Israelis began really seriously examining Iranian capabilities, they discovered some extraordinary things.

Q: Talk a bit more about about Iranian capabilities?

HRG: For example, they have this huge arsenal of ballistic missiles that can reach Israel, but they don't have a huge number of launchers. And so they're limited, the launchers are the bottleneck. And so the Israeli Air Force and the Mossad with these drone factories, the main target, for example, last night, the Israeli Air Force essentially just spent the night hunting launchers, any launcher that it could identify, because it launched something, the Air Force focused in on it and sent a strike at it.

And the idea is as you shrink the number of launchers, and so at the beginning you had, I think it was 100 missiles fired the first night, and then it was 80, and then it was 50, and then it was 30. And last night they went up... Forgive me if the numbers are incorrect, but the basic story is correct, they went back up to 50.

But the denial of launchers has been the bottleneck that has prevented Iran from having the kind of strategic response that they wanted to have. And so aerial superiority, taking out the radars, taking out the air defense systems of Iran unbelievably quickly and easily back in November, nevermind now, and then now focusing in on the correct thing, we're going to eventually get to the entire missile arsenal. This is not going to last another two days. This is going to go on for a while, but in the meantime, we're going to deny them the capability of actually using that missile arsenal through these launchers.

Now, what the heck kind of army, knowing that it's going to basically depend, if the proxy thing doesn't work, on its own ballistic missiles because it doesn't have an air force to speak of, the Air Force is still flying Vietnam-era, F-4 Phantoms, the Iranian Air Force, I mean, it's really kind of incompetent and pathetic for one of the countries that should be one of the wealthiest countries in the world just from the extraction economy. But it spent so many years being ideologically committed to nukes and the destruction of America that it failed to be anything that it could have been.

What the heck kind of incompetent army like that builds out an arsenal of missiles but doesn't have secure, safe, deeply buried underground launchers to actually be able to use them?

So Iran really is a sad sack in terms of military capability. Now, it's always dangerous to say that. The enemy always surprises, and you only strut around with pride after you've won. But it is astonishing how bad they've been so far. And maybe they're going to regroup and maybe their intelligence services are going to give them some big great target and they're going to succeed in some big way. I certainly hope not, but maybe. But so far, this is the story of a regime that has lived too long in the belief that Arabs somewhere out there in the proxy system in Iraq, and Lebanon, and Yemen are going to die for them, and they'll never have to actually face the Israelis. That's what this looks like.

Q: What do you see as the future in these negotiations and how will Israel continue to respond?

HRG: There's a goal. There's a specific goal. My people have been massacred and bled. Lebanon has been internally demolished and weakened by an Iranian proxy that just didn't care what would happen to Lebanon. In fact, planned for an Israel-Lebanon war that would destroy Lebanon as badly as Gaza's situation. And Assad murdered 600,000 people only after Iran gave him the backing and the survival ability to do so.

And everywhere it has gone, it has massacred. This is a regime that if it survives this relatively unscathed, and forgive me, the death of, I don't know what 20 generals is unscathed. I don't care about their existence and their lives, and I don't think Khomeini cares about their existence and their lives.

If this is a regime that is set back by a year in terms of its missile-building capacity, and that's it, and we've reached this moment after all the sacrifices and all... What we did to Hezbollah, that was a one-time thing. Nobody is now going to ever again trust a random foreign beeper supply chain that reaches out to you with great prices. And so these are intelligence... I don't know if the Mossad has the ability from going forward to again, build drone factories on Iranian soil for deployment at the moment of the launch of the war to take out those launchers.

So no, we have to make this count, and make this count means safety. De-escalation is not a goal. De-escalation is a means. The goal is security and safety. And if you can't explain to us how de-escalation will give us security and safety, none of it matters.

Q: Is there an exit strategy for Iran?

HRG: Now, here's how Iran could get out of it. And this is something that I think the Trump administration has said publicly. And if it hasn't said it publicly, I know for a fact it's been saying it privately. And that is the great debate over infrastructure. In other words, the negotiation over the nuclear program is a negotiation, not over asking Iran politely not to go to nukes and agreeing to IAEA supervision right up until they decide they don't want IAEA supervision. That's essentially the Obama strategy. And that's the kind of strategy that Clinton employed with the North Koreans that resulted in a North Korean nuke.

So what we need is the removal of infrastructure, of the ability to enrich, the dismantling and destruction of Fordo, the blowing up of those halls full of centrifuges. We need the removal of the infrastructure.

Iran can be brilliant, beautiful, happy-go-lucky country. If Iran reaches the level of Turkey, everybody in Iran will be happier, and they'll have F-35s, and be best friends with America. Iran can be a great nation, but it cannot be a great nation building nukes trying to destroy me. So that capacity to build those nukes has to be removed because this is a regime that we believe will use those nukes.

If that's the new negotiation, Iran has an exit ramp off of this path, but the negotiation has to no longer be about whether Iran has 15 more years of delaying, and questioning, and thinking, and feeling its feelings. You dismantle the nuclear infrastructure in its totality, everything gets blown up, or we have to find other ways of getting it all blown up. And that's it. That's the story.

Q: What is the Israeli perspective on the Administration’s actions thus far?

HRG: On the question of what Israelis are seeing, as far as we can tell, Bibi went in to meet with Trump back in the spring, I think it was in March when he was in the White House for the first time. I forget exactly. And he came out of there and there was some briefing to Israeli reporters that I don't know how much to trust it, I don't know exactly what it means, but the basic idea of the briefing was the statement that Trump asked Bibi for a home run. In other words, what Trump doesn't want, and when he says, "We're not going to more wars," what he means is grinding Middle Eastern wars without clear results that cost us vast amounts of money and some blood even, and then everybody leaves Afghanistan after 18 years and everything's just basically where it was when we went in.

That's not something Trump is willing to do. So what he told Bibi, he challenged Bibi. Now, I don't know how true this is, but I know that top Israeli reporters were saying this was what they were hearing at the time when Bibi was in Washington, and might've been hearing it from the Israelis, as far as I can tell, that Trump said, "Just give me a home run and I can back it." And what we've seen so far is basically that Bibi went home and he said, "Hi, Mossad, you've been building 15 of these home runs over the..." There are things that are happening in Iran that people haven't... Because so many huge things happen, people have stopped noticing some of them, but simultaneous car bombs taking out not nuclear scientists, but specifically weaponization scientists, where, as you said, Danielle, that was exactly the thing that was on the verge.

And so the level, the granular level of the intelligence, the ability to be so involved in the scheduling of the IRGC Air Force chiefs to the point where they could ensure that the start of the war coincides with a meeting so that they could take out... I forget what it was, like eight of the top 14 people in the IRGC Air Force, including the number one guy, all in one meeting with one missile, that level of granular intelligence penetration, the Mossad prepared and the IDF emphatically, and the coordination between the two, which has been truly unbelievable and astonishing, prepared this home run. And they prepared it in a way that's entire design appears to have been built to answer Trump's one demand. Trump is willing to fight for Israel. He's not willing to have a Middle Eastern war for Israel. And that's the difference.

And so all these Tucker Carlson's screaming and raging and raving and Candace Owens saying, "All the white men are going to die for the Israelis, and it's not anti-Semitic to say so." Other than them being raving lunatics, which everybody has the right to be a raving lunatic, I don't want to take that away from them if it makes them happy, but the actual policy conversation between the Israelis and the Trump administration and the United States appears to very much have taken those sentiments of the Trump administration to heart. And the Israelis, I don't think in the history of warfare, anyone has more aligned with that sentiment, make it fast, make it count, make it powerful, we can deliver the knockout blow on Fordo as much as the Israelis have. And then the great question is will America deliver that knockout blow on Fordo?

Q: Can Israel do this alone?

HRG: That's one of those questions that I simply don't know the answer to. And it's a yes or no question. Does the Mossad have the ability to pull something out of its sleeve? The kind of supply chain explosive operation we saw with the beepers with Hezbollah has already been done before by the Mossad. There was an operation, I forget the year, in which the Mossad basically managed to penetrate the supply chain of the furniture provider of one of the Iranian nuclear sites and a big desk exploded in one of these underground facilities. Now, has the Mossad been able to, at a mass level, penetrate in various unpredictable ways that I can't imagine those kinds of institutions, smart people, the people who delivered for us all the astonishing, miraculous achievements of the Mossad in the last 20 months have been thinking about nothing else. In other words, everybody understood that Israeli F-15s and F-16s and F-35s, from wherever they're shooting and however they're refueling, would have the ability... It's gone better than they expected, I think.

But everybody understood that they would be capable of taking out the very shallow stuff at Natanz and of the facilities that are above ground. And the big question was always going to be Fordo. And the kind of planning we've seen so far tells me that there's no way on earth that big question has not been addressed by those same brains that gave us all the other achievements of the last 20 months. So I can't believe the Israelis have no options. However, it is also possible that there are no other options, that this one place, the most important place, the reason they built it the way they built it deep under a mountain is because these are the enrichment halls, these are the advanced centrifuges. That's the one place that we haven't penetrated with our intelligence. We have to assume competence on the part of the Iranians at some point. At some point we must encounter some competence. And so it's possible this is the last step that we can't do alone. I simply don't know. But those are the kinds of questions that we're all looking to answer desperately.

Q: If Fordow isn’t destroyed, will this operation fail?

HRG: Look, the simple answer is that all the things everyone is saying are all true all at once. If we stop now, then, yes, Iran has not suffered the kind of military capability setback that gives us real time and a real achievement. And it will only have been costs. And everything that's built up to now, including the crushing of Hezbollah and all the sacrifices made by so many Israeli soldiers and agents on the road to all of this, will have been wasted. But it's not going to stop now. It's going to achieve some great significant part of its goals. There is almost no way to completely remove the Iranian nuclear program totally. There is an indigenous knowledge base that isn't going anywhere, they know how to do it and so they can do it again. I'll say even more than that, let's imagine a best case scenario where a humiliated and crossed and pathetically begging clerical elite, this revolution falls, and other power bases in Iranian society step in, whether it's from the economic power bases, the army that isn't the revolutionary guard, says, "You guys have screwed up. We're taking over."

These are the kinds of things you saw in the fall of the Soviet Union where there were these other power bases that stepped to the floor because the whole thing was collapsing. And then the question becomes that new regime will look around and it'll see that India has a nuke and Pakistan has a nuke, and the Israelis have a nuke. And what if it says this new moderate regime, this regime that doesn't talk like insane psychopaths like the Ayatollah's talk, and the world wants them to be a success story and to not have to relive the last 46 years of this nightmare called the Iranian Revolutionary Regime, the Islamic Republic of Iran, what if it then says, "I'm going for a nuke," and then the Israelis are back at square one, but without even the ability to explain to the world... All of these possibilities all exist and they're all on the table, and we don't know how any of these end up.

You have to take out the missile system, as much of it as you can get. You have to take out the nuclear capabilities, as much of it as you can get. If it's not all or nothing, it's how do you get to enough to achieve a future safety for as long as possible? And if that drives a regime change that has a different kind of regime with different priorities, that's the best-case scenario. If that drives this regime, desperate to survive, to a negotiating table in which they give up their infrastructure, another one of the best-case scenarios. I'm sorry to the Iranian people that'll keep having to live with this garbage, we've seen just over the last year just mass protests by truck drivers and bakers and small shop owners and huge protests and nurses all over Iran because they are a society that has one of the biggest oil deposits in the world that just went through a bad winter without gas, because the regime has mismanaged this economy so horribly.

So I apologize to the Iranian people if the regime survives this by giving up its nuclear program, but my people will live safer for the next generation. So I don't think the Israelis have the entire war scripted out. I think the Israelis have many, many possible endings that are good, some possible endings that are much less good, obviously contingency plans in case it all goes belly-up, which you have to have, you have to assume the enemy is more competent and then you generally do better in the war, even if it turns out the enemy is incompetent. That's where I think things stand.

Q: Can the Iranian regime survive this?

HRG: I think it's simple. If they survive without the infrastructure for the nuclear program, that has to be rebuilt, then that's a 10-year arc assuming the Mossad doesn't blow it up again. No, no, they're not that competent. No. And everything they've done, all the billions they've spent, all the sacrifices that has meant for Iranians, for ordinary Iranians, that was the investment in Hezbollah and the investment in the Houthis and the investment in the militias in Iraq and Syria and in the Assad regime, all of that was for nothing, it was all for nothing, because it was incompetently done. And they will continue to be that incompetent and they'll be even less competent. And so, no, I think it's over. I think it's over because the Israelis aren't going to stop now. In other words, yes, this war could also go badly for the Israelis and they could leave the infrastructure in place and the Americans could turn their backs on us, and we could actually have to deal with this again and again and again, and we could end up just having a bunch of wars with Iran over the next three years.

All those kinds of possibilities are ahead of us. I don't know any serious Israeli official who thinks that we've got this all figured out. We don't have this all figured out. This is war. As they say in first day of officer school, war is the realm of the unknown. And so you lay your best laid plans, you go to meet the enemy, you hope you've done a good job, and from there on you pretty much just have to wing it.

Q: Is Iran different from Gaza or Lebanon?

HRG: Gaza was a particular kind of war where you have to hunt through cities and through thousands of tunnel entrances into 500 kilometers of tunnels, an enemy that hid, not hid under civilians as human sheep. But whose fundamental strategy was the destruction of Gaza itself. You can argue the Israelis were terrible. You can argue the Israelis did the best they could. I'm not getting into that debate. I'm just saying Gaza was a war in which there was no other power other than Hamas that could step in. Once you weakened Hamas, there was no way to weaken Hamas because of its particular strategy of tunnels, but in every other arena, the enemy was fundamentally different.

And so Israel, when it went into Lebanon to go after Hezbollah, managed to keep a perfect separation between Lebanon and Hezbollah in its own war fighting, to the point where everywhere the Israeli military advanced in South Lebanon, as it moved in on those villages with those rocket arsenals, the Lebanese army, an hour earlier, left. And it left and it ceded ground at every turn with the perfect absolute knowledge that every Lebanese person, whether they like it or not, want to admit it or not, knows and most admitted openly, the Israelis were absolutely fighting war against Hezbollah, not against Lebanon.

That exact same story we're seeing today in Tehran. Now, ordinary residents of Tehran don't know if they're living next to a military target, and they're terrified, many of them. And we're seeing the traffic jams of people trying to flee Iran. Try to flee the city, try to flee Tehran. But there is also an awareness and a clarity that we're going after this regime and we're not going after the people. And our best case scenario is that out of this war is born, the Iran that should have been born in the original revolution in 1979, people don't remember. But that revolution wasn't just Islamists led by Khomeini and his clerics and his mosque networks. The liberals were part of that revolution. The Marxists were part of that revolution. The feminists, women marching for women's rights were part of that revolution. 9 million people marched in the streets, 10% of the Iranian population in December of 1978. That was the moment where everybody understood that the Shah was no longer going to be able to survive with his repressive regime.

And Khomeini broke that alliance as soon as he took power in February. And over the next eight years, killed thousands of dissidents, crushed student organizations. At the very initial moments after the Shah, there was a liberal nationalist government of the Iranian Freedom Movement, I think it was called. And then the Islamists turned on all the other allies who had helped bring them to power and defeat the Shah and crushed Iran and sent it into this dark age. The ideal situation for Israel, the ideal result for Israel is a reclamation of the original revolution of broad-based, including led by Democrats and liberals that brings Iran back into the light.

So this is not a war on Iran and has never been a war on Iran. It is a war to remove the monsters who have come for us. And I don't know how to put this politely, so I'll just say it very bluntly. We aren't going to stop. Most Israelis have lost faith in the government's ability to deliver a proper ending in Gaza, a defeat of Hamas and a rebuilding of Gaza. And so, there's a majority now in polling that say, you got to end the war in Gaza. And it has to do with hostages and it has to do with faith in Netanyahu personally and in the government generally. And it's very complex. Israeli public opinion is not simple. The same people that say 70% of them in one poll, I think a month ago, we have to end the Gaza War, 70% and more in fact say, we have to take the fight to Iran.

So this has all been one war, and we woke up and we knew where this was going to go from the very beginning. And if they understood us better, if they were a more competent regime that grasped who we are and what we are and what we're capable of, and that we're not just a carbon copy of their incompetence and brutality and oppression, but in fact, a people that knows what's at stake, then they would've known how this is going to end. And they would know now that we're not going to stop until we're safe.

Q: Would this have been possible without the death of Qasem Soleimani?

HRG: I completely agree with you. That was his reputation and there were people pushing him, very, very important factions in the regime pushing him to be the next supreme leader because of the sense that he was the brain that could put it all together. And so, had we faced this exact same war, this exact same 20 months with him in charge, it could have gone a lot worse for us. I suspect that also would've made him the number one target for assassination at the beginning of the escalation. In other words, that would also have been something the Israelis would've pursued.

But I want to say something larger because if you step back to the larger picture, this is the man who really built out the proxies into what they became, into the monsters that Hezbollah became, and that tells me that actually, yes, he was by far more competent than Khomeini replaced him. And then a lot of the other... The most adorable thing was watching an interview with the head of the IRGC navy. The only general not yet taken out, I think, and the only general nobody cares about. And he's the only guy who doesn't have to worry because he doesn't control anything Israel's worried about. But nevertheless, Soleimani, even if he would've been tactically very smart and he knew how to navigate the complexities of Syria and Iran and Lebanon, and he knew how to supply the Houthis with ballistic missiles that they don't know how to make and barely know how to launch, even if that is true of him, and his loss was a real strategic setback. He nevertheless was the man who built the great strategy that just came crashing down.

In other words, at a grand strategic level, it's one thing to be the builder of armies that he was that really, you got to give him credit for. He built something. And at the same time, it was all a mistake. Hamas when it launched October 7, genuinely believed that the proxy system was some kind of military alliance that was going to come to its rescue. And we have the letters of Sinwar like we know that he's deeply frustrated with Hezbollah doesn't, and Iran doesn't. Now, put everything at stake for Hamas. Iran, when it came to Hamas and upgraded Hamas and gave Hamas money and gave Hamas training and trained the Nukhba force and carried out October 7, on a model that had actually been developed for a Hezbollah attack of the same type.

When Iran was doing that, it thought that Hamas understood that it was part of the proxy system. The proxy system's purpose is not to have Hamas launch a war Iran is dragged into, it was for Hamas to take the blows Iran doesn't have to take in the long arc, in the grand strategic arc. So this was a proxy system built badly and not in a way that would... It ended up being a proxy system that bled Iran instead of bleeding Israel. And so, I would submit that, yes, absolutely. It would've been a harder fight if Soleimani was in charge, but also, Soleimani walked the Iranian regime into this corner.

Q: Will this get to the point where Iran runs out of weapons and ballistic missiles?

HRG: I don't know. I know that the Israelis assume not. Now, that could be an abundance of caution. You don't assume the best case scenario, right? In a war, you assume the worst case scenario and prepare for it, and then everything goes a little bit better. But the Israelis assume that right up to the end, the Iranians are going to be able to keep doing this. There's a whole new system of warning the Israeli public in place that we haven't had, I don't know what? A year and a half ago that I remember. They certainly worked very differently. It's much more accurate. It turns out that a couple of days ago, there's preliminary reports they haven't really dug down in. I haven't seen the final word, but we've faced a sevenfold uptick in cyber attacks that are apparently sourced in Iran, and they've targeted specifically the siren warning systems so that civilians are not protected when the missiles fall to kill more civilians.

It is deeply embarrassing to the Iranians that they've been unable with these unbelievably expensive strategic weapons that they can't replace easily to actually hurt many civilians. That is, if you're the Iranian public watching this, the whole thing is a pathetic show of weakness rather than a show of force. And so, they want to make it a show of force and restore their ability to scare everybody. And so, the Israelis assume that Iran needs to have the missiles continue forever and ever, right up until the very bitter end.

Will there come a point where the last launcher is gone? Hopefully. Hopefully soon. The IDF announced that it has taken out, I think it was a quarter maybe the message said a third this morning. It announced that after the massive missile hunt of the night by the Air Force, and they have total control of the airspace and they're going to keep hunting those launchers. The fact that they put out a percentage number of the launchers that they know they've taken out, I think is a message to the Iranians, "We know how many you have, we know where they are. We are going to get to them eventually, and so, good luck. Do your best. Enjoy this moment. It's going to get more pathetic from here on out." I think that's the military's message to the Iranian regime. I assume they can continue launching for quite a while.

Full Transcript here

SHOWNOTES:

A Battered Iran Signals It Wants to De-Escalate Hostilities With Israel and Negotiate (WSJ, Summer Said, Benoit Faucon, Anat Peled, June 16, 2025)

Live updates: Israeli airstrikes rock Tehran; Trump rejected proposal from Israel to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader (NBC News, Live Updates, June 15, 2025)

Israel Says It Killed Four Iranian Intelligence Chiefs in Single Strike (WSJ, Live Updates, WSJ Staff, June 16, 2025)

Mossad set up drone base in Iran, UAVs took out missile launchers overnight (Lazar Berman and Emanuel Fabian, The Times of Israel, June 13, 2025)

Much of Iran’s Nuclear Program Remains After Israel’s Strikes. At Least for Now. (David Sanger, New York Times, June 13, 2025)

'Excellent’: Trump lauds Israeli strikes on Iran, says Tehran can still make a deal (TOI Staff and Jacob Magid, Times of Israel, June 13, 2025)

Witkoff said to warn Iranian response to Israeli strike could lead to mass casualties (TOI Staff, Times of Israel, June 13, 2025)

Everything You Need to Know About the Iran Attack (The Front Page, by The Free Press, June 13, 2025)

What Matters Now to Haviv Rettig Gur: The existential Israel-Iran War (What Matters Now Podcast, Amanda Borschel-Dan, June 14, 2025)

The Real Threat from Iran (Kenneth Pollack, Foreign Affairs, June 13, 2025)

Why Israel Hit Iran Now (The Free Press, Eli Lake, June 13, 2025)

Quinnipiac University National Poll (Quinnipiac University Poll, June 11, 2025)

Donald Trump Sides with Israel—and Rejects the Restrainers (Matthew Continetti, The Free Press, June 13, 2025)