The view from inside Iran

0:01WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

0:05Mark Montgomery:Of course they see it as an opportunity, one that they haven't ever had. But on the other hand, they also think it's very risky. What if Donald Trump cuts a deal with the regime? Then what?

0:18Ali Safari:Kurdish forces in Iraq are reportedly planning for a possible incursion into Iran. Could they be a lever for regime change in Tehran? or agents of chaos? Or will they just be left out to dry?

0:41Ali Safari:It's Thursday, March 5th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WVUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:50Ali Safari:Today on the show, a retired Navy admiral says the U.S. attacked Iran without a clear plan for what happens next politically.

0:58Mark Montgomery:We're going to have to turn to an existing, probably IRGC leader, one we haven't killed, to temporarily and potentially permanently lead the country going forward.

1:11Ali Safari:Also, we'll get a rare view from Tehran.

1:15Amberin Zaman:Who are you to change our regime? How can you consider for yourself that you have this authority to go and decide for the other nations?

1:26Ali Safari:Life inside Iran, under bombardment by the U.S. and Israel, coming up in about 15 minutes. But first, on day six of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran, most of the strikes are coming from the air. Bombs, missiles, drones. But there's growing speculation about what could happen on the ground, specifically along Iran's northwestern border, where Kurdish fighters have long opposed the Iranian government. The Kurds are a stateless ethnic group of mostly Sunni Muslims who live in a mountainous region they call Kurdistan, which spans parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. Some Kurdish groups based in Iraq are reportedly preparing units that could cross into Iran, and observers wonder if President Trump might see the Kurds as a tool for regime change in Iran.

2:16Ali Safari:The White House is pushing back on that idea. Here's Press Secretary Caroline Levitt.

2:20Mark Montgomery:The president has held many calls with partners, allies, and leaders in the region, in the Middle East. He did speak to Kurdish leaders with respect to our base that we have in northern Iraq. But as for any report suggesting that the president has agreed to any such plan is completely false and should not be written.

2:41Ali Safari:But Kurdish leaders and regional officials reportedly say the preparations are real. So says Ambarin Zaman, she's chief correspondent for Al Monitor, an American news site focused on the Middle East. And she told Indira Lakshmanan that groups along the Iran-Iraq border are discussing whether to move in to Iran.

3:01Mark Montgomery:Well, what they're preparing for specifically is to be able to move in once they're confident that the regime is sufficiently weakened in those Kurdish provinces so that they can basically take charge. And as you know, the Israelis and the Americans have been bombing those areas very heavily, targeting Iranian security forces, and so basically prepping the ground for these forces to move in. So if Kurdish forces did open a front in western Iran, how big of a threat could they possibly be to Iran's much bigger and better funded Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? Well, that's an excellent question.

3:44Mark Montgomery:And obviously, in advance of any such move, they would need to be assured that the IRGC, the Basij, and other Iranian security forces are sufficiently weakened in those areas so that they can become effective. Now, the real threat really is that if other ethnic groups inside Iran, notably the Balogs and the Azeris. Two other ethnic groups you're referring to. That's correct, yes. If they are inspired then to rise up as well, because Iran has a huge problem, especially with the Balogs, who live along the frontier with Pakistan. But this is all, you know, very speculative for now, because many of these groups that are in this Kurdish alliance have not seen combat for decades.

4:38Mark Montgomery:They've been basically living in camps well away from the Iranian border, have very little presence inside Iran. Amberin, the U.S., as you note, has partnered with Kurdish forces before, memorably during the Iraq war, and those alliances haven't always lasted. Do the Kurdish leaders fear that the U.S. would leave them high and dry, not actually stand by them if things escalate or go south? Totally, because there is a long history of the U.S. encouraging the Kurds to rise up, only to let them down. We saw this play out in 1991 when George Bush asked them to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then did nothing for them when they did.

5:21Mark Montgomery:And we saw Saddam Hussein kill them by the thousands. More recently, we saw something similar play out in Syria, if not quite on that scale, where the U.S. pivoted towards Damascus and watched the Syrian army attack the Kurds and not intervene to stop that from happening. You're talking directly to Kurdish leaders now. Do they see this moment as a genuine an opening for them and their ambitions? Or are they concerned this is a risk that could backfire if the current Iranian regime survives? Well, they feel very split on this issue. On the one hand, of course, they see it as an opportunity, one that they haven't ever had.

6:08Mark Montgomery:So why not give it a try, given what's going on inside Iran? But on the other hand, they also think it's very risky. What if Donald Trump cuts a deal with the regime, then what? Ambrin Zaman is chief correspondent for Almonitor, a U.S.-based Middle Eastern news website. Ambrin, thank you so much for your time. Not at all.

6:33Ali Safari:Let's take a short break now, and then Robin Young will pick up the conversation about Kurds and lots more on the war with a retired Navy admiral. That's after the break.

6:54Ali Safari:Let's bring in retired Admiral Mark Montgomery with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, whose leadership has advocated for regime change in Iran. Admiral Montgomery, served in the Navy for decades, does support this war with concerns. But Admiral, first your thoughts on this idea that the CIA might arm Kurds to foment a popular uprising in Iran.

7:15Mark Montgomery:Yeah, I'm not happy with this. I would have hoped that a precursor for starting this conflict would have been that we had an idea of who we would arm ahead of time. The only time I've ever seen air-enabled campaigns work in Libya in 2011 and Kosovo in 1999, both of which I participated in, we had armed insurgencies going on the ground. And therefore, the air campaign worked. The idea that we're now going to turn to the Kurds, a group that I think would be viewed very poorly by the Iranian public. I mean, if you want the Iranian public to like the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, arm the Kurds and bring them against them.

7:55Ali Safari:Well, and again, we should say White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said that talk of the CIA funding the Kurds was completely false. But to something that you just said, you would have thought this would have been planned out beforehand. Do you get the sense that this may not have been tabletopped, as they call it?

8:14Mark Montgomery:So I would break it up into the political part and the military part. The military part clearly was well organized, planned, and is now being executed pretty well. And by that, I mean the kind of lines of effort where you destroy the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and their facilities. You suppress enemy air defense. You destroy their maritime capabilities. You destroy, probably most importantly, their ballistic missile capabilities, facilities and future production and their drone capabilities, facilities and future production. So that part, I think, is organized right. What you're asking is the political end of this of what's the strategic endgame here?

8:53Mark Montgomery:Clearly not mapped out in an effective way. And that's why the president, the secretary of state and secretary of defense have given five or six different reasons for why we're doing this and end outcomes that they expect from it.

9:05Ali Safari:What about the sense that there can be a popular uprising fomented? In the very first moments of this, President Trump also said to the Iranian people, it's your government. Go take it. Now, we're hearing from analysts, Kareem Sajjadpour, for instance, is one who says in the beginning of this regime, you know, 47 years ago, you might have had 20 percent of the Iranian population opposed, 80 percent supporting the regime that came in. Now it's more like 80 % against the regime, 20 supporting. But still, we saw an uprising attempted and thousands of people were killed. So is that also kind of a false assumption or what do you think?

9:54Mark Montgomery:So I think the 80-20 is probably correct. The problem is the 20 % have all the weapons. And we saw that, you know, anywhere, depending who you believe, three to 30 ,000 protesters were killed. that'll have a dampening effect on future protests if they don't have weapons, if they don't have a believable path to victory, which you don't have when you have 125 ,000 highly organized IRGC, of whom I think anywhere from 25 ,000 to 50 ,000 are true believers, you know, that are going to fight to the bitter end. You need to have an armed adversary on the ground, but it needs to be someone that people can embrace.

10:31Mark Montgomery:And again, getting back to the Kurds, not the Kurds.

10:33Ali Safari:But also, who leads? We spoke to an Iranian in Tehran, but I'm hearing this elsewhere, too, that there's a deep concern that the U.S. will do what it's done in the past in Iran and in the more recent history in other countries, handpick somebody to put in to lead a country that has not worked historically.

10:55Mark Montgomery:I mean, certainly we're getting to the point where we're going to militarily achieve, you know, through air power, significant damage to all those lines of effort I said. And the problem is at the end of that, without having solved – the military is very good at this, you know, planning and executing a war plan. Our military is world class. The problem is the political leadership did not have a similar effort in how you solve this, how you resolve this politically. And as a result, we're going to be left with that military solution, which means exactly what you said. We're going to have to turn to an existing probably IRGC leader, one we haven't killed, to temporarily and potentially permanently lead the country going forward.

11:41Mark Montgomery:I hope, you know, it sounds like we've been listening to their conversations for several years. Maybe we've detected some senior IRGC people who privately have had misgivings about the IRGC. Maybe those are the ones we approach. I'm not sure. But we better do something so that at the four or five week point, we're able to end the air campaign because there are no more targets at that point, realistically. I'd say one other thing, though, and the president hasn't said this enough. The IRGC killed a thousand American soldiers in Iraq.

12:10Ali Safari:These are in different bases.

12:11Mark Montgomery:We've documented this. These are people that we should hold accountable. I'm not opposed to the military part of this. I am disappointed that with all the time, we drove the timing of this. We in Israel drove the timing of this. Yet we did not have the appropriate level of political solution ready to go.

12:31Ali Safari:I just have to ask you, you tell us you just got back from weeks in Ukraine. How critical a situation is there in Ukraine right now?

12:39Mark Montgomery:Well, Liz, they're not going to lose this war, but the ballistic missile attacks by Russia every day, which equal what we're seeing in the Middle East on the few days here, they get every day, and many of them are hitting because they're short. Patriot, a missile called AMRAAM, and other air defense systems. And what happens is it hits critical infrastructure and private residential areas, killing Ukrainian citizens.

13:06Ali Safari:It's off the radar.

13:07Mark Montgomery:It is.

13:09Ali Safari:Retired Admiral Mark Montgomery with the Nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a research institute. Admiral Mark, thank you so much. Thank you very much. To that point of Iran's political future, mentioned earlier, and the apparent lack of an American plan for it, President Trump told Politico today that he expects to play a big role in choosing Iran's future leadership. Quote, We'll work with the people and the regime to make sure that somebody gets there that can nicely build Iran, but without nuclear weapons. End quote. Well, Robin mentioned hearing from an Iranian. After the break, we'll listen to that conversation about what it's like to live in Tehran during wartime.

13:50Ali Safari:Stick around.

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14:33Ali Safari:Last year, after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in June, we reached Ali Safaree at his home in Tehran. He's a former news editor, a doctoral student in international relations. Here's what he told us last year when we asked him what he was most concerned about back then.

14:51Amberin Zaman:Well, I cannot guarantee that I'm going to be alive to see what is going to be the future of Iran and my country. But what I can say, I'm really afraid of a regional war because the war, the military is not options. If you want to engage in diplomacy, you have to continue the diplomatic way.