Massive unrest and protests are roiling Iran, resulting in hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths as the mullahs crack down. President Trump has called on the Iranian leaders to stop killing protesters and promised American action if they don’t. Rich, on today’s edition of The Editors, asks Noah how he thinks Trump will respond if the mullahs ignore his threats.
“I am completely speculating here,” says Noah. “And I just don’t know the capabilities that we have on offer. I’m sure there are options that range from big kinetic strikes, efforts to decapitate the regime, strikes on security services, the IRGC and the besieged police that it maintains. . . .
“Making the names and locations of their tormentors known,” is another option, says Noah. “These people have homes, they have families, and they live in fear of the public being aware of who they are, their names, faces, and identities. That’s another sort of thing that would impose some more caution on this regime than it has evinced so far. But we are seeing a massacre. . . . And if the regime survives it, if they eliminate this threat in the brutal fashion that they are, it may be another generation before we get the opportunity that we’re seeing right now to push this rotten edifice over.”
“The idea that ‘Trump always chickens out,’ the phrase the left was trying, isn’t true,” Charlie says after Noah’s response. “So hopefully, he will follow through on it. But there is always that temptation with Trump to try and find a deal. And Noah is right, there is nothing to negotiate here. We have enough evidence.”
Charlie says that while he doesn’t “always think revolutions are good . . . Here, there is a restorationist element.
“Iran or Persia, as it was, is not a country that was, prior to the establishment of the world’s worst Islamic regime, the place you would have expected the world’s worst Islamic regime to spring up. . . . If you look at those photographs from prior to the revolution, sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether it’s Tehran or London, other than the immutable characteristics of the people within it.
“I hope we come down on the right side of this, not just because it’s the right thing to do morally, but it would be so good for the United States to have that change in that region.”
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