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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
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Mike Pesca
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- [00:53]
Mike Pesca
It's Monday, March 2, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the Gist. I'm Mike Pe. Big Satan and Little Satan got together to be the big and little assassin delivered to the Ayatollah. The second Ayatollah. The first one coined that big Satan, Little Satan thing. But come and he certainly ran with it until it ran him into the ground. You will not be missed. Now, the fact that a bad man is gone is not ipso facto justification for this war. Was this war wise, prudent, legal, and in the best interests of the United States? You know, the answers might be something like maybe, maybe no and yes, this could be. And I am not among the knee jerk who immediately say, Donald Trump's doing it, therefore it's wrong, or we could never win a war from the air in this part of the world. I'm just not knee jerk anything. And I also know that history doesn't stop and start with Iraq. So most of my show I'm going to give over to an interview with Eli Lake of the Free Press, who has been covering all this and knows a lot about this. And we will talk about differences between Iraq and Iran. But here, one big difference that I wanted to get to so Senator Chris Murphy was making this point on the Sunday shows. This was on Face the Nation about the near impossibility and he posits it as the impossibility of trying to achieve what this war is trying to achieve, which is functional regime change and a functioning country in the wake of a bombing campaign. Here's Senator Murphy.
- [02:28]
Senator Chris Murphy
There is no history, there is no experience that shows an air campaign alone will result in positive regime change. In fact, there's not a single example of it in the entirety of American history, an air campaign without at least the threat of a ground invasion, which the administration is ruling out, never results in a democratic rebirth in an authoritarian country. So the plan they have laid out, sustained airstrikes without a ground invasion in, is destined to fail. All that will happen at the end of this, most likely. Listen, I'm rooting for democracy in Iran, but the most likely outcome here is that hard liners take over the government, they restart their missile program, they restart their nuclear program, and we're just right back at bombing them again and putting American lives and regional lives at risk again in a year or two.
- [03:16]
Mike Pesca
Now. Yeah, when you think about Iraq, you think about the similarities to Iran. It's one letter off, you know, and they're right next to each other and they had oil reserves and they had a very bad leader who oppressed their people. So therefore quagmire and therefore the United States has once again committed itself to a self destructive action. Not necessarily to rebut Senator Murphy. Let's think about Kosovo. So Kosovo doesn't hit all the criterions that he laid out, but it was an air campaign, it was conducted by NATO forces. So there is a difference from this current campaign in which even the UK did not participate in. It was conducted without the loss of any US life. Again, that's a difference. Already a few servicemen have died, but it was conducted with great success. It drove out Milosevic and eventually after the UN intervened, gave the country over to the popular will of the people. And right now Kosovo is not one of the top 3/4 countries in Europe in terms of freedom ratings, but it's partly free. And we take that. We definitely take that in Iraq. So. So what I'm saying is that the circumstances are different, but the general thrust of what Senator Murphy was saying was that it can't work, has never worked and will never worked. Question that. There are other examples that you could cite and in the upcoming days I'm going to be talking about different aspects of this campaign. How imminent any attack from Iran might have been, probably wasn't. Does that mean this wasn't the wise and proper move? I know the knee jerk reaction is to say no. I know that somewhat of the informed reaction is say history tells us no. But it might have been because I think the absolute dumbest stance to take would be something like the United States is so great, so brave, we can't be defeated, therefore this will work. That's really, really dumb. But to understand what the dumb guy says and to just do the opposite of that isn't really so much smarter. So the second level of ignorant is to say that thing that looms large in our imaginations as a recent failure, that is Iraq will of course play itself out again. Or to use the heuristic, whatever Donald Trump does cannot work. I don't know if it will work. I don't know exactly what work will be or work will mean something like fewer than 100,000 civilians killed. I mean, the Iranian forces already killed 30 to 50,000 civilians. So that is a baseline of what happens when the regime is in place and there is no outside help or intervention with domestic politics. So I don't want to say that we should accept 10000 civilians killed, but that seemed like it was going to happen given the dissatisfaction of the civilians and awful repression of the regime that was in place. And in the upcoming days and weeks, I'll ask you to come along with me as we puzzle all of this out. And now Eli Lake of the Free Press in a wide ranging interview over what he calls the riskiest gamble of Donald Trump's career. I'm going to say something that you might know but you didn't know I knew. And it's this. A thoughtfully built wardrobe comes down to pieces that mix well and last. And quince is great at this. Premium fabrics considered design. Quince has everyday essentials I love with quality that lasts. Let me talk about the short sleeve Mongolian cashmere polo or as they call them in Mongolia, the short sleeve cashmere polo or as they call it when playing polo, a short sleeve Mongolian. When I wear these things, oh my God, the compliments I get the feeling that I get because they exemplify what Quint does. They work directly with top factories and they cut out the middlemen. You're not paying for brand markup or fancy retail stores, just quality clothing right now. Go to quince.com the gist for free free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to build your wardrobe and love it and you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last. Go to Q U I n c e.com the gist for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the gist the gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
- [08:02]
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- [08:06]
Mike Pesca
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- [08:59]
Mike Pesca
With the United States now in its third day of war in Iran, there are, of course, many questions to answer these questions. None other than Eli Lake, who covers national security for the Free Press and characterized this as the greatest gamble of Donald Trump's tenure. Eli, welcome back to the gist.
- [09:19]
Eli Lake
Oh, thanks so much for having me, Mike. It's great to be.
- [09:20]
Mike Pesca
Absolutely. Let's start with the easy questions. Why is and isn't the analogy to Iraq applicable?
- [09:27]
Eli Lake
Well, it's applicable because it's a huge military intervention, far more than what the United States committed to during the 12 Day War in June, which was just having, you know, the three B2 bombers flying over their nuclear sites and dropping a bunch of bunker busters. This is a lot more, you know, right now the US Air power is engaged in basically hunting all of the missile systems that the Iranians have and taking care of remaining nuclear sites. And it looks like that's the division of labor. And the Israelis are focused on regime leadership. But it's very different in that regard than the Iraq war, because the Iraq war was nearly 300,000 troops were ready to invade Iraq. And then the advantage of that is that you have a lot of influence over what comes after Saddam Hussein. The negative part of it, as we all learn not just in Iraq, but also Afghanistan, is that when you commit to rebuilding the nation after the invasion, then that means you're going to have U.S. forces who are manning checkpoints, training the army, training the police, and engaged in providing kind of social services. And then they become targets of opportunity for an insurgency and also a magnet for global jihad. Because you can make the argument that the occupation of Iraq by this foreign army, Trump is very clear he's not going to do that. And that, I think, gets to a deeper point, which is that for a long time we had this kind of understanding, a kind of rule of US Foreign policy or dictum, the Pottery Barn rules, which was originally coined by Colin Powell. Fun fact, by the way. If you break something at the Pottery Barn, you don't own it.
- [11:17]
Mike Pesca
Yes, they were very clear on trying to emphasize that.
- [11:20]
Eli Lake
Yeah, right. But let's just leave that aside. Like they have a more forgiving. But the point is that if you break the regime, you own what comes after it. And that was, I think, one of the great reasons why no one after George W. Bush launched these kinds of wars again. And I think most people would say we can't be in that kind of, you know, we can't be in the nation building business. And I think that's why regime change, wars became, you know, opposed by majorities in both parties. So. Because that's the part of it. But what we forget is that the initial phase, the toppling of the regime is pretty easy for us.
- [11:55]
Mike Pesca
Pretty easy. And so I want to get to that and I want to pull back. And you know, obviously what you're pointing to, the question is can you topple the regime, decapitate the regime or. Yeah, or to riff on what you were saying about the Israelis, enact some personnel changes and then hope for what happens next to be appreciably better. Right. You can't think of it being much worse in terms of the Ayatollah, but there can be a lot of death in between then, which, which is say four days ago and whatever happens next. But let's just talk about how the air power is going to work. When there was the October war and the United States hit the nuclear sites, not obliterated them, but from all the best intelligence I could see, set them back maybe a year or two, the Israelis knocked down the air defenses, the United States, they could operate with the understanding that they won't be getting interference from the Iranian anti missile systems. Is that the situation now? How arduous a task is it to truly take out all these defensive capacity not just for bombers high in the air, but even drones or other things that Iran can launch to boats in the Straits of Hormuz or all these hotels in Dubai.
- [13:13]
Eli Lake
Okay, so a couple of points in terms of strictly territorial air defense. I don't even know if the Iranians rebuilt what was destroyed in June. That was never going to be an issue. The issue is the Iranians have so many missiles, short range, long range, ballistic, etc. Then they may even have the new hypersonic missile technology from either China or Russia. There were some reports they fired some of that at Israel that it creates. What is this devilish math problem? And the problem is, is that the United States and Israel have developed remarkable technology to effectively shoot a Bullet with a bullet, which is we can, we have the inner. We have the ability to shoot missiles out of the sky before they land. Bravo. Yay for us. Here's the downside. It costs exponentially more to build those systems and to replace the interceptors that shoot the missiles than it does to make the missiles. So you know, at a certain point we're going to run out. And we already, we sort of, we came close to running out in June during the 12 Day War. Add to that the commitments we've made to Ukraine, which is dealing with this over the course of four years, and we don't have enough interceptors to fill all of our defensive needs. So that is a huge problem. And I can tell you that.
- [14:35]
Mike Pesca
Let me just interrupt. They give you a quote from the center for Strategic and International Studies. They did a war game and this was about China. And they said the United States would likely run out of some munitions, such as long range precision guided munitions. And then they also started talking about air defense interceptors in less than a week. So we don't have an unlimited supply of these things.
- [14:55]
Eli Lake
Right. Okay, so that's so. So what you now have is a race. And the race is can you wipe out the launchers and the missiles before you run out of the interceptors? Let's add a couple other factors in here. There are conflicting reports that last night the Israelis battle tested a technology they unveiled last year called Iron Beam. That is a missile defense system that uses a laser. Now that is a game changer if you can use it in lots of different circumstances. Now I should say there are problems, which is if there's a sandstorm or bad weather, you can't use the laser. And they don't work as well with ballistic missiles as they do with short term. But that will obviate the need for as more some of the, that will take care of some of your, your interceptor demand if that technology is used by Israel and then going forward for this kind of thing, America would, I think, probably want to use that for domestic missile defense. So that's another technological leap. And then what's interesting here is this sort of a diplomatic part of it. So before the war, our Gulf allies, mainly Saudi Arabia, were publicly saying, see how the negotiations play out. Let's not jump into this too quickly. And I think that that's understandable because they were in range of the Iranian missiles. Now that the Iranians have responded, not just in Israel, but in the United Arab Emirates, the international airport of Dubai was hit. I think they may have hit a refinery in Saudi Arabia. There's a lot of different Gulf allies who've now been hit by Iranian missiles. The Iranians will have said, oh, we're just targeting U.S. bases. Well, that didn't work. And what it's done is it's created a situation where all of now the fence sitters are now in favor of the war and cooperating with it. Add to that even European countries like the UK that originally didn't want us to use the Diego Garcia base, they're now on board with the war. So the Iranian response has further diplomatically isolated them. And just as a point, their natural allies, what you could call China and Russia, which are their superpower allies of sorts, have not provided much relief. Part of that's because Russia's got its hands full with Ukraine, and part of it's because the Chinese are a predatory ally when they're your friend. And so the Chinese have offered to buy Iranian oil at a huge and steep discount. So they're not really being good friends.
- [17:38]
Mike Pesca
And they lend him money at usury rates. And if you think Donald Trump is transactional, the Chinese are much, much worse.
- [17:45]
Eli Lake
So the Iranians are in a terrible situation. Add to that that before all this started, what kicked off the latest round of protests was the plummeting value to almost nothing of the rial. The Iranians just have structural problems. Add to that they have been decapitated. Not just Ayatollah Khamenei, who's the supreme leader. And it's important to note that he's not just like the president in America. He's like the combination of the president and the Pope in that. He's like, you know, second to God and lots of other people, like the current kind of the commanders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, their top intelligence people. And remember, a lot of the military leaders in the 12 day war were taken out in the first salvos by the Israelis. So that was, you could argue, the B team and the B team just got. So now we're going to really get, like, less and less qualified people in important command. It's unclear whether they even have command and control communications at this point. There have been mixed messages there. So I think the Iranians are in trouble. Their one advantage is that they know that politically it's probably going to be impossible for Trump to kind of have a long war in this regard and that. So they do think that if they can kind of hold tight and maybe there's a way for them to survive. But right now, we're seeing something That I think maybe this is the biggest headline from all of this, which is that the United States and Israel have now perfected a kind of decapitation from the air technique and technology. We saw the Israelis do this with like Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and we just saw it demonstrated with Khamenei to a certain. To a slightly modified version of that was snatching Maduro with like no US Casualties, although there were some serious injuries. We saw the guy at the State of the Union. That's an extraordinary capability. And by way of contrast, remember four years ago when Russia invades Ukraine, that was their opening gambit. They tried to do it with special operators known as Spetsnaz on the ground. They wanted to snatch Zelensky and they failed. If America has demonstrated that they can do this from the air with intelligence assets on the ground, and I'm pretty sure that's mainly Mossad penetration of Iran, that is game changing, that we've never seen a military or any force have that kind of ability to do it. Yes, there have been examples throughout history, going back to antiquity of an expeditionary force that's highly trained, going and targeting the leader before the battle starts. Yes, that's happened. But to do it from the air without any ground forces is a remarkable kind of feat in terms of military history. So that is a big deal. It is.
- [20:48]
Mike Pesca
But how does it lead to and in what timetable does it lead to the Iranian regime, The vestiges, the spread out, diffused by design vestiges of the regime yielding or being overthrown. And how does that happen? The U.S. air dominance and Israeli air dominance flattens any ability to shoot back at the people in the air. Then the people, the Iranian people on the street rise up. And what, US Or Israeli airplanes strafe the National Guard? How does it actually happen?
- [21:22]
Eli Lake
Well, first of all, these are all unknowns. This is why I say it's an enormous gamble, because we don't know what comes next. And if you don't commit to the ground forces, which, by the way, smart move, I don't think that's politically sustainable. He couldn't have done that. Okay, so you cannot really affect those events on the ground. Now, does the Mossad and CIA have assets on the ground? I'm sure they do, but it's unclear whether that would be enough to really shape things to the kind of transition that we would like to see. So I would say the answer to that question is unknowable. Here's what the factors have to be. If you see two Three, four layers of leadership wiped off the map. Will that then lead to the next people in line? Will that strengthen their resolve? And you still have a lot of true believers, or as many very brilliant Iran analysts have been writing now for 20 years, that they've lost a lot of the popular and ideological legitimacy and that most of the people who are in the power elites are corrupt. And if they're corrupt, that's good, which means that you can buy them up. They will make a rationale decision. I would not want to be on the kill list. Let me cooperate with whatever transition is coming next. Some people had speculated. I don't. I never bought into this, that Ali Larajani, who's still alive and still tweeting, he's like their national security advisor and effectively the interim leader, he was given that responsibility before the war started, that he might be somebody who could work with the Americans, like Elulu Rodriguez in Venezuela, like somebody like that.
- [23:06]
Mike Pesca
It's also been speculated that everyone who survived that airstrike might have been in on it.
- [23:11]
Eli Lake
Well, there's that. How far is the Mossad penetration? That's another great point. But I would just say that I think Larajani is going to go down with the ship. But there may be other people who emerge that we don't know their names, who will take the deal. And that, I think, is what Trump is talking about. Trump said something revealing in one of the interviews that he's given when he said, we had a couple people, but they were killed. And that is like, a weird thing for him to say. I don't quite understand what that means. You'd think that if he thought they could be that interim figure, he would have told the Israelis not to kill them, and he doesn't. I don't see any evidence right now that Trump is unhappy with the Israelis. So I don't quite understand what he meant by that. And there's a lot of things that Trump says that if you could pick it apart and you could say that. That doesn't make any sense. He kept saying, by the way, before the war, we still haven't heard the magic words, we'll never have a nuclear weapon. The Iranians say that all the time. Yeah, the foreign minister had been saying that, like, literally that day.
- [24:12]
Mike Pesca
It's very hard to parse Trump's words and untangle what he knows, what he thinks, what he means. He lies all the time. You don't even know if he's lying. The obliteration of the nuclear sites comes to mind. And I've talked about it on the show. They weren't obliterated. That doesn't mean they weren't severely set back. But because they weren't obliterated, it gave rise to commentators in the west saying, you know, this was all a lie, and Steve Witkoff saying they were a week away from getting nuclear material, which one way you could look at it is true. On another way, it was maybe a negotiating place. So it is very hard.
- [24:46]
Eli Lake
If I may, I don't. I think lie is different than bs. Am I allowed to first?
- [24:52]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:52]
Eli Lake
Okay. So Trump's. I did this piece like a year and a half ago. Trump's the greatest bullshitter we've had in American political history.
- [25:00]
Mike Pesca
Yes.
- [25:00]
Eli Lake
And his, that's his medium. He is a bullshit.
- [25:03]
Mike Pesca
I know that. But he's also like, if he didn't say obliterate and if he just used regular words, like, we've seriously degraded them. I know it doesn't appeal to how he communicates, but I think we'd be in a better position in terms of trying to sell to the American public.
- [25:17]
Eli Lake
I would say obliterate, while technically false, is closer to bullshit because, yeah, it, you know, incapacitated would have been a better word than obliterate, but nonetheless, you know what I'm saying? Nonetheless, he's pretty much in the ballpark and he loves to speak in hyperbole. He's a salesman, he likes to tell you. And that is, I think, his ideas that he believes. This is the other thing you got to understand about Trump. One of the most influential kind of thinkers on his life is Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote a book that I believe is largely bullshit called the Power of Positive Thinking. But the theory is that if you think and believe it hard enough, then it's, then it'll be true. And so part of what I think Trump's doing is like, listen, I'm gonna take out the top. We're gonna take out the top echelon of the leaders. And then the Iranian people who've been demanding their freedom now for so long, they're gonna finally have their once in a generation chance. And then I'm going to get that. We're going to not going to rebuild the country through USAID and Boots on the Ground. We're just going to have a big Board of Peace summit where we're going to have tender offers for incredibly valuable infrastructure projects. Lots of capital will pour in. And he really believes that. I think that that's how it's going to end. And his entire life if you think about it, and you could argue that this has always kind of worked out for him. I mean, who would have believed that Trump would have won when he came down the golden escalator in 2015? That is a testament to somebody who just believed he could win the presidency when nobody else would have given him a shot. And this is a little bit of that we're sort of seeing. And I think that's a double edged sword because it can lead to delusion, which is a real possibility that there will be untold horrors that will affect our security. But he might be right. And it wouldn't be the first time that the kind of foreign policy consensus of Washington or the political consensus of Washington was wrong. And that is kind of where it's I'm hesitant to just simply declare Trump doesn't know what he's doing. This is going to be a fiasco.
- [27:34]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And I'll give you another one. Who would have thought that him denying the election would redound to his benefit? But it did. And if he didn't do that, he wouldn't be a viable Republican candidate. All true, all things to ponder. And in a moment we're going to talk about what comes next, but also when it comes. Stay tuned. Eli Lake, back after the break. The gist is brought to you by
- [28:00]
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- [28:05]
Mike Pesca
These are things people say about drivers
- [28:07]
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- [28:57]
Mike Pesca
We're back with Eli Lake from the Free Press, and we've been talking about what comes next in Iran. But before we get to that, when will it come next? How long? There's a bunch of questions and you hinted at this in the first segment, but how long can the United States and will the United States and Israel have to keep up this level of airstrike? And how long can the Iranians resist in the same way, in the significant way, though not overwhelming way that they have been so far?
- [29:28]
Eli Lake
Well, I mean, first of all, let's not. It's too soon to tell how effective the Iranian response is. They've certainly hit, we know, we've seen the video from Israel. They've hit places in Israel, not strategic, but neighborhoods. And so there are casualties. They've hit the Dubai International Airport and other things. And we don't really have a good tally yet of what they've managed to hit in the region. So let's wait to sort of see there. And it's hard for us to know how effective the hunting for the missile launchers and so forth campaign has been. My, my suspect, I suspect that that's probably going to be pretty effective. And then we have this other situation which is how deep will the leadership elimination strategy go? I mean, again, this is the fog of war, so I don't necessarily. But there were reports that they named an interim supreme leader. And then, you know, like the Spinal Trap tap drummer, you know, he was out of, out of business only a few hours later.
- [30:38]
Mike Pesca
So a globule, really.
- [30:40]
Eli Lake
Right, exactly right. So, and by the way, we saw this with Hezbollah. I think they just did this, you know, with Hezbollah, named a couple leaders after Hassan Nasrallah and then Israel would just take him out. So, you know, that's, that is a real unknown because we've never really seen that on the scale of a nation state. What we can say is that when it, when we saw a version of this done against Hezbollah, it severely weakened Hezbollah and the very weak Lebanese government was able to assert more control over southern Lebanon than it had in 20, 30 years. So that's a significant. That, that's maybe one way to think about it.
- [31:19]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I just saw a headline, Lebanese Government Instructs Hezbollah to essentially stand Down. And two years ago, I don't think they even be bold enough to say that, but it wouldn't matter. Not dispositive, but it does. So, yeah, that was real game change there now.
- [31:34]
Eli Lake
But there is no Lebanese government waiting in Iran. What we can say is institutionally the Iranian army, which was built by the first Pahlavi Shah, you know, in the, in, in the early 20th century. It, you know, they're not the same as the Revolutionary Guard Corps. It's quite possible that the senior officers from the Iranian army would happily defect to a transitional government. There are, there is an open effort by the son of the last Shah Reza Pahlavi to create the sort of transitional council. I think he has not done what he needs to do in terms of getting more buy in from other elements of the opposition. I Wrote a big piece on that about a month ago.
- [32:22]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, that's interesting because he's the one figure that we know in the west and he's prominent in the west and his daughters are beautiful socialites who all went to, you know, top American schools. But I don't know. I have no way of knowing if he has any resonance and if the resonance is even good, considering the Shah was an oppressive force, especially in the last years of his life.
- [32:42]
Eli Lake
We have some scant data, I wouldn't say scant, as we have some data that a his name has been called in recent uprisings, not just this latest one, but the one before it in women life. Sure. And in 2024, there was a survey, a kind of a poll that Iran experts that I trust take seriously that said that he has about a 31% approval rating, which is more than anybody else that they asked about, including.
- [33:12]
Mike Pesca
So he's at the Gavin Newsom level of support.
- [33:15]
Eli Lake
Yeah, but that's. We don't.
- [33:17]
Mike Pesca
Let me then cap or minus three beheadings. Sorry.
- [33:21]
Eli Lake
That's right. That's one pole. Right. And I mean, a lot is going to depend on how he reenters the country and the symbolism and optics around that and whether or not he is seen as a kind of person to which defectors of the Onsen regime will align with and also whether he can, you know, bring in. There are significant groups inside the country, labor unions, women's groups, groups representing minorities that would love that, want to get rid of the regime and will they rally around him? But to his credit, he has said, I only want to be a transitional leader and he wants to transition to elections. All of that would be wonderful. But as I said, it's unknown at this point. And unlike past US Interventions, we are not trying to prop him up in any way. The response from not just Trump and the Trump administration, but the response from the most hawkish senators like Lindsey Graham is it's not for me to choose the next Iranian leader. That's been the line. So that is another difference between this and the efforts to try to guide a transition government in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- [34:43]
Mike Pesca
So the first question I ask is what asked was what was the differences between this and Iraq? And one of them is, I'm not sure. And I turn to you for guidance. What about the factions underneath this repressive regime? My we saw and also I think I understood that in Iraq, it was known that there were many people vying for power, that there was a Sunni, Shia split because it's a majority Shia country. But, but Saddam Hussein is Sunni. There were the Kurds. It was known that there were many factions who would vie in Iran. I'm not sure, but maybe that's because they're so good at being repressive. How true that is. I know there is repression of the Baha'. I, they have their own Kurdish population. Give me the lay of the land in terms of that and what it might mean for factionalism and civil war.
- [35:30]
Eli Lake
Well, the first difference is that there has been and Iran in some form or another since antiquity and the Achaemenid Persian Empire, the bad guys of Herodotus and the Greek historians. So that there is an Iranian identity. What's more, that Iranian identity has always been multi ethnic and included lots of different groups. So, you know, it's not like everybody in Iran is Persian. In fact, it's hard to know because, you know, the last 47 years we haven't had great social science from Iran. But there are some people who say there's actually a majority right now, Azari population, as opposed to Persians. There's a, there's about maybe 10 to 15 million Kurds who live in Iran. There are Sunnis and Shia, although it's majority Shia religion. You mentioned the Baha', I, which have been terribly oppressed, not just under the Islamic Republic but also under the Shahs before. So there is that, but I. And compared to Iraq, which you know, was sort of cobbled together after World War I and one could argue is not, you know, there was no Iraq in ancient antiquity. I mean, there was of course the Babylonian empire, but it wasn't the same thing. There was Mesopotamia. Right. And of course Mesopotamia. So there is a strong Iranian identity. And that Iranian identity I should say also, you know, it's a tension in modern Iranian history. There has been a movement for democracy in Iran since the end of the 19th century. There was the 1905 constitution and that still exists to a certain extent, although it has been modified to accommodate for the supreme leader. And this new theocracy, the Majlis as an institution has existed for more than 100 years. That's their parliament. So there are institutions in Iran and history. But I'd say the tension is that Iranians are also used to living under Assha. And the significance of the 79 revolution and what they said at the time was they're ending like 2,500 years of Iranian monarchies. They haven't been on the same monarchy, but there was an Iranian Shah, you know, up until 79. The irony here is that the supreme leader looks an awful lot like the Shah. So there's an argument that, you know, whatever happens, you're gonna. It's not gonna be the kind of democracy or republic that we in America think of as a sort of model. It's probably going to be a mix, and there probably will be some kind of position that will be similar to a supreme leader, but maybe with more restraints on his power and centering it more toward the parliament. But those are really serious tensions in recent Iranian history that we could see play out. But for now, I think especially for the transition, you would need a recognizable figure that would sort of act for a time being autocratically. And that's kind of an argument for Reza Pahlavi. The argument against him is he hasn't been in the country since 1978. It's all very untested. And when his grandfather created the Pahlavi dynasty, he was a very hard man who was battle tested by leading the cavalry against vicious insurgencies in the late 19 teens. And he was able to emerge as a kind of strong, brave, heroic figure on a horse. That is not Reza Pahlavi. Anybody who spent time with him, he comes off as a very, you know, sophisticated royal, but not somebody who's lived that hard life as his grandfather.
- [39:26]
Mike Pesca
Okay, so I have two more questions. One is, I started by saying or asking Iraq isn't Iran. And one of the reasons, it strikes me, one of the problems with Iraq, the war in Iraq, redoing the government of Iraq was Iran. Iran would come in via maximally destabilizing.
- [39:45]
Eli Lake
Great.
- [39:46]
Mike Pesca
But now that it's Iran we're talking about, what can Iraq do or another country?
- [39:53]
Eli Lake
Well, the Turks have been adventurous. They are responsible for the final push to oust Bashar Al Assad. So there's a possibility that Turks could be the foreign spoiler that Iran was in Iran. We will see that Iran was in Iraq. Yeah, right. That Iran was in Iraq.
- [40:12]
Mike Pesca
Totally different incentives. They're a NATO quote, unquote ally. But yes, good.
- [40:16]
Eli Lake
If you go back to the 19th and the early 20th century, the Russians had played a pretty pernicious role in Iranian domestic politics. That's always a possibility, except right now, Russia is in the middle of a horrible quagmire from them, which we never appreciate. But they're preoccupied with Ukraine. And that war doesn't seem to be going anywhere. So I don't know if they have the resources or attention to do it now. And then there's this possibility which is that, okay, let's say you Get a moment where somebody does emerge and say, all right, uncle, let's talk form the transition. Okay, Yay. Everybody feels really good. But you know, there are tens of thousands, maybe true believers with guns who might decide to go into the mountains and to go into and become an insurgency. And at that point, who's going to root them out, who's going to fight them? You know, we don't have the boots on the ground. You know, how's that going to work? So maybe the sort of a rump force of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that has not just meddled in Iraq, but the entire Middle east, maybe they will be the spoilers in Iran. That is a nightmarish scenario. It's very bad. Now the other thing I would just say is that, okay, well that's a tragedy for Iran and it's very sad. But from a perspective of US national interests, it's a big win for us because we've gotten rid of the nuclear problem. They're not meddling in the rest of the region. We've taken out their missiles. So it's good for our interests, even though maybe it's bad for the Iranians in the short term. My response to that is careful. It could be very bad for our interests if there are even military equipment that gets in the wrong hands, if you know what I mean. Yeah. So like forget nuclear material and stuff like that, which is the worst case scenario. But what if you just had handheld anti aircraft guns, which I'm sure the Iranians have lots of, and they went to, you know, effectively kind of like a new terrorist organization and they infiltrated into the major international airports in the Middle east and that's a horrible scenario.
- [42:27]
Mike Pesca
And we know the Iranians by mistake have shot down commercial airlines, killing Harvard.
- [42:32]
Eli Lake
Sure. And we have by the way too, back in the 80s. But like, so that's another thing, which is, I'm just saying that it's like I don't know that we're out of the woods. Even if you got the big announcement, if you still can't account for if there isn't a real monopoly of violence in Iran. But on the other hand, we've never been here before and maybe it will work because I do think that the vast majority of Iranians want to take their country back from the Islamic fanatics and this might be a kind of a do over or a reset and maybe there'll be fewer of the true believers than we thought and there'll be plenty of, you know, Iranians who will come back to the country and maybe some of them will volunteer to be part of a security forces. We'll see. But all of that are unknowns, which is why I say this could be an epic historic geopolitical mitzvah, or it could be a profound act of hubris leading to, you know, a debacle. So we don't know. It's a big gamble to use, of
- [43:36]
Mike Pesca
course, the Persian term for blessing. So you led me to my last question, which is about the nuclear material. I saw, I think it was Tom Cotton being asked about this on Face the Nation. And I didn't, he wouldn't answer. And I didn't get the sense of if he didn't know or did know and didn't want to talk about it on the air. How does the proximate cause of this entire war was the unwillingness of the Iranians to give up their nuclear program. We know that the underlying causes were things like a thousand Americans killed over the years by Iran and Iran killing dissidents and just the threat of nuclear weapons. How does and when does the United States or someone, the iaea, you tell me, take control of this? Who hands it over? Is it that? But for that to happen, there has to be the true entire regime change, and then that next entity just gives up the 60% enriched uranium stockpiles and maybe some centrifuges to the West.
- [44:40]
Eli Lake
Well, one, I would imagine, and I don't think it's that much of a stretch. The CIA and the Mossad probably have been thinking a lot about this and planning a lot about this. And so on the one hand, I don't want to, like, seem, I don't want to get too Cassandra, like, but, you know, there is a, there, there is a very good chance, given the penetration that Israel has demonstrated of the Iranian regime, that they probably have thought about this and they know where the locations are. I mean, remember, this is the, you know, the Israelis, the Mossad stole all of their nuclear files from a downtown warehouse in Tehran in 2018. So you'd think they probably would have a good sense of where things were. And they probably are sending out small teams to make sure that they secure those materials. But that's not going to be perfect. And bad guys would know where that stuff is, too. And when you're talking about nuclear, you're talking about all you need is a little. So that's, you know, like not to have a national nuclear program to build weapons. I'm thinking you need a little. If you're a terrorist group and you want to build A dirty bomb. You only need a little if you want to try to sell it to, you know, another aspiring tyrant somewhere who might want a nuclear program. There's all kinds of nightmarish sort of scenarios. I would say this. In the past 40 years, America has gotten very good at dealing with these kind of counter proliferation threats. And I think the Mossad might have a head start on the ground. But that's part of the gamble here, which is we don't know the answer to that. And I don't think that anybody who gives you guarantees either way should be trusted, because I just don't think we would know.
- [46:14]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. And of the United States and the west and Israel's priorities, this has got to be either 1 or 1A, yes, you do this to get the uranium.
- [46:25]
Eli Lake
Well, yes, you do it to get the uranium. You do it to eliminate the threat of the missiles. You know, there's a lot of things that you, you know, and it's a long time coming. I mean, the one thing I would say is that we are in the journalism business, so it's important for us to kind of hold our leaders to account for honesty. And the real reason why the war is happening now is not because they were about to get a bomb or anything like that. The real reason is because they were weak. And this was an opportunity to finally be done with a regime that looked like based on their own decisions and their own statements was not going to reform. There was no chance of reform. There was no chance. We've tried. We tried bringing them into the family of nations, hoping that would normalize their behavior, and it didn't work. So that's why we did it. And it follows from the 6th, from the 12 Day War, really follows from October 7th, because that's sort of the beginning. That's the opening event that led to this. And the Israelis were going to do it come hell or high water. But I also think it's absolutely in America's national interest to do it as well. And that's why this is happening. And that's the one part of it where I would say it could end up that Trump will be, well, this will go down as one of the greatest things that Trump ever did. That's certainly what I'm hoping for. But he has not been able to kind of articulate that this has been an enemy of ours since the hostage crisis. And we've tried so many times to negotiate with them, to bribe them, to bring them in from the cold. None of it's worked. So we really have this is our last, best chance to really solve one of our major national security challenges so that we can focus on countering China and not have to constantly getting sucked back into the Middle East.
- [48:25]
Mike Pesca
Eli Lake has expertise in foreign affairs and national security, and his current job with the Free Press, which I can't recommend enough, is the podcast Breaking History, which talked about and anticipated so much of what we're seeing in Iran and elsewhere. It's an excellent, well produced podcast with jingles. You might not believe it, but it's really, really a great listen. Eli, thank you so much.
- [48:50]
Eli Lake
Thank you, Mike. It's great to be here.
- [48:58]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the Gist. Kathleen Sykes does the Gist list. It's up today@mike pesca.substack.com Jeff Craig runs our Socials. We've had help recently from Astrid Green and Ben Astaire is our booking producer. Michelle Pesca provides the shock and awe for this particular campaign.
- [49:19]
Eli Lake
Improve.
- [49:20]
Mike Pesca
And thanks for listening.
- [49:39]
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