Here’s the promised conversation with Shay. It’s grim. For those of you who don’t listen to podcasts, a transcript is below.
Updates
* US withdrawing troops from key Middle East bases as precaution, American official says
* Iranians arrive in Turkey through border gate as crackdown persists. The US issues a warning for citizens to evacuate Iran as protests intensify, with many Iranians seeking refuge in Turkey, crossing the Kapikoy border gate into Van Province.
* Iranian Justice Minister labels “anyone in the streets” after January 8 a criminal as death toll mounts. According to HRANA, 18,434 arrests have been confirmed, along with 97 forced confessions and 1,134 people sustaining severe injuries.
Pay attention to the Kurds:
Armed Kurdish separatist groups have sought to cross the border into Iran from Iraq, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a sign of foreign entities potentially seeking to take advantage of instability after days of crackdown on protests against Tehran:
The three sources, who included a senior Iranian official and who all spoke on condition of anonymity, said Turkey’s intelligence agency had warned the IRGC of the Kurdish fighters crossing the frontier in recent days. The Iranian official said the IRGC had clashed with the Kurdish fighters, who the official said sought to create instability and take advantage of the protests.
Turkey will be highly averse to any kind of instability in Iran precisely because the scenario it most fears is the union of Iranian Kurds with Syria’s and its own.
More:
* Kurdish parties in Iran call for regime change as protests continue. As protests in Iran escalate, Kurdish opposition groups, including PDKI, PAK, and PJAK, call for regime change, despite ongoing violence and a deadly crackdown on demonstrators.
* ★ ‘The system is in crisis’: Kurdish leader says Iran is nearing a Soviet-style break point. “What we are seeing in Iran is not simply an economic crisis. These are primarily symptoms of a deep political crisis,” said Yazdanpana. “The state, the political system, is in crisis.” … Yazdanpana said that Iran is suffering from a fundamental mismatch between the identity of the state and that of its population, drawing parallels to the crises that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and plunged Yugoslavia into war and genocide.
Yugoslavia is the right parallel. This is a particularly interesting interview that will give you a sense of how dangerous this moment is for the region.
Shay has been writing a lot about this over the past few weeks:
US strikes on Iran must be covert and overt—and must happen soon:
There are two misunderstandings about attacks on Iran. First, many of the usual suspects are giving briefings behind closed doors, warning that attacks could unite people behind the regime. This is nonsense. The current protests erupted only months after the Twelve-Day War with Israel in June. Then, the regime attempted to utilize the war to unify Iranians behind the state. For the first time, it erected statues of Iran’s pre-Islamic heroes, but the public unveilings featured more empty seats than people.
The few messages my colleagues and I have received throughout the regime-imposed blackout during the protests have been unanimous: “We are doing everything we can, but we need foreign intervention to succeed. Get the US government to help us!” Foreign wars unite revolutionary regimes in their infancy, as the Iran-Iraq War did, but they weaken them domestically once they have lost popular legitimacy. Desert Storm led to a popular uprising in Southern Iraq.
The second misconception is that cyberattacks suffice. Advocates view it through a military and logistical lens, rather than a political one. Cyberattacks are necessary to disrupt the regime’s command, control, and communications used for suppressing the protests. Cyberattacks might have sufficed when people were on the streets, to disrupt the crackdown, but the protests are subsiding after the regime reportedly killed 12,000 people, mostly in the first two nights of the riots.
* Responsible Iranian opposition should offer Pahlavi conditional support, whatever his flaws. A constitutional monarch could keep the country together while Iranians establish institutions to allow civil society to take root/
* What will the Iranian clergy’s position be in a post-Islamic Republic future? A challenge to the regime by religious leaders could deliver the coup de grâce to the Islamic Republic
* Eliminate Khamenei’s family members and top regime oppressors until Khamenei surrenders. Making the fall of the regime an inevitability that even Khamenei cannot deny is a difficult task
* Have Iranians learned the lessons of economic failure under both the Ayatollahs and Shah? Iran needs a leader who not only curtails corruption but also challenges the Iranian society’s fantasies about itself.
* Maduro’s fall removes an exile location for the Iranian elite should the Islamic Republic topple. Trump’s show of resolve in Venezuela should make Khamenei reluctant to push his luck too far with violence against Iran’s protesters
* What does Iran’s use of Iraqis and Afghans to suppress protests mean? If Arab and Afghan proxies act with the brutality they showed in 2019, Iranian security forces will further turn on the regime.
* Washington’s hands-off approach to the Iranian opposition is self-defeating. The Islamic Republic’s cruelty and commitment to staying in power against defenseless Iranians make foreign assistance necessary.
In related news, it looks as if Syrian security forces are now slaughtering Kurds on behalf of the Turks:
Two weeks of clashes in Aleppo led to devastation in Kurdish neighborhoods, formerly controlled by local Kurdish security forces for more than a decade.
There had been calls to integrate the Kurdish forces, who are linked to the Syrian Democratic Forces, with the new Syrian security forces. However, after clashes resulted in the Kurdish forces being forced out of the Kurdish neighborhoods, Kurds were left fearing that the fate of Aleppo might lead to Damascus pressing its gains by attacking the SDF in eastern Syria.
The Syrian transitional government had used various methods to clear the neighborhoods Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh of Kurdish security forces, as Syria surrounded and bombarded them. The government called for the civilians to evacuate and declared the area a closed military zone. After attempts at a ceasefire, many Kurds had to flee, and the remaining Kurdish fighters left for eastern Syria.
… There are also concerns about how detainees are being treated by the Syrian authorities and about the desecration of the bodies of the fallen. “In a new atrocity in Sheikh Maqsoud, Damascus government militias executed a female member of the Internal Security forces in cold blood, proceeded to mutilate and abuse her body, and then discarded it by throwing it into the upper floors, a savage act that exposes their complete disregard for humanity and the laws of war,” the SDF said.
… US Central Command had also put out a statement this week saying the US was closely monitoring developments in Aleppo. It is clear that there is intense concern now that the clashes in Aleppo may be a curtain raiser for more clashes in eastern Syria.
Claire: Hey, this is Claire, and I’m here speaking with Shay Khatiri. I wanted to get his sense of what’s going on in Iran, and—well, what’s going on in Iran, Shay?
Shay: So almost ten days ago, around the New Year, a bunch of shopkeepers in the bazaar began closing the shops and chanting anti-regime slogans because of the collapse of the Iranian currency, the rial. And it spread and kept growing for a few days until the son of the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, issued a statement for people to come to the streets and protest the regime on certain days and time. And then, in all 31 provinces, pretty much in every single city and town, millions came out and began protesting the regime.
This follows a pattern that we have seen since 2017, exactly around the same time—so I remember I was at a New Year’s celebration party in 2017, going into 2018, protests were going on in Iran. That was the first major protest movement, anti-regime, since 2009. And since then, we’ve had, every two or three years, protests erupting. You had November 2019. Then you had the pandemic, which caused some delay in the two-year eruption. Instead you had 2022, three years later, the Mahsa Amini protests, and it went on for almost a year into 2023, halfway through 2023. And then two years later you had the protests come back again.
Claire: Are the reports from Iran International that they’ve slaughtered 10,000 protestors credible?
Shay: It is very difficult to assess whether the report is credible or not, but based on what I’m hearing—by the way, the report is between 12 to 20,000. mostly over two nights—
Claire: They’ve elevated their estimate?
Shay: Yeah. It’s a serious estimate. Between 12 to 20,000.
Claire: So this is a Tiananmen-Square level massacre, if they’re correct.
Shay: Tiananmen-Square level, but in a much smaller population. Iran is not a billion-people population. I do not know, and I don’t think anybody can assess, whether the numbers are accurate or not. However, based on videos uploaded online—and this is at a time when internet is mostly disconnected—we have verified 180 body bags. So, just keeping that in mind, based on people taking videos in different places and corpses that have been collected, it checks out for me that it would be at least 12,000, if not higher. And based on stories that I have heard from inside—I heard from one surgeon at a small private clinic in upper class Tehran. He said they brought in injured—and I emphasize, this is an upper class clinic, which has the best surgeons and best equipment, very skilled in saving life—he said they brought in poor people who were already dead upon arrival. However, there have been nearly a hundred people who were brought in shot with military grade bullets. and with their internal organs, intestines, stomachs, wombs, literally hanging out of their bodies.
And he said every single one of them would have died in any large public hospital, but they managed to save all of them. Most of these people are going to large public hospitals, because they have more personnel. And they will have all died.
That’s just one example of—you know, thank God that these lives were saved. But you should assume that most people in these conditions would die eventually. A lot of people were brought in on the fourth night of the protests when it had mostly subsided. They were not shot with military bullets anymore. They were shot with pellet guns, in their heads, mostly in their eyes, so blinded. The other thing to consider here is we are completely disconnected from Iran.
Claire: But you were able to speak to the surgeon.
Shay: It is very here-and-there. I talk to a few people, using Starlink, and if you keep calling a million times, you might eventually get one connection.
The other thing I’ve seen a lot of videos that people are uploading, right? And people are just crying, posting videos: “Just please, please, please, someone from the outside world, help.” And the thing I have heard, from every single voice I’ve heard from inside Iran, every single voice is, “We’re doing everything we can, but it’s not enough. We’re willing to do whatever we can, but we need foreign help.”
And it’s not just that they say that—again, it’s dozens of people, so in a country of 90 million people, I want to be careful about not saying that it’s a unanimous consensus—but it is very important to mention. Dozens of people have said this, and every single one of them has also said, everybody I have talked to also wants outside help. So it’s not just that they are telling this to me. They’re saying that everyone around me needs foreign help.
There’s this idea outside that if we intervene, Iranians might rally behind the regime, which is insane to me. It’s insane. They’re literally, literally putting their lives on the line to oust this regime, but God forbid if America does something, they will go back behind the regime that’s killing them. This is insane.
Claire: The regime’s propagandists are saying that in response to what they claim were violent riots, more people came out to demonstrate in support of the regime than had ever come out before. Is there any truth to that?
Shay: So, no, because “than ever before” is ridiculous. Just go back and see the size of the crowds that they could turn out in the early years of the Revolution and even early years of the post-war era. No, “more than ever in recent years,” possibly, because the tensions are so high that many lazy regime supporters suddenly have the stamina and the energy to go out in support of the regime, I would not be surprised about that, but—important to mention—they might have pulled the largest pro-regime crowd in a decade or so, but they have pulled out the largest anti-regime crowd in 47 years.
Claire: I’m just asking this because if that’s true, it suggests that the desire for external intervention is not universal, and there would be a significant contingent who would be further radicalized in their views [by intervention].
Shay: So, how can I phrase this? It is sure that it’s not unanimous that everybody wants foreign intervention. I know one group that doesn’t want foreign intervention, and that’s people who support the regime, 10 to 20 percent of the population. As for the remaining 80 to 90 percent of the population, I don’t think that a hundred percent of that 80 to 90 percent want foreign intervention. I’d be shocked if more than 20 to 30 percent of them don’t want foreign intervention. At the end of the day, the vast majority of Iranians do want it.
Claire: Tell me what kind of intervention they want and what kind you would recommend
Shay: Claire, Sorry, I have to add one thing—
Claire: Mm-hmm.
Shay: Setting the desire of Iranians aside—I grew up in Iran. I’m Persian. I never call myself Iranian because I always view myself as an American who’s ethnically Persian. Let me just really quickly focus on US interests here.
Claire: Yeah, please.
Shay: Whether Iranians want or don’t want foreign intervention is an important factor to consider. However, did it matter whether Syrians wanted intervention ? We didn’t intervene, and see how it turned out for us and our allies in Europe.
Claire: Well, the worry is that—and this is not a worry I share—for this administration, the worry is that whatever they do will actually make things worse. And the fear is total chaos, civil war that spreads throughout the region.
Shay: That’s exactly what happened in Syria without intervening.
Claire: Yes, I know, I know. But—
Shay: I have been banging the drums since 2022 that Iran is headed toward civil war unless we do something.
Claire: Yes. What do you think we should do?
Shay: So the best thing to do is not to decapitate the regime. Rather, keep Khamenei alive, and eliminate everybody around him. People he has had in his circle of trust for decades, as well as his operation and suppression commanders. People like his chief of Staff, Golpayegani, who is a cleric. Ali Larijani. IRGC Admiral Shamkhani, as well as people in the judiciary, because Iran has developed a new policy in recent years, which is, after the protests are over, they rely on footage of protests, round up people, and execute them. This time they got really bloody, but in the past, they didn’t want to risk the scenes of people shot on the streets. To avoid videos and footage like that you just hang them, behind closed doors. A lot of these protesters are going to be hanged, even if they’ve survived. Who knows? Maybe even major prison sentences for doctors who have treated them. Go into the hospital and just arrest doctors because, “How dare you treat the protesters.” Things like that. So, judiciary, judges, prosecutors need to be targeted.
His son Mojtaba is the most important. Essentially, he is Khamenei’s prime minister. Eliminate Mojtaba, and that creates a fear for Khomenei, “Oh, now they’re coming after my family members, too.” And Mojtaba is not a family member. I mean, he’s a family member, he’s his son, but he’s a perfectly legitimate political target, being a political actor himself.
So you need to corner Khamenei psychologically, to [make him] understand that everybody who’s been with him for decades and defending his regime is gone now. Now it’s time to make a decision, whether he wants to keep fighting without any of his trusted lieutenants—and he’s a paranoid person—or give up power.
I think there’s a scenario, it’s not a certain scenario, but there’s a scenario that he would agree to give up power to a successor. In my judgment, it should be the exiled crown prince, who he would be legitimizing. On top of this, to the extent that you can militarily attack Basij and IRGC bases that are being used for suppression, we should do that. But it’s difficult because a lot of them are in major urban areas and it would cause a lot of collateral damage. Definitely, we need to be using cyber attacks to disrupt their command, control, and communication centers.
Claire: Why haven’t we done that Already?
Shay: We were caught off guard.
Claire: We don’t have an aircraft carrier in the region.
Shay: Well, yeah. They’re in the Caribbean right now, though. They’re moving, actually. To be fair, they’re moving.
And there is a huge bias in the intelligence community against doing anything, as well as [in] the military bureaucracy, by the way, unless the president mandates them for options, and gets on their bottoms to force them to provide options, They’re not going to do anything. They’re going to do everything they can to say, “Let’s not do anything. Let’s not do anything. Let’s not do anything.” I will not be surprised at all if there is a bureaucratic fight going on right now within the US government. The administration, the political appointees, are fighting with the intel and military bureaucracies.
Claire: Well, there’s also an inter-administration fight.
Shay: I’m less convinced about that. Based on everything we’ve seen, the jD Vance crowd has been sidelined, and—
Claire: Sidelined where Venezuela is concerned. Sidelined where Latin America is concerned. But we’re getting reporting, we’re getting hints, that they’re very worried about the backlash they received after the first intervention, when we began taking out the nuclear program. And they don’t want to see that again.
Shay: Let’s see what the after-action reports say. I’m not convinced about that. I think Trump has pushed himself into a corner that if he doesn’t, it’s not just the credibility of the United States, it’s his own credibility. You know, if there’s one thing I know about Donald Trump, it’s that he does not want to be Barack Obama. He does not want to repeat the Syria red line. He does not want to repeat 2009 Green Movement.
Claire: Well, that’s a good thing to not want to repeat.
Shay: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It might be for the wrong reasons, but in this context, I don’t care, because as long as you’re hedging against being Obama, you’re hedging toward the right thing.
Claire: But here’s my question. I assume the regime is now dispersed and underground. If they know we’re coming, they’re not going to make it easy to hit them. How likely is it that we could carry out the kind of precision assassinations you’re suggesting without putting people on the ground?
Shay: Israel did it.
Claire: Yeah, but—
Shay: They did not have personnel on the ground.
Claire: Israel’s better at this for one thing, and [the regime has] also learned from that.
Shay: Uh, no, I don’t think that Israel is necessarily better at that. Israel has a lot of intel on Iran that we don’t have. They can always share that intel. As far as operationalizing it, we have better pilots than Israel. Our pilots are perfectly capable of executing such strikes.
Claire: My question is whether we’re capable of finding them.
Shay: Israel can find them for us and share intel. And the Mossad is on the ground. By the way, Israel eliminated a third of commanders in charge of the 2022 suppression. A third. One reason it got out of hand so badly for the regime was that the experienced commanders were not there. I think that we can execute this quite reasonably.
Claire: What happens after that? What do the Revolutionary Guards do?
Shay: I don’t know. And that also depends on our conduct. There needs to be a lot of secret diplomacy to reach out to them. It’s not even diplomacy, really. It’s just reaching out and saying, “You have two options. Do you want to go to Moscow or do you want to go to hell? Because those are your only options.”
Claire: Do you think Moscow would accept them? I mean, does Moscow want a bunch of super well-trained, experienced terrorists ?
Shay: Yeah, they bring a lot of money and fall out of windows. Why not? Some of them, yes. Probably not too many of them. We will have to find a place for them to go. And if we cannot, then we don’t need to send 200 of them. The number of commanders orchestrating this is not that large. To be quite honest, that’s a problem the diaspora has been struggling to come up with an answer for, and they have not yet. What do you do with IRGC after the regime falls? You cannot integrate them into the regular army for many reasons, including that Iran cannot afford to have such a large security force after the regime is ousted. You have to push them back into the regular society that hates them.
Claire: Exactly. They’re going to be torn limb from limb.
Shay: Yeah. Yep. So there’s no good answer for that. There really isn’t. So, I can b******t you here, but I don’t have a good answer. I will say this though. My friend and colleague Michael Rubin has a very interesting idea, which is [that] there are going to be, possibly, parts of Iran that are going to fall out of the regime’s control and into the opposition’s hands. And every one of the regime’s senior leaders has children living in the United States, North America, and Europe. The Supreme leader’s most trusted advisor—one of the most trusted advisors—his daughter is teaching at, I think nursing school. I think nursing school at Emery University. It is amazing that for people who hate America so much, the children are all here. You know … love deportation. I dunno, Abadan in southern Iran or Rasht in northern Iran is liberated and “Hey Mr. Larijani, do you wanna give up power or do you want me to deport your daughter to … ”
Claire: Is his daughter a citizen?
Shay: I don’t believe so. You know, like, “We have your children here, we can deport them.” But anyway, you can actually technically revoke citizenship if they have lied on their papers. And I believe that—don’t quote me on this—but I don’t think that you actually could become a citizen if you’re you’re Larijani’s daughter, because you have to disclose your family members. And if you have a problematic family member, you cannot become a citizen.
Claire: How many IRGC people are we talking about who need to somehow be safely defused?
Shay: When you say “safely defuse,” you’re talking about the rank and file, right?
Claire: Yeah.
Shay: About 150,000 people.
Claire: That is a hell of a lot.
Shay: That is a hell of a lot. That is a hell of a lot. Listen, it’s important to point something out. A lot of people in the IRGC are not ideological monsters who joined because they wanted to kill Jews and Americans and Iranians. There’s a guy I knew growing up, the son of the lady who would clean, the housemaid, never finished high school, always troublemaking and never really had a job. My mom once asks his mother, “How’s your son doing?”
And she says, “Oh, he joined the IRGC.”
“What—what, what you talking about? You mean, like IRGC monsters, etcetera?”
She says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, they’re monsters. He knows that. He hates them, but who else would give him a job?” A lot of people like that.
Claire: I don’t think the public is going to be particularly concerned about these niceties.
Shay: No, I think, actually, that they would be understanding because they are living through it themselves. And when it’s 150,000, everybody knows someone who was at the IRGC. On top of which, Iran has mandatory conscription. So most Iranian men have been around IRGC. Understand this—that most people in the IRGC, I’m not saying they’re tremendous people, but are not monsters. I actually think that most people understand this. That, I’m not worried about.
Claire: But enough of them are, and enough of them have very significant motivation to not want to give up their sources of funding, that I don’t think we can expect them to go quietly.
Shay: No. They’re not gonna go—we’re seeing they’re not going quietly. Senior ranks is not really my worry. You can either convince them to go quietly, or force them out of power and then tear them apart limb by limb. And I would like to fly to Iran to kill a few of them myself.
The issue is the rank-and-file. Society would accept them. That’s not the problem. The problem is they are not gonna have an easy time finding jobs, and they cannot stay in the armed forces because Iran is not going to need to have such a large armed force. And military-trained men, unemployed, are a very dangerous thing. So that is my bigger worry.
Claire: Perhaps we can teach them to code.
Shay: So actually, that is another thing. IRGC has a huge engineering arm and spent decades on ballistic missiles, right? And there is a potential for certain industries in Iran to be kickstarted thanks to the engineering science that these people have.
Claire: There’s also a potential for them to take that knowledge to other places.
Shay: Well, [even] more important to keep them in Iran and find them employment. The problem is that then you have former IRGC personnel working in the aerospace industry, making a lot of money. So you are back to square one, the oppressors become the richest people in Iran and the tycoons of industry. I mean, that’s what happened in Russia.
Claire: That’s one of the less bad options compared to some.
Shay: Yes, but it still poses a threat. Which brings me back to: It’s best for Iran to have a monarchy after the regime falls, because this country has nothing to run itself. Nothing. It is incredibly diverse ethnically. It is polarized. It has no civil society, and no religion. Iranians have lost their moral base after 47 years of the Islamic Republic, and they don’t have religion to find it through. There’s nothing to keep the country together. It needs to be someone. I’m not talking about an absolute monarch, I’m talking about a constitutional monarch. Maybe come the day that Iran could become a republic, but it doesn’t have the conditions right now. And it is also important to consider that Iran has never been a republic. Even today it’s a monarchy. Khamenei is a monarch. Instead of a crown, he wears an ugly turban, but he’s a monarch. It’s not an Islamic Republic. It’s a Shi’ite Caliphate.
Claire: Right. Do you have faith in Pahlavi’s capabilities? He’s reputed to be a bit dimwitted.
Shay: No. Yes. It’s better than having someone who’s extra-capable of becoming an absolutist, right?
Claire: Yeah,
Shay: Yeah. As my friend [I can’t make out his name, sorry] says, if you must have a monarch, could you think of a less dangerous one?
Claire: I have a few questions about how to interpret items I’ve seen in the news recently. The regime is claiming that sharpshooters killed security forces. Is that credible? And if so, how do you understand that?
Shay: It’s possible. I would not be surprised if Mossad agents are shooting people or distributing rifles.
Claire: Or if the regime has themselves done it in order to give them motivation to kill the protestors ?
Shay: My dad was fond of saying about the regime, he would say, “They asked some guy, do snakes [hatch] eggs or give birth,” and the guy responds, “You cannot put anything past that b*****d.” It’s the Islamic Republic. Anything is possible. Some of these clerics are hanging judges who infamously hanged their own sons.
Claire: Yeah. Our writer Robert Zubrin suggested airlifting and dropping a ton of small arms for the protestors to use. What do you think?
Shay: That’s very dangerous, because you’re making keeping the country together extremely difficult after the regime falls. Overthrowing the regime is not difficult. Keeping the country together after is extremely difficult. I’m much more worried about that. If you put me in charge of the US government, the regime is gone within five days, without boots on the ground. But I cannot promise you that the outcome would not be a civil war or anarchy.
Claire: Well, if you’re in charge of the US government, what would you do?
Shay: Well, I told you. Kill a bunch of people, disrupt their command and communications center. Meet with Reza Pahlavi, say that when the regime is gone, he’s going to be the interim leader of Iran until there’s a constitutional convention and there’s a referendum on the constitution. And yeah, that’s what I would do. And force Khamenei to give up power,
Claire: Assume a competent US government that’s capable of genuinely mustering as they call it, a whole-of-government response. What else would you do? For example, to try and get the economy up and running.
Shay: So we’re resurrecting George H.W. Bush.
Claire: The much lamented.
Shay: Yeah, I know. the whole-of-government approach, I hate the term, because you’re never going to have whole-of-government approach. Even George HW Bush couldn’t really have that whole-of-government approach. Just see how much Cheney and Jim Baker and scope Scowcroft were fighting each other. And by the way, our Constitution is designed to prevent a whole-of-government approach, so we don’t have tyranny in America.
But let’s say that you could have the best-case scenario. Let me actually go back. More important than whole-of-government approach is bilateral with Israel, especially through the Mossad. If I could do everything overtly myself, I’d call Netanyahu and say, “Hey, can I borrow Mossad instead of my own CIA for a few days?” That’d be good.
We need to have very good coordination with Israelis on covert ops. For one, we don’t have any agents in Iran. I’m sure you’re familiar with the famous quote, I think it’s in Bob Woodward’s book about spies we had in Iraq on the eve of the invasion. And it says, “We can count them on one hand and still give someone the finger.” That’s the same with Iran. I don’t think we have even four. We have to rely a lot on the Mossad.
We need to be working with our allies and partners—who have good reasons not to want to work with us right now. To not just isolate Iran, but permanently isolate it. For Europeans to say, “No matter the outcome of this, we’re never going to touch Iran again.” You need to—
Claire: Well, hold on a second. At some point , if you get rid of the regime, the economy needs to be restored.
Shay: Well, yeah, yeah, Yeah. By “no matter the outcome,” I mean, “if the regime survives.” That’s what I meant. Good catch. You need to say that the regime is beyond the pale for us. We’re never touching the regime again.
You need to block Qatar’s number, and really Saudi Arabia, because MBS seems to be switching jerseys nowadays.
Claire: Not necessarily in the direction of more cooperation with Iran, though.
Shay: Yeah, he is.
Claire: You think?
Shay: Yeah.
Claire: I mean, something’s going on in Saudi, but I don’t quite know what it is. It’s actually what you would expect if he’s beginning to worry about precisely the scenario you sketched out—of a conservative revolution.
Shay: That, and also he’s got a much freer hand in foreign policy because cooperation with Israel was a necessity, and without Iran’s nuclear program, why do you need Israel anymore?
Claire: I imagine he would want to cooperate to make sure Iran stays down.
Shay: Stays down, but not necessarily gone, on the one hand, but also, keeping Iran down is not the [same] urgency of the nuclear program. It just is not, and Israel was there to fix the nuclear program.
Another thing, by the way, [that] Europeans and Americans and Canadians need to do is kick out their children. They should not even be there. It’s insanity that they were there already. It’s even more insane that after the scandals of Londongrad, and post-Ukraine invasion, they’re still there. Have you learned nothing.
Claire: No, they haven’t.
Shay: No, they haven’t. And you know, you go and just look at the diaspora women—they show up with complete hijab, black cloak, everything, in certain events in Iran, Qatar, elsewhere, to defend the regime. Same woman—with sleeveless shirt, sleeveless top, in London, promoting human rights of Palestinians.
Claire: Yeah, I know.
Shay: Completely uncovered. And she’s a London resident. That’s just one example.
Claire: Right.
Shay: And there this propaganda in Iran, they call them [Saderat-e—sp?] It means exported. The regime exports these people to advance this interest. And they’re walking around in these countries. Revoke their visas. Send them back.
Claire: A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Shay: But this is something that if I’m the US government, I would be emphasizing in my multilateral meetings with the Europeans and Canadians
Claire: Well, the US government right now has never had less influence on its former allies.
Shay: Claire, I one hundred percent agree with that, and our approach to Europeans is insane, and really counterproductive. But also Abe Greenwald from Commentary always says, “Trump always has the right idea. He just goes way too far.” It’s completely reasonable for the US government to go to the Europeans and say, “You guys are being insane.”
Claire: I agree.
Shay: How they’re doing it also completely insane. However, forget about the US government. If you are going to the Europeans and saying, “Kick out these people. Isolate Iran,” it’s not like we’re asking them for a favor. We’re telling them, “Isolate a country that’s arming Ukraine, has terror cells in your countries, is violating human rights, which you allegedly stand up for.” Like, give me the pro-Iran case from European point of view.
Claire: Well, I keep saying this—don’t think of Europe as a single entity. You have to look at it country by country. And usually, it’s the judicial system—the judiciary is independent in most European countries—which is the obstacle. In Britain, the judiciary is consistently an obstacle to throwing these people out
Shay: Well, first of all, the court is usually an obstacle to deporting refugees and migrants. That’s an issue I understand. Economic isolation, that’s not difficult. The court was not an obstacle kicking out Russians. So if you want to do it, you can do it.
Claire: Yeah. There are still Russians running around all over Europe, though.
And obviously, since Iran and Russia are allies, it makes sense to keep the pressure on Russia. It’s sickening to me to see these reports that—surely on Russia’s advice—the Iranians have been summoning Witkoff to tell him they want to negotiate. Which is their way of buying time.
Shay: So this is a huge problem. We still have not figured out what to do with WhatsApp in our diplomatic corps. Because, once upon time, if you wanted to reach out to a diplomat, you had to send an official cable. Now you can just WhatsApp a message. And Witkoff and Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, have each others’ WhatsApp numbers, and we haven’t figured out what to do.
Claire: It’s very easy. Say don’t do that.
Shay: Claire, you can say don’t do that. But how are you going to—
Claire: Get Witkoff out of foreign policy entirely.
Shay: Claire, I hundred percent agree with you, right? However. If you have—forget about Marco Rubio, let’s say you have Secretary of State “John Allison.” I’m coming up with it randomly. And if the Secretary of State wants to WhatsApp with his counterpart, there’s no way to verify. If you say don’t do it, and he does it, how do you find out? You have to rely on media reports, if they can even do that. So it is very difficult to actually implement that. But also, they’re doing it. They’re doing it and the president doesn’t seem to mind
Claire: They [Iranian regime officials] know, surely, from watching what’s happened with Russia—and from hearing it directly from the Russians—that if you dangle the prospect of a deal in front of Trump, he finds it irresistible.
Shay: So far Trump seems to have resisted it.
Claire: Well, not really. I mean, first he said, “We’re going to see if there’s a deal possible.”
Shay: So, he said that he has already written off any diplomatic negotiation. For now, at least. He said, “Oh, I canceled all of them.” There’s that. By the way, keep in mind the Omani foreign minister was in Iran two or three days ago, it is obvious that he was carrying a message from the United States.
So—oh, you asked me about Russia. Witkoff going to Russia and trying to negotiate with the United States. A friend pointed out something very interesting. He said, “Look at how Trump is messaging about Venezuela and Iran. Venezuela, every time Trump talks, it is “drugs and oil.” With Iran, it is “freedom.” From the Venezuela point of view, it’s depressingly the opposite. Donald Trump talking about freedom—that is very uncommon, let’s say.
Claire: Yeah.
Shay: He’s talked about—there’s a few times, not many times—but he’s talked about it a few times, he’s known Persians in the United States. He had a friend who was a businessman in Iran before the Revolution, and how much that guy likes Iran. I do think that he genuinely has a positive impression of Iranians as educated and successful people, who actually deserve to have a civilized country, that he doesn’t have about Latin Americans. And it is very depressing: I care about Venezuelans. I have a lot of Venezuelan friends. So I’m not saying it in a giddy way at all. But he seems to have that impression of Iranians, one. Two, I think that we have the benefit of Israeli influence on him. And three, Republicans. The only time I ever saw Republicans publicly and privately massively pressuring Trump was when he was negotiating with them in the spring, or trying to negotiate with them. He was negotiating on the nuclear program. Iran is such a red line for Republicans that I have not seen anything else [like it], for variety of reasons, but it is what it is. At the end of the day, the influence that congressional Republicans and Israeli have on him, as well as his own views are going to bail us out on this one. And, remains to be seen, but so far everything he’s said and done, I do not object to, right?
Claire: Zelensky just made a statement saying a regime that has lasted so many years and killed so many people does not deserve to exist.
Shay: Is he talking about the Islamic Republic or—
Claire: Yeah. About the Islamic Republic,
Shay: Or would go either way?
Claire: He says right after that, “Changes are also needed in Europe. The bloodshed that Russia started and is the only one still prolonging must come to an end.”
Shay: Yeah, of course. I’m surprised how long it took for Zelensky to say something. If there’s one regime, other than, Russia, that Zelensky wants to fall, it’s Iran, to win the war. So where are you, Dude? This is your fight.
By the way, the four groups that are constantly talking about Iran: Americans, Jews—Israeli and diaspora—Iranian diaspora, obviously, and Afghans. And the silent crowd is the free-Palestine crowd.
Claire: Mmm. Well, worse than silent. Some of them are calling for the protestors to be liquidated.
Is the internet coming back on? Because there are about 50,000 Starlink dishes inside Iran, right? But the regime is jamming the GPS signals.
Shay: Actually, I have a point about Starlink . But to answer your question, they are jamming GPS signals. They’re also confiscating a lot of Starlink terminals and, this is my suspicion: A lot of Starlink illicit business in Iran is run by the IRGC. Not all, a lot.
Claire: Mm-hmm.
Shay: So the ones they’re confiscating are the ones they sold to people.
Claire: Right. So they know where they are.
Shay: Who has it. Yeah.
Claire: So what about direct-to-cell satellite?
Shay: Now, that’s my point.
Claire: Mm-hmm.
Shay: Just to explain how stupid our government is: direct-to-cell requires your carrier to be compatible with Starlink. This is not a hardware issue. It’s not even a software issue really. It’s just a government regulation. When, for instance, when Hurricane Helene happened, a year and a half ago, the FCC issued a waiver. Anybody with a compatible phone could have direct-to-cell compatible, meaning if the phone had the satellite receiver, regardless of your carrier, you could have access. 15 percent of Iranian cellphone users have compatible phones. If we issue this waiver right now, within hours, 15 percent of Iranians will have internet access. And on top of that, the direct-to-cell does not work with GPS.
Claire: Why the hell aren’t we doing this?
Shay: Well, you tell me.
Claire: I mean, that’s just unforgivable.
Shay: A big part of it is the Iranian diaspora’s own fault, because they’ve been focusing on airlifting Starlink equipment.
Claire: Yeah, but why is it the Iranian diaspora’s fault? The Pentagon should be aware of our tech.
Shay: Well, we are where we are, and how politics nowadays work, at least currently, is you have to tell the White House what to do and give them ideas. And what the Iranians have been telling the White House has been, “We need equipment.” Why? Because they didn’t know that this regulation could be waived. They had no idea about this. I actually have the responsibility for convincing the diaspora that “Guys, this is the thing you can do,” and from three days ago, the messaging finally changed. So we’ll see if we can get something done.
But yeah, the answer is our government is stupid, and the diaspora is stupid. That’s really the answer I have for you. I am talking to someone later today, so I cannot give you details about this, however, if plausible, depending on the targets, jamming centers are another good target to hit, right? If militarily possible.
Claire: Right. So you haven’t been in touch with your mother at all?
Shay: No.
Claire: Are you worried about her?
Shay: No. If there’s one thing I know about my mom, it’s that she knows how to survive, and not avoid trouble, but to survive trouble. She’s really good at that. I got my dad’s brain and my mom’s gut. In 2009, I was doing things I never thought I was capable of. And I know that’s exactly how my mom operates, so—not really.
Claire: Okay. It must be taking a toll on you to see this though,
Shay: So, it’s not. Because in the past, it took a much worse toll on me, for two reasons. One, I had no hope that it would get anywhere, on the one hand. On the other hand, I knew nobody was going to do anything. This time is the opposite. The suffering is much worse, but this is the first time that there’s hope that something might come out of it, on the one hand, and on the other, there seems to be help on the way. I’m quite optimistic the administration is going to do something.
So the toll that it took, in the past, was that it was all in vain. It doesn’t look like it’s in vain this time, so it’s not taking at toll now. It might not go anywhere and we’ll be disappointed. Really. Or I will be. But this time is actually weirdly cheerful. And I don’t—it’s important—I don’t want to sound like I’m sitting in my comfortable chair in Scottsdale, Arizona where the weather is very nice and saying that, “Oh, people are suffering, but it’s for the best.”
I have an essay coming out soon, about my experience in 2009.
Claire: Mm-hmm.
Shay: I was one of the very few people who was as radical as people you are seeing today. With a bunch of other guys. We actually killed A Basij member, on the street, who was shooting at us, hoping there would be more people as radical as we were. But there were not. So it failed, the 2009 movements.
But my point is that I was being shot at. I was fighting armed guards with bare hands.
Claire: Mm-hmm.
Shay: Literally wrestling them. One of them, at least. I’m not saying this as someone who’s never done anything, and I’m not saying, “Go free your country and die.” I have done that. I don’t want to come off as coldhearted, who’s saying, “Okay, others can die for my cause.” But yeah, it is hopeful, for once.
12 to 20,000 people might have died. 12,000 is twice as many Americans were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan over 20 years combined. It is a huge price. It’s a price that I always knew had to be paid. I never thought the regime was going to go down smoothly. I had been prepared for what’s going on.
In fact, I am prepared for much worse. I’ve been predicting a civil war. This is much less than my greatest fear.
Claire: Alright. Will you please send me the articles you’ve written? I’ll post them with it?
Shay: Yes, of course. Well, there are too many. If people are interested, it’s much easier, just go on my byline page at the Middle East Forum. There are like 10 articles I’ve written.
Claire: Oh, I didn’t realize that. Okay. I kept checking on your Substack looking for articles.
Shay: Oh no. I have been blogging for Middle East forum. That’s why you haven’t seen it.
Claire: Okay. If I’d known I would’ve publicized them. Alright, is there anything else you feel people ought to understand?
Shay: Yes. The IRGC—and not just the IRGC, the entire Islamic Republic state structure—is factionalized. If you go and read a book—you can translate it to Book of Politics or Story of Politics, or Letter about Politics, whatever, by Niẓām al-Mulk, a thousand years ago, he wrote this—Iranian political thinker who advises that everything, there should be two of it in the state, so you would protect yourself, as the king, against coups. Iran has two militaries, two intelligence services, two law enforcement—Basij and cops, police—within them. Again, everything is divided into two different subbranches. That’s a way to prevent coups.
That’s the way, in 1979, the regular military, which still exists, announced that “top general and admirals met and said we’re surrendering to Khomenei,” and they were like, “Okay, we’re surrendering, revolution succeeded”—there’s no such mechanism today. You cannot just surrender, meaning five, 10 guys meeting and saying, “we’re surrendering. Okay. We’re surrendering, game over.” That apparatus does not exist. It is so factionalized.
And most of these guys, even if they have a lower rank than the official structure, if you’re close to Khamenei, you actually have more power. Which is to say there’s no easy mechanism, other than Khamenei himself to transfer power, for revolution to succeed. But it prevents revolutions. It prevents coups. What it makes very likely, such a factionalized structure, is civil war, because then they can turn against each other. If the current state continues, and by “current state continues,” I don’t mean for the next six months, necessarily. Since 2017, every protest has been larger and bloodier, every single one of them, and more violent. If this goes away, it’s gonna come back in two or three years. When it comes back, how long before some of these commanders say, “You know what? I cannot change the regime on my own. What I can do is open the base, and tell people to come and grab guns and go shoot, right?” Or some major part of the military goes against the rest of the military—the conventional civil war, instead of an armed insurgency. How long before this happens?
Claire: What’s the disposition of the army now ?
Shay: The army is an irrelevant political player, has always been, but it’s always been more loyal to the regime than the IRGC because they’re always—
Claire: More loyal?
Shay: More loyal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they’re aware of the suspicion against them, that they’re not really loyal, and all their commanders are IRGC, actually. The IRGC commanders moved to the regular army, so they’re not trustworthy, not reliable at all. At all.
Claire: Mm-hmm.
Shay: But yeah, it is a structure that begs for anarchy. It is kind of, not exactly, but kind of like the old European system of nobilities who had their own militias. Those systems led to war regularly. A lot of the quote-unquote “European” wars were civil wars within Germany, within the Holy Roman Empire, or in Britain. That is kind of the structure that we have in Iran.
Claire: Oy.
On that note, we’ll draw it to a close. Thanks very much. I really feel I understand the situation better. I’m just horrified by the bloodletting. Just horrified. And I hope we intervene.
Shay: Thanks. I do too.
Claire: All right. Thank you, Shay. Of course. Take care.
Shay: You too.
Claire: Bye-Bye.
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