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But of course, Israel and the United States and our friends have a massive, massive military Armada in the region. And Sean, it's a lot easier to shoot the archer before he gets off his arrow than trying to knock the arrow out of the sky. Great analogy, which I can understand. Michael Rubin joined us now, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. That was, of course, Senator Tom Cotton, Director of Policy Analysis, Middle East Forum.
He specializes in Middle East countries. Michael, welcome. This is a very interesting time for your area of expertise. You wrote a column just on saying the president's got to make clear his objective. And whatever you want to say about the last operation, George W.
Bush, we knew exactly what he wanted to do, Al Saddam. H.W. Bush, we said he was going to make sure that Kuwait was, the forces were pushed out of Kuwait, left Saddam in power. The objective's got to be clear. What do you think the President's objective should be here?
I think the President's objective has to be regime change, because what the President needs to understand is that Iran's playbook has two possible plays. One is to bog him down in negotiations until the clock runs out. The other is to come up with some sort of agreement, which they're going to violate the second that Trump is removed from office. And so the only security, if Trump wants his legacy to be secure, is to ensure that the supreme leader is gone and his regime. The problem has never been the nuclear missiles.
It's been the guys who would wield them.
So how about if that's the policy? But politically, it's not the best line to use, correct? Absolutely, it's not the best line. But here's the thing. The President doesn't want boots on the ground.
If you have regime change, there's a chance of a vacuum. You don't know what's going to come next. What I don't understand is if you have 95% of Iran's oil going through the Karg oil terminal, which is 10 miles off the coast of Iran, why don't you simply take that? And then if Iran can't export 95% of its oil, it can't pay its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It can't pay its Iraqi militias, and then the whole regime comes tumbling down.
So you mean sh shut off the oil um shut off the oil? Shut off the oil. This is what Ronald Reagan did in part back in 1988 in Operation Prey Mantis Brian when he took out one of the oil derricks in the Persian Gulf.
So just bombing, you say, and Tai going for the ballistic missile plants and going after the finish off the nuclear weapons and bombing maybe the bases of the IRGC. You said that's not going to be enough.
Well, here's the problem with just bombing the IRDC. I support getting rid of the missiles. I agree with Tom Cotton here. But in 2007, the Revolutionary Guard reorganized so they put one unit in every province, 32 different provinces. Each of those units has an arms depot.
What are we going to do to secure those arms depots to make sure that bad guys don't rush in and get them the way that happened in Iraq or Libya? That's a good point.
So, when you look at our assets right now, what are we capable of in the region?
Well, look, we're capable of almost anything when we have two carrier strike groups. Because remember, when we're talking about carrier strike groups, we're not only talking about the F-35s and so forth. We're talking about the destroyers. We're talking about the cruisers. We're talking about the submarines that come with an aircraft carrier.
But this is what worries me. When I hear that Arab states in the region won't let us use their airfields, I see this as a barometer of their intelligence services. assessing how serious Donald Trump is. When you have a hornet, Seth, Brian, you have two good options. One's to leave it alone, the other one's to get rid of it, but you don't want to sit underneath it lightly tapping it with a stick.
And when the Arabs are saying, we're not going to participate, to me that signals that they have talked to Donald Trump and the U.S. intelligence community, the military, and they're not sure that we can pull this off. That's interesting, or they don't want to be a target. And they think if they play a role, if they say, well, we're going to go after Saudi Arabia, they could say, what do I have to do with it?
Well, you're absolutely right that that is a concern, but their biggest goal would also they have no love for this regime. They would want to get rid of it. But you know, here's my other concern with all the talk right now. If Iran retaliates, I'm much less concerned about what happens in Beirut and Basra and Baghdad than I would be what happens in Bangkok or Burbank, California. And the reason is that Iranians with sleeper cells and terrorists will hit us where we're least expecting it.
This notion that they're just going to hit us in the region, that's something that we need to it's just a false assumption that's going to hurt us. How infiltrated do you think they are into our country? I haven't seen much terror attacks from them. We've seen threats, we've seen some arrests. But has there been indications of s cells?
Well, there are indications of cells. In 2006, there was an incident in Arkansas where an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps veteran had infiltrated the Arkansas National Guard. Then you remember that in 2010, there was a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. by exploding a car bomb outside Cafe Mulatto, a popular restaurant. What's important to understand is that in many of these cases, the Iranians don't necessarily do things themselves.
They reach out to the cartels. They reach out to other criminal gangs. And this is the same play that they also engaged in back in 1994 in Buenos Aires when they blew up the Jewish Cultural Center. Here is Senator Tom Cotton on what Iran might be able to do. Cut 26.
That's certainly what they want the world to believe and what they're threatening. And again, those thousands of missiles pose a real danger. And I know that Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth and General Kaine are explaining the risk to the president as they should. But of course, Israel and the United States and our friends have a massive, massive military armada in the region. And Sean, it's a lot easier to shoot the archer before he gets off his arrow than trying to knock the arrow out of the sky.
I don't know who was calling significant progress from that meeting this morning. It sounds like it may have been the Iranians. Remember, they believe for 47 years that they can't win a war, but they can win any negotiation. I think with Donald Trump, they're likely to lose both.
So have you ever seen the Iranian people, Michael Rubin, as exercised and motivated as they've been over the last month, and they've paid a bloody price, but it's been pretty persistent? It has been pretty persistent, and they definitely do want regime change. But here's the problem. You know I used to live in Iran. They used to call me son of the great Satan.
And one thing that just overshadows all Iranian thinking is the Iran-Iraq war, where they had a revolution to get rid of a dictator. They were promised Islamic democracy. They got neither, but they got a war that killed a million people. That's what keeps Iranians on the fence. That said, if they see that we're serious, I think they will move ahead.
The question then becomes, what's going to happen? Because Iran is a country with 40 potential generals and presidents for each potential private.
So, wait a second.
So, you think they move ahead in what way if they thought we were serious? Look, if the Iran I mean, what I would be saying right now, Brian, is if I were Donald Trump, I would tell the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, you have three days to defect. And if you don't defect, you will likely die. We need to make clear to the forces that are repressing the Iranian people that their time is up. If that happens, I think the Iranian people will return to the streets and this time be triumphant.
That's interesting. Do you think that the next leader in Iran is in prison? Do you know names of people, if gotten out, would have the popularity to unite that country?
Well, certainly the son of the former Shah has the most popularity. I'm not sure whether he has the organization to pull this off. And you know that I worked in Iraq during the invasion and so forth. One thing that a lot of people forget is the CIA had inserted a cleric named Majid Al-Khoy, who is very pro-Western. We had a lot of hopes on him.
And then what happened is he was hacked to death the day he arrived. What I'm worried about is if we talk about inserting the former crown prince into Iran, how are we going to keep him alive? And can we even do that without boots on the ground, which of course is a red line? That said, there's a lot of other labor union leaders. There's a lot of other civil society leaders who are emerging.
My biggest fear is you have three or four different people emerging, some backed by neighboring states, and then you have a civil war.
So if you could you think from the best you know, of course, we don't have satellite images and infrared images. Is it possible to destroy their ballistic missile capabilities or set it back like we could at their nuclear facilities? Yes, absolutely. It takes a long time to fuel these missiles. They don't have as many as they used to.
And if we look at the timing of the June 2025 war, that was determined by when the Iranians were reconstituting their anti-aircraft missile capability after the April and October 2024 Israeli strikes. If we can knock out their S-300s and their other anti-aircraft missiles, we can do so with the ballistic missiles, which are a bigger target. That ultimately needs to be the objective. Isn't home where we all want to be? Reba here for Realtor.com, the pro's number one most trusted app.
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In 2025, $1 billion, which is down from the year before, obviously. See how they have the IRGC if reports are correct. rebuilding Hezbollah personally because they're in tatters. Hamas gets financing too from Israel. If you could put that regime flat on its back as they scramble for power.
Does that free up more time to further destroy Hezbollah and really move forward with different phases of peace as Hamas scrambles for arms and money? Yes, it absolutely does. But here's, look, I spent part of the summer in West Africa interviewing Lebanese diaspora about money laundering to Hezbollah because while the Israelis knocked out Hezbollah's military, and I went to Beirut recently, into Hezbollah's neighborhood, I counted the people missing eyes and fingers at a cafe which was symbolic of their defeat with this Operation Grim Bieper and so forth. But if we don't uproot that financial network, they are going to regrow. But when we talk about finances, Brian, this is the big elephant in the room with regard to Iran.
Many people estimate that Iran over the past 40 years has lost up to $2 trillion in sanctions and lost opportunities for development because of its nuclear program, its nuclear ambitions, and so forth. If Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader, were to give this up right now, the nuclear program, he'd have to explain to his hardliners, not just ordinary Iranians, what they sacrificed for, how they lost $2 trillion. That's one of the reasons I don't think he's ever going to be sincere in giving up his nuclear program because I don't think he can survive that concession. What would you like to see happen, Michael? I would like to see Ayatollah Ali Khomeini frog-marched out in chains the way Nicholas Maduro was so that he's humiliated and this Islamist terrorist ideology, which he represents, is basically delegitimized forever.
That would do something. That would do more. Get this 86-year-old out. You don't think it would exercise the religious extremists to say we have to take action? And look at this guy as a hero.
I actually don't because many of the, I mean, first of all, not to quote Osama bin Laden positively, but you remember that he once quipped that everyone in the region loves a strong horse. They don't like to shackle themselves to a hobble pony. And so this is the case where I think we need to show Ayatollah Khomeini in front of his own supporters. We need to show him humiliated. And at the same time, I speak a lot to Ayatollah's.
I spent a lot of time in Iraq and so forth. People don't like Ali Khomeini. They want him to go. It's time that the Iranians return to the community of nations as a normal country. And you know what?
They're immunized from this virus of Islamist extremism because they've suffered under it for so long.
So you think if you assemble, if Trump was to ask you what might target, you say, go get Khomeini. Kill him. Arrest him or something. And that'll be the best opportunity for change? That would be and I would also say dry up their ability to pay their salaries.
Take Harg oil terminal and then don't destroy it because Iran is going to be our ally the day after. What you want to do is you want to create a sovereign wealth fund for them that they can invest in their own future with their own money. It's the perfect Trumpian solution. And where is that located? that is located ten miles off the coast of Iran because remember the Persian Gulf is very narrow, it's very shallow.
The average depth is only around ninety feet deep, and it's more shallow closer to the Iranian shore.
So you can't get the supertankers into shore, which is why they have to pipe all their oil out to these terminals about ten miles away. Are you concerned about the different sects, ethnic groups like we had in Iraq?
So if you blow off the top and there's no leaders, you worry about the Kurds taking on different other elements and the country breaking up. I'm not worried about the country breaking up because Iran has a near-contiguous history going back more than 2,000 years, and so it has an identity which predates this era of ethnic nationalism. Remember, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, the supreme leader himself, isn't Persian. He's actually Azerbaijani.
So he's a different ethnic group. The former head of the judiciary was an Arab, and so on and so on and so forth. There are going to be demands for federalism, especially among the Kurds and the Baluch, but among the larger minorities, I don't think there's going to be that much of an issue. I can't imagine a better person to talk to with such direct knowledge of the region and worries about what could happen. But Michael, do you see Blair, before I let you go, do you see this as a unique opportunity to strike a enemy of ours for the last forty seven years?
That should be just done correctly? Or do you use it? Would you be just as happy if we let this opportunity pass? No, no, I think that ultimately the Iranians are going to strike us if we don't strike at them. We can't underestimate the importance of ideology.
In the United States, we prize Brian. We prize multiculturalism, but we look at it as walking into a sushi restaurant and being able to order mojito. We don't understand that different peoples can think in very, very different ways, and that itself can be extremely dangerous. Michael Rubin, thanks so much. Senior Fellow at AEI.
We'll talk to you soon, Michael. Thank you, Brad. All right, and check out his columns. Just bombing Iran is a strategy that will fail. And you just heard some of the worries and some of the options.
This is Ainsley Earhart. Thank you for joining me for the 52-episode podcast series, The Life of Jesus. A listening experience that will provide hope, comfort, and understanding of the greatest story ever told. Listen and follow now at FoxNewsPodcasts.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.
