What does the U.S. want from war with Iran?

0:00Shirin Nariman:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

0:18Jim Walsh:WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

0:21Mark Hertling:To be clear, this was a war of choice, not necessity. Iran had not issued a threat to the United States. We just decided this was a good time to whack them again.

0:32Jim Walsh:The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran is expanding with counterattacks by Iran against American bases and allies across the Middle East.

0:52Jim Walsh:It's Monday, March 2nd, and this is Here and Now, Anytime from NPR and WVUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

1:01Jim Walsh:The U.S. and Israel have started a war with Iran that has already expanded into several countries in the region and killed hundreds of people, including civilians. We'll get a few perspectives on today's show from a retired American lieutenant general who worries about the apparent lack of a plan or even objectives with this war. Those extremists will come to the forefront who will argue that the nation is under siege and under greater threat. So it remains to be seen what's going to happen. and from an Iranian-American and former political prisoner who's been calling for regime change for years.

1:34Shirin Nariman:We never ask for boots on the ground. This is something that Iranian people have to do.

1:40Jim Walsh:But first, this is the second time in less than a year that the United States and Israel have attacked Iran. Well, the last war lasted only 12 days. President Trump says this one could last weeks. At the Pentagon this morning, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Cain offered no timeline.

2:00Mark Hertling:This is not a single overnight operation. The military objectives at CENTCOM and the Joint Force have been tasked with will take some time to achieve,

2:09Jim Walsh:and in some cases will be difficult and gritty work. Even the president's timeline of several weeks could be a vast underestimate, says herein-now security analyst Jim Walsh. He's with MIT's security studies program. He spoke to Indira Lakshmanan.

2:25Mark Hertling:Well, when you think back to the attack in June, which was much more limited and narrow in scope, that went on for 12 days. And the point there was to try to hit some nuclear facilities. You're talking about regime change. It's going to take quite a while. Now, remember, we use the word regime change. But if you're on the other end of that stick, that's regime survival. Most countries fight very hard not to be destroyed and to survive. And if you're not going to put people on the ground, all you're going to do is bomb from the skies above, this is going to be a very difficult mission. Well, Jim, let's try to parse those U.S.

3:03Mark Hertling:goals because the president this weekend indeed said he was attacking the Islamic regime and that it would be up to the Iranian people to seize the moment and build a new government for themselves. He said, I made you a promise. I've kept that promise. Now it's up to you. This is your one chance to build a new government. That sounds like regime change. But just today, Secretary Hegseth said this isn't a regime change war. And the president has just said at the White House that he ordered the attack to thwart Tehran's nuclear and ballistic missile program. So is this or isn't this a regime change war?

3:37Mark Hertling:Well, I got to say off the top that it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that after day three, they're changing their story, right? This was supposed to be a week in change. Now it's four to five weeks, maybe much longer. It was originally regime change, regime change, regime change. Now they're backing off. Well, it's a little hard to back off after you kill the leader of the country. You say it's regime change, and Israel is constantly calling it regime change. So it doesn't matter what Hexbeth says at a podium. What matters is what the Iranians believe, and they believe it's about regime survival.

4:10Mark Hertling:President Trump today said he wouldn't rule out U.S. boots on the ground in an interview he did with the New York Post. He also told CNN's Jake Tapper that a big wave is yet to come, that we haven't seen anything yet. We know that Americans don't want U.S. troops overseas, especially after the long, deadly entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Has the president made a case to the U.S. public for putting boots on the ground? He hasn't made a case for the war at all. There's been no case. There's been nothing laid out as there was in previous occasions describing the state of Iran's program. He had previously said it was obliterated.

4:47Mark Hertling:We know they haven't restarted the sensitive facility. So how is it that it is a suddenly overnight a threat? And again, the U.S. intelligence community has said for decades and up until this moment that Iran is not actively engaged in a working nuclear weapons program. It has nuclear assets. It has enriched material. But it does not have an active nuclear weapons program. Now, it certainly has ballistic missiles, but that's their defense. Like no country is going to say, oh, I'm going to go defenseless so Israel can attack me anytime it wants to. And to be clear, this was a war of choice, not necessity.

5:25Mark Hertling:Iran had not issued a threat to the United States. We just decided this was a good time to whack them again six months after having already done it once. So we know that an Israeli strike killed Iran's supreme leader on Saturday. Now with Ayatollah Khamenei, who was in power for 36 years dead, what happens in Iran now? Well, in theory, what you would have is the Assembly of Experts, which is a governmental body made up of clerics, would meet and select a new leader. And that's the sort of thing that would happen if Khamenei had died of old age or something. But, you know, we're in the middle of a war now.

6:00Mark Hertling:You'll remember back in the June attack, only six months ago, seven months ago, that And Hominay, in anticipation of being killed, actually pre-designated three potential successors. And so I expect that it will move in that direction. I'm not sure they'd want to pull together a big group together of the assembly to select that now. I think it's probably happening behind the scenes. As you said, Jim, the president last summer said that he had totally obliterated Iran's nuclear program, which, as you've just said, kind of takes away the argument then that the purpose for this was to obliterate a program that's already been obliterated.

6:36Mark Hertling:But tell us, what does victory for the Trump administration look like in Iran? Well, that's the question, isn't it? Like, before you enter a war, you're supposed to figure out your objectives, the costs you're willing to pay, the objective you're trying to achieve, and how you would know if you reach that objective. Now, if your objective is regime change, that's one set of metrics. If it's obliterating a previously obliterated nuclear program, that's a different set of objectives. So it depends on what the president wants. But if it's regime change, it will be very difficult to achieve. So the president just said that his goals are to destroy missile capabilities, annihilate Iran's navy, ensure Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and ensure the regime can't arm and sponsor groups outside its borders in the few moments we have left Jim reaction.

7:26Mark Hertling:Yeah, well, the Navy part is hilarious, you know, if you can laugh about it, because Iran doesn't have a Navy. It was never a naval power. That's like, I don't even know what that's about. I think it's going to be very hard to achieve all those objectives, and I expect that tomorrow they will change and the day after that they will change, and we will hear a different story depending on how things go on the ground and in the air. Jim Walsh from MIT's Security Studies Program, Here and Now Analyst, thank you so much.

7:53Jim Walsh:Thank you.

7:57Jim Walsh:We'll get some more analysis of what the U.S. is even doing with this war and what might happen next after the break.

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8:55Jim Walsh:Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling served 38 years in the Army. He was Deputy Commander for U.S. Forces in Baghdad. In 2007 and 2008, he served as a division commander controlling northern Iraq, leading nearly 100 ,000 troops of American soldiers and Iraqi Army units. So far, the American and Israeli war in Iran has been in the form of airstrikes. Retired Lieutenant General Hurtling told Robin Young that air campaigns can destroy things, but what they can't do by themselves is build political outcomes. What we're seeing is terrific strikes, and external strikes alone rarely produce democratic changes.

9:37Jim Walsh:They sometimes even in countries, and unfortunately I have a great deal of scar tissue from Iraq on this, they sometimes strengthen hardliners. They create additional chaos, and they bring a lot of extremists on both sides to the forefront who will, in the case of Iran, because of their culture in the last 47 years since the revolution, have become somewhat rabid and have accused the U.S. and Israel of being the great Satan. So those extremists will come to the forefront who will argue that the nation is under siege and under greater threat. So it remains to be seen what's going to happen.

10:16Shirin Nariman:Well, you know, Iranian experts have been saying that there's far fewer of the supporters of this extreme ideology of the supreme leader than there were maybe 50 years ago of the first supreme leader now. But, you know, it sounds like you're saying what we have seen in recent wars, that it tips the balance when it is another country coming and embalming you into regime change. You might even bring out people who also disliked that regime.

10:45Jim Walsh:Well, and the mantra of it being regime change implies there's going to be a new regime. But right now, we don't know who that is or how it's going to take charge of a country. And when you continue to bomb the security forces, which, I mean, we can debate whether or not those are valid targets in terms of what we're trying to do. But if you continue to eliminate the security forces, if you've eliminated most of the leaders, if you've used cyber weapons to thwart the potential for communication between people who might be standing up a new regime, it's going to be much more difficult. So there is not going to be the cohesion that you would expect, or that we even saw in Iraq and Afghanistan where the regimes were replaced.

11:33Jim Walsh:Now, they weren't replaced very effectively in many cases, but at least there was a plan. Right now, I don't see a plan. There may be one. I just don't see it for replacing the leaders. You know, Secretary Hegseth said this morning that the regime has been replaced. I'm not sure that's true. I think we've decapitated the regime, but without a replacement that would lead the people into a new tomorrow.

11:58Shirin Nariman:Well, and this, again, this language sounds so familiar, decapitated the leadership. And we spoke, you know, 20 years ago about, oh, wait, this is a snake with many heads. You know, not just one. I mean, it's horrible. You know, the word decapitation is horrible. But you say there's a persistent belief in Washington that enough explosions will cause the Iranian people to rise up against their government. History suggests otherwise. Authoritarian regimes facing external attack often consolidate internal control even when their leaders are eliminated, which is kind of what you're saying. Could you comment more?

12:30Shirin Nariman:You talked about having some scar tissue, you know, from the last two wars, Iraq in particular. I've been thinking about this. I've been hearing over the weekend different people like General David Petraeus also has that scar tissue and others saying that they anticipate that in order for there to be the change that the U.S. seems to be looking for, there need to be at least 500 ,000 U.S. boots on the ground and it would take six months to train them. I've heard this several times. It reminds me of before going into the past wars, we heard from analysts like the great Anthony Cortesman, who said the same exact words, half a million, you know, 500 ,000 boots on the ground.

13:16Shirin Nariman:And people are like, no, that can't be. What is your sense if in fact, and nobody is saying that that's the direction we're going and everyone's saying there won't be boots on the ground. But do you agree that if there are, that's how many there would be needed?

13:33Jim Walsh:I would say even more than that. This is not an environment that replicates Iraq at all. You're talking about a country that's three times, three and a half times the size of Iraq, with about three times the number of people. There are 90 million citizens of different ethnic varieties. You have Kurds, you have the Shia, you have all sorts of extreme views in terms of the culture inside of Iran. It is a beautiful culture, no doubt about it, that has been oppressed and it has become an evil regime. But when you're talking about sending Americans in, the same Americans that for the last 40 years they've been calling the great Satan, you know, after they've bombed the country and probably killed a significant number of people, just like in Iraq.

14:20Jim Walsh:In Iraq, I mean, I was in the Pentagon as a war planner in 2002 when the plans to go into Iraq were being formulated. And there were a lot of the civilian leaders who said, hey, we sent too many forces to Desert Storm. And we had about 400 ,000 plus during Desert Storm in the 1990s. And Secretary Rumsfeld said, oh, no, we can do it with a quarter of that or a third of that. Well, he was somewhat contrary to what the military leaders were saying, that they needed much more. And he said, no, no, we can do it because we're such a great force and we've learned so much. Well, we found out that we didn't have the civil affairs forces.

15:03Jim Walsh:We didn't have the military police to quell revolts. We didn't have the trainers that we needed to retrain the Iraqi army. There was the establishment of de-Bathification, which created a real hole within the retired community of military leaders in Iraq and others. You would have that in spades in Iran, I think. So if people are predicting already how many boots we should have in the ground, that's off the top of the head. And it's not considering a great mission analysis in terms of what we need to put on the ground. And if I can just say one more thing. I sure the hell hope we don't do that.

15:43It would be an unbelievably tough environment against probably a determined population that probably does not want to see Americans on the ground there. Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling, thank you so much and thank you for your service.

15:59Jim Walsh:Thank you, Robin. Appreciate being with you.

16:10Jim Walsh:One more perspective for you on today's show. Coming up after the break, an Iranian-American shares her thoughts. Robin has that in just a minute.

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16:54Shirin Nariman:So what has it been like for members of the Iranian diaspora to watch this war unfold? Shirin Nariman became a human rights activist in the pro-democracy movement of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed royal dynasty of the Shah, but that imperial state was replaced by the current Islamic Republic and then-Supreme leader Khomeini. And Shirin was jailed two years later at the age of just 16 in a notorious prison where she saw and experienced severe torture. Shirin, we welcome you, and I guess just want to ask straight away, how are you doing today? Thank you for the opportunity. Well, I feel we are close.

17:36Shirin Nariman:We are much closer to end of regime, theocracy that has been ruling. You know, I have seen death. I have seen how my friends and family members and cellmates were taken for executions and they were executed. So, and if it wasn't for my belief of, and the promise that I made each of them that at each time that I said goodbye, they asked me not to forget and not to give up. And I stayed with those promises that I made. And if it wasn't for the support of this particular opposition that I have, you know, I support the National Council of Resistance, which is led by a woman, Maryam Rajavi, I would have given up maybe a long time ago.

18:25Shirin Nariman:But I always had a hope that this regime will be overthrown and Iranian people will be free. I just want to ask Sharon, because we just had a military analyst on, and as he writes, hope is not a method. And there's a lot of concern that while the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other senior officials in Tehran are dead, there's really not a lot of chance for regime change unless there are U.S. boots on the ground. You've said we have to fight. Who has to fight? Well, Iranian people, see, let me to be clear. We never ask for any foreign intervention and we never ask for boots on the ground.