What Could Go Wrong, or Right, in a War with Iran

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3:02Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When protests ignited across Iran in December and reports emerged that the regime was killing thousands of protesters, Donald Trump threatened to intervene then and there. He did not. But the Pentagon began building up a huge military presence around the Gulf region. And meanwhile, the regime, it turns out, may have killed as many as 30 ,000 of its own people, according to some estimates. Iran has seen huge protests in the country before. And the regime has responded with violence before. But this time seems something of a different order of magnitude.

3:42some Iranians who oppose the regime have been in the crazy position of hoping for the U.S. to strike, to bomb their own country, even if it leads to full-scale war. Reporter Cora Engelbrecht has been recording her conversations with people in Iran about what that could all mean. Now we've altered or overdubbed their voices to protect these people from reprisal. It is the topic of the past 40 days. It is the topic that every two Iranian would speak about when they would ever meet. One of the people who spoke with me is a young man who works in a hospital about four hours north of Tehran. I mean, I'm having a very difficult time processing all these different thoughts because on theory, like on paper, I would be against a foreign intervention.

4:37I would believe that democracy would only come from within. But looking back at what happens, where are these criminals going to go? Like, we're not going to vote no way, not in a million years. This hospital worker was stationed in two different emergency wards during the peak of the regime's lethal crackdown on nationwide demonstrations in January. In the weeks since, he has sent me evidence he collected of hundreds of casualties, many of them trauma injuries, from these emergency wards where he was stationed. These people, these plaincloth agents, for example, remember the grandmother that I told you about?

5:19The grandmother that was brought in debt to the hospital? The granddaughter who was shot in the ear was crying all the time. and the daughter of that grandmother was undergoing a mental collapse. During that entire time that we were attempting CPR on the old woman, the clinical agents just stood there laughing and showing no empathy whatsoever. They were laughing. Essentially, mortal enemies were treating the patients like animals. Seeing that, realizing that we are already these people's mortal enemies, helped us realize that we are at war to a degree, to a good degree. And fearing a foreign invasion in these circumstances is just kind of laughable, if you ask me.

6:17Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah. How are you feeling? is too hard. This is an activist who lives in Tehran. She's in her 20s. She was actually in prison during the Women's Life Freedom protests in 2022. Over the past few weeks, she's been attending a lot of funerals commemorating people who were killed in January. For years, she told me she would have never dreamed of supporting foreign intervention. but now faced over and over again with the undeniable brutality of the violence from the past months, she's shifted her view. She can't help but want some kind of action from the United States which would eliminate the regime.

7:07I don't know. You read the book Waiting for Godot. Yes. Yes. It's like we are waiting for you, Godot. And we want to attack us because we can't fight back with the governments. And I don't know. I think that's a miserable situation for my people. You know, war is not good. And we saw that the war and the foreign engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq and Palestine is too bad. And it's continuing over these years. But it's like we have two ways. One, the regime kills us. Two, the foreign country kills us. You know how upsetting that is? It's really upsetting. This woman is an activist in her mid-30s, and she told me she's participated in every political uprising, starting with the Green Movement in 2009.

8:32She was in her teens then, so her whole adult life she's been protesting the current regime. She said that the 12-day war in June with the United States and Israel was still fresh in her mind and had actually made her more cautious about joining the demonstrations in late December. This time, I kind of... This time, I kind of... I did not participate, right? I just... I observed. Like, I mostly went to the streets by car. It was both the fact that I was scared by the violence and also by the prospect, because it was, it started, it did not start, but it picked up with a monarch's cult. It was a monarchist movement, and I had the feeling that it's kind of like a counter-revolution.

9:24Like many I spoke with, she expressed some distrust and skepticism for the royalist movement that has served around the former crown prince Reza Pahlavi. He's the exiled son of the former Shah of Iran, and he hasn't been in the country since 1978. The thing is that the foreign pressure is, it's not humanitarian completely. We are all very well aware of that. aware of that. It seems like a tool for them, a negotiation tool, an excuse. It's not even what they're negotiating for, and it's naive to think so. But I'd say this whole situation, this whole dualism that either the Islamic Republic stays or there is a war and there is no third way, this is a dangerous mindset.

10:10I don't want to choose one of them. I choose neither of them. to be honest i wake up i feel like i wish there was a war i don't share that with anyone but that's just inside my head i wish there was a war and we were over with it but i am quite sure about myself that i do not want that right it's just personal mood swings i have come across people waiting for war in that sense i mean like waiting for a celestial catastrophe like a miracle that can, you know, save them from this situation. And that's kind of suicidal, you know? People who are very senselessly waiting for that beautiful moment of the skies being bombarded and the earth catching fire and everything exploding and destroying.

11:01I mean, it's a suicidal wish. To me, it sounds people who are living, especially people in Tehran, because Tehran was affected more than other cities. When you say that Tehran was more affected than other cities, what are you referring to? Are you referring to the 12-day war? Yeah, yeah, the 12-day war. I mean, we're talking about two traumas. And wishing for that to happen again, it just comes out of frustration and feeling that in either way, if there is a war or not, you have no control over your life and being. What in that, are there any kernels of hope and all that? When you think about the future right now, what is giving you hope, if anything?

11:53That is a very hard question. But it's a very difficult thing to find hope. Maybe we will transition to a democracy, or maybe we won't. Maybe things will get even worse. but we're not in a situation to worry about this because we are way beyond the no-turning-back points, you know.

12:21Voices from Iran. All of these people asked to remain anonymous. You can find some extraordinary reporting from Cora Engelbrecht all at newyorker.com. We'll continue on Iran and its relationship with the United States in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

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14:50That's odoo.com. WNYC Studios is supported by Helen Keller International. This is a moment of growing urgency. Families around the world are facing widening gaps in health care and nutrition, but solutions are within reach. Just 75 cents can provide treatment for neglected tropical diseases, and$2 can protect a child's sight and health. For a limited time, donations are being matched, helping expand that impact. Learn more at HelenKellerINTL.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When the United States instigated a regime change in Iran in 1953, it didn't do so with aircraft carriers.

15:36There was no shock and awe. It was a piece of covert business involving the CIA and British intelligence. Together, they engineered the overthrow of the elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, because his government was pursuing a plan to nationalize Iran's oil industry. There were also concerns about the influence of communists in Iran. But contemporary Iran is not Venezuela. Does Donald Trump want to force Iran to make a nuclear deal to replace the one that he scrapped in his first term? Or is he really seeking regime change? To understand how this complex situation might play out, I called on one of the best sources I know on Iran, Kareem Sajjadpour.

16:20Sajjadpour is a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he writes about the Middle East for foreign affairs and other publications. Let's begin our conversation about now with the most obvious resonance. In 2002-2003, the American government looked on the leadership of Iraq, quite rightly, as horrific. And we went to war with Iraq, and it was a catastrophe. Right now, the United States, under Donald Trump, is amassing a gigantic military force around Iran. What do you make of American intentions here, and what is the wisdom of them? Well, I think part of the challenge we have, David, is that it's not clear in President Trump's head what his intentions are and what his endgame is.

17:23if we rewind, the reason we've gotten ourselves into this situation is that when these protests began in Iran in late December of last year, 2025, President Trump initially said to the Iranian regime, if you kill protesters, there's going to be consequences. The United States is locked and loaded and ready to protect them. He later went on to issue, by my count, at least nine more of those red lines, warning Iran that if it kills protesters, the United States was going to have their back. And he incited protesters to the streets. He said, go and seize your institutions. And Iran drove a giant truck through Trump's red lines.

18:13By some accounts, the regime killed as many as 30 ,000 people over a 48-hour period. We don't know for a fact. And it was very clear that the regime in Iran totally flaunted President Trump's red lines. And there's recent history on this one when President Obama issued a red line against the Assad regime in Damascus against using chemical weapons. You know, Assad used chemical weapons, and that was one of the critiques, foreign policy critiques of Obama's presidency, that that red line wasn't enforced, and what are the implications and messages for other adversaries if we don't enforce red lines?

19:00So I think that's the context of how we got to where we are now. But there is in the context also that the United States, I think it was Phil Gordon, a national security figure for Democrats, for Obama, as well as for Kamala Harris. I think Phil Gordon once said, we invaded Iraq fully and it was a disaster. We invaded Libya partly and it was a disaster. And we kept out of Syria and it was a monumental disaster. And now with Iran, the humanitarian question of the killing of thousands of demonstrators is without question. The question is what to do about it. The big question is, does the United States have the power to transform Iran's government?

19:56Or the right. Or the right. Or the right. Listen, I think that if the last two and a half decades of Middle East history had turned out differently, I think we'd be having a very different conversation right now. Now, I do believe that Iran is a very different place than Iraq and Afghanistan. But I do think we have to be very honest in saying that the last two decades has proven that we don't have the ability to dictate our preferred outcome in Iran. We don't have the ability to dictate who comes to power the day after a military attack. We're told all the time that Iran, unlike other countries in the region, is quite pro-American.

20:48What does that mean and what does that imply for what's going on now? Well, I think this is simply stated after 47 years of living under a theocracy whose identity has been premised on death to America. It's the most secular society, I would argue, in the Middle East and the least anti-American, the most pro-American. And I think most Iranians have also reached this conclusion that so long as the ethos of their government is death to America and death to Israel rather than long live Iran, this country will never fulfill its enormous potential as a nation. There's a lot of nostalgia. It's an interesting phenomenon, having nostalgia for a period which you never lived, because three-quarters of Iranians were born after the revolution.

21:36But they do have this nostalgia for the stories they heard about life before the revolution, when people had social freedoms, when Iran had a dignified place in the world, when the Iranian passport could get you places, when the country wasn't an isolated pariah state. And so it's not to say that people want to be a lackey of the United States, but I think there's a basic recognition that this nation, which in my view should be a G20 nation, it has the human capital for it, it has the natural resources for it, number two reserves of natural gas, number three reserves of oil, has this, you know, one of the longest continuously inhabited civilizations in the world, and it's punching way below its weight.

22:27It could be South Korea, it behaves like North Korea. And so I think there's a recognition among Iranians that this radicalism, this anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism has just led the country into a ditch. And if the country is ever to fulfill its potential. It needs more tolerant government. It needs a government that prioritizes national interests before ideology. So I believe that it's a society which is capable of representative democracy. But authoritarian transitions are not usually popularity contests. They're not usually dictated by, you know, the vote of people. It's oftentimes, you know, when that power vacuum comes to be.

23:15Who can mobilize violence? Well, I remember on the brink of the Iraq War, I forget who said it in the Bush Circle, maybe it was Kenneth Edelman, that we would be greeted, American soldiers would be greeted by flowers and candy. And to be sure, in the first couple of days, there were scenes of ecstasy when statues of Saddam Hussein were toppled in Baghdad. What is predictable in Iran? Let's say the combined military and intelligence forces that are arrayed around Iran succeed in that way, in that immediate way, if that's what the operation is. What's in place to fill that vacuum? So it depends on what kind of operation we conduct.

24:04If we choose to assassinate Iran's supreme leader, and the people I talk to both in Washington and in Israel believe that if we do take military action, there's a better than 50 % chance that we will try to target Iran's supreme leader, that has very different implications than if we simply go after their missile program and nuclear program and maybe Revolutionary Guard outposts. It's my view that even within the regime, there is a recognition that this status quo is not tenable. A friend of mine who's a political science professor in Tehran told me that at the beginning of the revolution, the regime was composed of 80 % ideologues and 20 % charlatans.

24:53And now it's the reverse. Only 20 % are true believers in this system, and 80 % are just going along for financial, political expediency. And so most people in that system recognize that it's not sustainable, and they're waiting for the supreme leader to die. Now, what happens if instead of dying a natural death or some kind of internal coup, he's taken out by American missiles? That, in my view, is an enormous risk, an enormous gamble, that instead of this evolutionary process happening, it could radicalize and mobilize the true believers in that system to actually try to preserve power among themselves.

25:46That is something that I would be concerned about. If Ayatollah Khamenei were 50 years old, perhaps I would think differently. But martyring an 86-year-old, I think, is fraught with some risk. It seems to me one of the dynamics in Iran that maybe people aren't thinking about enough is that the real establishment in Iran is the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is not only a military and intelligence establishment, but it comprises much of the economic elite, factories, ports, all kinds of enterprises. And there's an upper crust of the Revolutionary Guard Corps that's quite rich and entrenched, and they have the weapons.

26:33So if, in fact, the Supreme Leader were killed, and even more in the intelligence and military elite were killed, you'd still have the Revolutionary Guard Corps there. They're not going to be wiped out. Isn't that what would come to power? And what would that portend? So that is a very valid concern that what are you going to do with 150 ,000 plus Revolutionary Guardsmen and their affiliated militia members, the Basij militia, who are usually much more ideological in their worldview. And that is a concern that I have if the goal turns out to be a decapitation operation to try to topple the regime.

27:26Because these folks, as we saw in post-Saddam Iraq, they're armed and they're organized. Now, I don't want to claim that they're monolithic. There are not 150 ,000 true believers. But what I learned from observing the Iraq war is that 1 % of society can make life hell for 99 % of society if they're willing to go out and conduct suicide bombings and things like that, if they feel like they're not going to have any role in the countries tomorrow. And so that, I think, is so critical for Iran's future, for any opposition movement or democratic movement, to try to figure out a way to co-opt these folks under a very big tent.

28:12So if you think about power in Iran as like a pyramid, shaped like a pyramid, at the top of that pyramid is Ayatul Khamenei. His turban is at the top of that pyramid. All the powerful people below him are not wearing turbans. They're the military commanders. And in some ways, I think the future of Iran will be shaped in part by the battles between these men. because some of them are ideologues who want to continue with the culture of the revolution and death to America and what I call Vision 1979. But there are others among them who are not Democrats. I'm not arguing that they're Democrats, but they recognize, they appreciate power, and they believe that in order to entrench their power and even enrich themselves, it behooves them to throw out Shiite nationalism and anti-imperialism and replace it with Iranian nationalism.

29:17And again, they're not Democrats, but they're nationalists. And so I think that is going to be one of the determining fights for Iran's future. It's very interesting to see the mixed nature of the protests this time. Tell me a little bit about the nature of the demonstrations this time and their extent and who they include? Yeah, so I think one thing that is important for people to understand about why the Islamic Republic is so despised by such a large percentage of its population is that it's not only politically authoritarian, but it's also economically and socially authoritarian. It tries to micromanage every aspect of people's lives, what you're wearing, what you drink, what you eat, what movies you watch, what music you listen to.

30:05And for that reason, the grievances against this regime are so widespread. And so in this particular instance, the trigger was economic. It was rapidly depreciating currency. It's remarkable when you compare Iran's currency now to 1979, it's depreciated more than 99 % since the 1979 revolution. And so what we saw with these protests was the trigger was economic, depreciating currency. And then very quickly, within a couple days, they quickly went to death to the Islamic Republic. And they spread throughout the country. For me, the things that were very eye-opening were these slogans of long live the Shah and death to the Islamic Republic in these cities which were conservative strongholds of the regime, in cities like Mashhad and Qom, in the town of Khomein, the birthplace of Ayatollah Khomeini, people were saying Javid Shah, long live the Shah.

31:12Well, speaking of the Shah, his son, who's now a man of a certain age, has lived abroad, obviously, nearly all his life. But his name keeps coming up, not only in foreign affairs articles and things like this or in the newspapers, but in the chants of the demonstrators, what role does he play or not play in this entire drama? So Reza Pahlavi has spent the last 47 years in exile, mostly in suburban Washington, D.C., in Potomac, Maryland. And, you know, he has been very consistent in opposing the Islamic Republic and advocating democracy. But it's only been in the last several years that people have begun looking to him for leadership and chanting his name.