Christiane Amanpour (26:56)
I would say a huge amount of pressure and an unprecedented amount of pressure, first from its own people who have shown themselves willing over and over again, but most recently late December, early January, to come out and essentially face the lethal response of the regime, to tell the world what they want. And they want freedom, they want change. They want to be able to have, you know, to be able to. To buy themselves food three times a day, to have meat, basically, to be able to survive, to be able to travel, to be able to have dreams, to be able to have business, and essentially to be able to be free. And that was met with a violent, violent crackdown with very sophisticated weaponry, with the kind of killings that certainly I wasn't there, so I can't tell you what I saw. And no Western journalists were there when it was going on. But all the stories that are coming out tell us that this is the worst that it's ever been. And the people who we talk to, the people who we can talk to on the phones tell us what's going on. And it's the worst that it's ever happened against the people. So the people have not stopped. They're not in the street right now, but they're in their homes, they're in their communities, they're in their organizations still. Maybe on the roof, out the window, whatever, saying, down with the dictatorship. The regime is fighting back right now by arresting tens of thousands of people trying to use all sorts of sophisticated electronic surveillance to try to identify whoever was involved in these protests. They've also, and this is crucial because, I mean, it's an Islamic country, they call themselves an Islamic republic. And they have basically told the people that they mustn't have visible or public 40 day anniversary mourning commemorations. So in the Muslim religion, you know that after 40 days, after a death, after they've mourned for 40 days, it's sort of another gathering and then they sort of kind of move on. That's the closure and this, that. But the 40 days is very important. And these regime people have been going around to houses, putting it on state television, doing what they do to tell people not to do that. But I just read from before I came out here instead, the regime is trying to own it. They're now on state television telling people that they are going to have a nationwide 40 day celebration, or not the correct word commemoration, because they say that, I mean, they say a lot of their own people were killed. So there's a very, very intense crackdown on what's going on. And if you remember, and this is, I remember because I was there, it was often the 40 day commemorations that led to the mass movement against the Shah in 1970. And they know that. So they are stopping it right now, which means they're going against the religious beliefs of their people and they claim to be an Islamic republic. So that's from inside, from outside. You have in the wake of June where there was A so called 12 day war, I don't call it a 12 day war. It was just, you know, brief and not a war. It was a, you know, missiles, bombs and missiles and this and that between Israel and Iran and the United States entered as well. That was pretty much specifically designed to attack their nuclear, their missile and some of their military and police leadership, their security leadership. Now for sure, because we heard the Israeli government, even the US Government had it resulted in regime change, that would have been for them a very good byproduct. But it wasn't designed to be that. So now the question is, with all this military might, you know, six months later heading to the Gulf, some of it's there already, some of it's on its way. Planes, you know, what's the actual reason for it? What's the Trump administration or the Israeli government's goal? So what we know is that the Trump administration called Iranians out onto the street and said help is on the way. Lindsey Graham said to me that The President of the United States has to fulfill that pledge, otherwise it would be terrible for the United States. So this is a senior Republican senator. Others, obviously people, you know, Iranians abroad, Iranians there, they also want to see regime change. How does it happen? So what we were told about a week ago was that the Israeli government had said to President Trump, don't do it. And everyone was like, well, why? You know, that's the Israeli government usually wants, you know, the US and has historically been urging the US to bomb Iran and to bomb this regime. And then we heard some of the allies, you know, the Gulf allies were saying, don't do it and this and that. So I was asking people, Saudis, Israelis, Europeans and others at Munich, what gives? They said to me, well, we weren't prepared then because if the US Israel or whatever starts bombing again, Iran will retaliate. And we weren't prepared defensively. Now we're prepared. So all of this stuff that's going there, these aircraft carriers, the battle groups and all the rest of it are not just offensive, they are defensive as well. Because first of all, there are something like eight US Military bases in the Middle east and there's Israel and whoever else might be in the field of vision.