School of War - Ep 265: Mark Dubowitz on Is Iran Next?

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Mark Dubowitz, CEO of FDD, joins the show to bring us up to speed on widespread Iranian protests, the chances of American or Israeli intervention, and what intervention might achieve. ▪️ Times 02:15 Will we strike? 05:34 New Iran talks? 07:03 Nuclear concessions?  10:35 Intervention possibilities 15:10 The Shah’s son and the Islamic regime 24:28 How do these protests compare to the past? 34:29 Public perceptions Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

All across the Islamic Republic of Iran, as we speak, there are widespread protests against the regime and a good amount of violence being brought to bear to put them down. After the Trump administration's dramatic action in Venezuela, is Iran next? Mark Dubowitz joins to update us. Let's get into it. It is for war this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain, the situation in France. We'll fight on the beaches.

It will fight on the landing grounds. We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to bring back to the show today. Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Mark, thanks for coming back on School of War.

Hey, honor to be back, Aaron. Thank you. We've been here before in the sense that I have a recollection of recording with you last summer just before Israel launched its first round of strikes on Iran in the 12-day war. And there was a lot of ambiguity about what might happen when, and we recorded this long, I thought, very thoughtful episode with all kinds of interesting observations in which we concluded that probably not there was going to be some sort of meeting that weekend between the Iranians and Witkoff in the Middle East, and we thought, well, nothing's going to happen for a few days until that meeting, and we got done recording and the Israelis attacked basically immediately,

all of which is a long-winded way of saying that we're going to get this up, the moment we're done recording, just in case something happens in the region. Yeah, I was part of Trump and Beebe's disinformation campaign in order to mislead the Iranian, so they were literally and figuratively found in their beds expecting a Sunday meeting and then got struck on early Friday morning. So I apologize for not having to say. disclose that, but it was obviously top secret. At School of War here, we feel we feel used, Mark.

We feel used. Well, then this leads to my, the obvious first question where we, where we, where we, where we, where we, where we, where we are we, where we are we out to begin today? I had your colleague, Bethlehem bin Talibu on a few weeks ago to discuss the Iranian missile program. And in that conversation, he kind of previewed the likelihood of a round of Israeli Iranian fighting over the missile program. Here we are, though.

We're recording this Monday. morning, January the 12th, it's about 11 o'clock in the morning, we are looking at the potential for U.S. strikes, or at least U.S. action in Iran tied to the protests and President Trump's red line, which he has repeatedly stating about, I don't want to get the phrasing exactly wrong here, but like basically the killing at scale of protesters, shooting, the words were something like shooting a bunch of protesters or something like that. Maybe you can clarify, what do you think might happen here? Well, according to Wall Street Journal, supposed to be a, quote, principles meeting tomorrow, Tuesday for the president to consider options that have been presented to him.

The fact that the Wall Street Journal has that story suggests to me that, you know, somebody provided that story and that President Trump has clearly been consulting with these top advisors over the past couple of weeks since the protests erupted. And I would hope has already been presented with a series of options and is not telegraphing to the Iranians exactly what the, what the, what? what the punch will be. I think the president has laid out a clear red line, Aaron. I mean, he has said very clearly that if the Iranians start slaughtering their people, he will act. And they have. I mean, there's reports of hundreds, if not thousands of Iranians who have been killed

by the regime security forces. And so the president is now on the hook. Is he going to enforce his red line? Is he going to intervene? Or is he going to be misled, I think, by a recent Iranian offer to return to the negotiating table. And if he does, I think that would be a catastrophic mistake. Well, let's talk about that. I've heard various murmurs about that. Most recently, more than a murmur, Barack Ravid reported that Steve Whitkoff had received. I don't, how,

how is he getting all this information from the Whitkoff office, Mark? They got the leak investigation will surely get to the bottom of it soon. But Barack Ravid of Politico, or sorry, of Axios reported that there was Iranian outreach to the other foreign minister to Whitkoff over the weekend, say more about what you think is going on there, about what level of open door they may be finding in some parts of the administration about what their goals are, because we're coming from a baseline here where they basically have rejected, really since the start of Trump's term, serious negotiations about the nuclear program. There have been talks, but the Trump people at every turn have basically been frustrated by

the Iranians' unwillingness to make concession. What's going on here? Well, the regime is doing what the regime always does. When they're back against the wall, they make these offers to return to negotiations with Americans. I think they appreciate that the only place they can beat the United States is the negotiating table. They certainly did in the Obama administration, in the Biden administration.

I think they want to have another round and another go at the Americans under the Trump administration. So, Foreign Minister Iraqi has reached out to Whitkoff to talk about a potential negotiation. Now, J.D. Vance has been publicly telegraphing that it would be useful to talk to the Iranians and that there should be a negotiation. So there seems to be an open door at the vice president's office. The Iranians that have heard that since this is their opportunity. Maybe they can forestall U.S. strikes and get back to that negotiating table. I think, again, catastrophic mistake. I hope the president doesn't fall for it. Because I think to your point, Aaron, the Iranians are not prepared to meet President Trump's. minimums demands. And those demands are the full dismantlement of their nuclear program, no uranium enrichment, no plutonium reprocessing, the dismantlement of their long-range ballistic missile program, which clearly they've got, you know, still hundreds, if not thousands of ballistic missiles in their inventory, which they could fire at U.S. troops, at Israel and our allies,

and the dismantlement of their terror networks. Those are President Trump's demands. I think there's no way that the Supreme Leader Alec Chaminet is prepared to meet any of those demands. Can I ask, I want to get to the question of what the Trump administration could actually do if it chose to intervene here. And of course, about the protest themselves and what's, what's actually going on in the streets of Iran. But before we do, on this question of the nuclear program, if I'm the Iranians, okay, sure, the full list of the sort of original Pompeo position from the first Trump term that you've got to do all these things, basically is it's kind of regime changed by another name. That is to say, stop being who you are.

and we can get along. But if I'm the Iranians, if I'm Khomeini, I mean, at this moment of what appears to be genuine crisis for the Islamic Republic, I mean, the economy is just in freefall, the currency is, has splat. It's past free fall. It's just splatted, obviously militarily shown to be completely ineffective in the face of its regional adversary, Israel and other adversaries, like the United States. I mean, these are these are dark days. There was discussion in Iranian politics of moving the capital because Tehran is running out of water. These are dark days. Why wouldn't I come in A make concessions on the nuclear program? It's all blown up anyway. It's going to be a while before I can reconstitute it under the best of circumstances. Why not just make the concessions?

So you would, if you were rational, you would want to trap the Americans in negotiations. You would want to give some concessions in order to continue those negotiations. You would hope those negotiations again would forestall the U.S. strike and Israeli strike perhaps lead to some preliminary sanctions relief or at least the expectation of that in order to bolster your crumbling currency and your skyrocketing inflation. You'd want to do all of those things if you're irrational. I fear that he may be at the point now where he does do that. But why hasn't he done that and why may he not do that? Because his Cominé's worldview is the level of anti-Americanism,

the hatred for the United States, and particularly for the president, is so deep that it would be such an abject humiliation for the Supreme Leader. After everything he's gone through in the past couple of years, on top of that, to have to negotiate with President Trump and provide the kind of concessions

that we would hope President Trump would demand would literally be the, I guess, the capstone, Is it the capstone of a failed career or the nadir of a failed career? But this, you couldn't get any lower for for Chaminade in terms of humiliation. And at age 86, he may just decide, you know, he'd rather go down with a ship, go down with a ship than bend a knee to the orange man. So let's talk about what the administration could actually do. And then we'll start sort of through the narrow lens of if it wanted to aid the protest movement, what could it do specifically?

specifically on that front, obviously there's a wider range of sort of more middle-term policy measures that we could contemplate with broader objectives just to put pressure on the regime broadly. But in the short run, you have these very brave protesters in the streets. There does appear to be an increasing amount of violence. Maybe you can share some details on what you're seeing there. And you with your colleague Bethlehem had this piece in the Atlantic just a couple days ago about precisely this. What could America actually do if it wanted to intervene here?

So there's a lot America could do. First of all, I think whatever America decides to do, they should be doing in close coordination with our Israeli friends. I mean, Mossad has demonstrated incredible capabilities in operating inside Israel. He saw that during the 12-day war. I wouldn't be surprised if Mossad is already on the ground working with in support of the protesters. So a strong recommendation would be close coordination between CIA. IA and Mossad. Specifically, what could they do together? Well, together, the National Security Agency and Unit 8200, which is Israel's NSA, could launch a massive cyber attack against the repression

apparatus of the regime, like literally blind the security forces. I mean, you know, go after the IRGC, the Ministry of Intelligence, the Basij, the Iranian armed forces, the Iranian police, and use cyber to blind their capabilities. Second would be there's a lot of technological capabilities to try to get Iranians so that they're back online. The regime has shut down the internet. They've also been interfering with Starlink access. But I think there's technology infrastructure that could be very helpful because it's very important. If Iranians can't communicate, they can't mobilize, they can't mobilize, they can't protest.

If they can't get videos out to the free world of the massive slaughter that is going on on the streets as we speak in Iran across 31 provinces of that country, then the world's attention will move elsewhere. So technological capabilities that NSA and UN 80200 have. I think third is, you know, if you're not going to go cyber and you want to go more Canadian, then it is possible to use the U.S. Air Force and the Israeli Air Force. to strike at the barracks, the headquarters of these top IRGC, besiege and other commanders. In fact, Aaron, I think you may remember speaking of the 12-day war, on day 12 of the 12-day war, Israeli airplanes were above Tehran about to take out hundreds of besiege militia, potentially over 1,000. And literally minutes before, they were about to drop the bombs.

President Trump demanded that those Israeli airplanes. planes return to their bases and that mission was not completed. Well, I'm sure that target bank is still in existence and perhaps even fuller than it was in June of last year. So a lot that can be done in cyber, a lot that can be done on the military side, and then a lot can be done in terms of supporting the Iranian people. We can talk about that short to medium term. Respond to the argument that I hear made in multiple quarters that any such kinetic action,

set aside non-kinetic for a second, but kinetic action, one way or the other, targeting the Iranian regime at this moment would be counterproductive from the point of view of the protesters' interests because it would arouse pro-regime sentiment and make the protests seem as though they are merely an arm of foreign intervention and action. Yeah, I mean, this argument is absolute BS. I mean, I've been hearing for 22 years, this notion that if the United States and Israel intervenes on behalf of the Iranian people who are protesting this brutal regime, that somehow there will be a rally around the flag. You know, this will create a strong sense of nationalism, their countries being attacked,

and they will support the regime. Well, number one, that has never happened in 22 years. Every time that we put pressure on Iran, whether it's sanctions, whether it's taking out Qasem Soleimani, the former head of the IRC, Coosz Force, where there was a 12-day war, where we literally, we and the Israelis bombed Iran, there has not been a rally around the flag. And even more so today, when hundreds of thousands of people on the streets and they're being slaughtered by this regime, it seems inconceivable that they would rally around this regime and rally around the flag.

I think actually, I'll qualify that. They will rally around a flag. It just won't be the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It'll be the flag of the pre-Islamic Republic of Iran, which is the lion and the sun. those are the symbols of what Iranians are now rallying around, which is a flag of freedom that is very much not the flag of the Islamic Republic. So let's talk about this. This moves us in the direction of the nature of the protests themselves.

And there's a few ways to go here. Let's start with the flag. You are more in the weeds and details of these rounds of protests than I am. That said, correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is the first major round of protests at Iran. And obviously we saw, you know, we've seen big protests in 2009, the Green Movement. We saw the Women Life Freedom Movement in this decade. There have been other significant major events. This is the first one where the former Shah's family seems to be playing an important role as a rallying cry, right? That is the flag. That is the flag of the pre-Islamic Republic,

Iran, which is to say that the Shah's Iran. Help us understand. I know you've spoken, I think you've interviewed on your own show, the Shah's son. help us understand this dimension of everything. Yeah, you're absolutely right. First of all, I mean, very much worth clarifying. Yes, multiple rounds of protests. I mean, there were student protests in the late 1990s. Then 2009, the Green Revolution.

Then there were these protests in 2017, 18, and 19 were very much kind of economic protests, which also transformed into political protests. Then you had Women Life Freedom in 2022, 2023. And yes, this is the first major round of protests where you're hearing chance from the streets in support of the crown prince Reza Palabi, the son of the Shah. It's also the first major round of protests in the wake of the 12-day war in June of last year. So it's important to footstop both of those. Yeah, Pallaby is interesting.

I mean, I've interviewed him on my podcast, the Iran breakdown. You know, he's been around for a number of years. But I think he's really grown in prominence, both in terms of his visibility on the streets. his visibility in social media, Iranian social media. And, you know, the maturity of his policy ideas, the post-Islamic Republic planning that he's gone through. I mean, really putting together like top teams of experts to figure out what would a post-Islamic Republic of Iran look like.

And I think he's gaining a lot of credibility not only inside Iran, but I think more admiration outside of Iran from people who had been previously pretty skeptical, whether he was the right guy to at least symbolically represent a alternative to to the regime. And sitting where I sit, it does seem real on some level. That is to say, he made these calls on previous evenings for protesters to rally. And they did. And that's obviously a big risk if you're in his position, because you could make the call and then people might not rally in the way that you've called for, in which case you're sort of shown to be a paper tiger. The opposite appears to be the case here. Why, why now? Why 2026 after all these years of exile and all these rounds of

domestic uprising, you know, that have been successfully put down by the Republic? Why the centrality of this man and this family now? It's a great question. I've been wrestling within myself. I think, look, you know, if you want to be skeptical, you'd say that there wasn't a, there was no causal connection between his, his calls for Iranians to come to the streets and the fact that they came to the streets, right? It's sort of they were coming to the streets anyway. You know, he's smart enough to be able to assess what's happening internally and certainly have a lot of context inside Iran and he knows there's going to be massive protests. So he capitalizes on the inevitability of massive protests by calling for massive protests and then being

able to claim credit for having precipitated this massive uprising. So that would be the more skeptical side of me. But I think that would underscore that he's an astute politician, which which he certainly is. But I think that I would underscore that he's an astute politician, which he certainly is. But I do think actually that we're at a point now where the regime's legitimacy is just dead. It's collapsed. And part of that is what happened to them during the 12-day war. You know, it's one thing for them to say death to America, death to Israel, and to call for our annihilation. But Chaminet has never, he has never called for the United States or he's never suggested

that the United States actually is a paper tiger. He fears the United States. And he understands our awesome capabilities. But he has mocked and ridiculed the Israelis for years. And the fact that this small country of 10 million people with a tiny air force and a tiny intelligence service, you know, ran and flew circles around him in the 12-day war and inflicted such devastating damage, not only on his nuclear program in cooperation with us, but his missile program in the command structure, but also took down this axis of so-called resistance or access of misery, which is these terror armies that he built painstakingly and expensively over multiple decades, is a major humiliation for him. And I think for the Iranian people, they understood at that

point that the regime was not 10 feet tall, that it had been absolutely embarrassed by a country that Chaminet had ridiculed for so many years. And I think that empowered the protestors. And if you combine all of that with a currency collapsing, you know, a massive water shortage and all of the reasons why Iranians despise their regime. I think Pahlavi kind of represented an alternative, a viable alternative. And I think this is the moment where he's been able to capitalize on that. Now, again, we'll see what President Trump does or does not do. But I think Pahlavi has emerged out of this in a much stronger political position than he has been in the past. Well, let's talk a little bit more about Iranian politics and just the stability and resolve of the regime itself.

You know, I saw a report. Maybe you can give us some background that will make this make sense of the president of Iran marching with some kind of march. I hesitate to call it a protest, but marching with some kind of march in Tehran. So obviously not the Supreme Leader Khomeini, but the president who in their system is subordinate to the Supreme Leader. So there's, you know, I'm curious about sort of the nuances and fissures within Iranian politics. And I'm most curious about, you know, a kind of, I'm going to frame it this way. You may reject the framing, but what I take to be a kind of debate that's been playing out for years between you, Mark Dubowitz, and another good friend of the School of War podcast, Fred Kagan, himself deeply immersed in Iranian affairs. His Critical Threats Project at AEI publishes a great kind of daily roundup of events in and around Iran. And he had a piece back in the first Trump administration. It was a cover piece for Commentary Magazine questioning whether a victory strategy with Iran, which is to say regime change in Iran made sense.

And his argument, and this is eight years ago, so, you know, it's worth updating. His argument at the time, though, I thought was really it was depressing, but hard to wiggle out of. The notion that there could be a victory strategy like that the Reagan administration employed successfully. against the Soviet Union in the 80s, had an important premise that was important to say aloud and reflect on. And that premise is that means the Iranian elite is something like the Soviet elite as the 1980s went on. And Fred's account of the Soviet elite in the 1980s was an elite that had lost confidence in its own project, that Gorbachev and other key people senior in the Iranian, excuse me, senior in the Soviet structure of power. And critically, Gorbachev himself,

just didn't believe their own nonsense anymore and weren't in the end when push came to shove willing to do what it was going to take to keep the system alive. And Fred's assertion back in 2018, and I've not brought him on to discuss this. So he may himself have changed his mind. I have no idea. But as of 2018, his argument was the Iranians just show no evidence of this loss of confidence. In fact, the evidence seems to be that they're quite willing to gun down in the streets, as many people as it takes every time.

And it's actually that. That's the fact, you have to have a point where senior members of the security services are questioning whether or not they want to do that, not because they're good or moral people, but because they are thinking about their own self-interest as events play out. So, you know, it's 2026. A lot has happened. The regime is demonstrably weaker than it was in 2018. I mean, dramatically weaker than it was in 2018.

But I am curious for your. best estimate of the stability of the regime right now yeah first of all anytime that i i disagree with fred i do so with great humility um because you know fred is an incredible scholar of both the soviet union iran and and the study of war there should actually be a podcast on that glad there is there so so fred is you know a great expert probably really worth having him back on to to talk about this issue. When I talked about this backmanj, the first Trump administration, I likened Islamic Republic to the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and Andropov, right? Ideologically bankrupt, economically bankrupt, with a military, in this case, a proxy network overstretched, certainly different in that, you know,

the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear-tip missiles aimed at our cities. Thank God, the Iranians have not developed a nuclear weapon, thanks to U.S. and Israeli action. But it was very much a tired, exhausted, bankrupt regime where the elites were still holding on to power. And you know, you would, you'd see multiple rounds of demonstrations that had been crushed ruthlessly. I think if we fast forward to 2026, I think some things have changed, some things have not. What, what has changed is the regime is demonstrably weaker than it was back in the first Trump administration of all the reasons we discussed so far on the podcast.

I think what hasn't changed is the willingness of ruthless men to turn their guns on innocent people and slaughter them. And I think we're seeing that on the streets of Iran today. But what also has changed is that within this elite, within this kind of 1% of the population that is the elite, maybe 20% of the population that actually supports the regime, and 80% of the population that is clearly opposed to the regime, I think within the elite, there is serious questioning going on about this project and the failure of Chaminet's project over multiple years. I mean, Chaminet's been in power since 1989, longest-serving dictator in the world. I had a pretty good run for a number of decades,

a lot of successes. Past couple of years, miserable failure. And I know for a fact, I won't tell you why, but I know for a fact that there is serious questioning going on within the elite about this project. about the direction that the Islamic Republic should be taking. So they're still willing to kill, but they're starting to ask some fundamental questions

about the survival of the Islamic Republic and whether they should change direction. And the Iranian president, though he has very little power and some of the people around him, are actually openly and publicly for the first time ever questioning the direction of the Islamic Republic. And that is a profound change. By the way, a very risky,

a risky course of action for these men to be publicly challenging Khamene. Based on your own study of these waves of protests we've seen over the years, how does this wave currently stand up by comparison based on whatever indicators you want to point to, number of cities, size of crowds, you know, nature of violence, you know, are we at the level of a 2009 or, you know, pick your point of comparison?

Because some of these previous rounds have been very serious And it really did take widespread brute application of violence to put them down. I mean, there was no other option left to the regime other than massive concessions. In each case, it opted for violence. Where are we right now in terms of scale? So I don't know in terms of size of crowds. I think it's really difficult to know because, you know, we're going on sort of anecdotal evidence. Clearly, they look like very big crowds.

They're certainly all over Iran and most of Iran's provinces and in most. most of Iran's major cities. We don't know quite the exact number of how many people have been killed. There's rumors 2,000, 3,000, 5,000. I think that will tell us a lot about the scale and intensity of the protests based on how many people are being killed. Because the more people that are being killed, the more the regime is obviously concerned about the size of the protests,

the intensity of the protests, and the impact of the protests. So the evidence that is coming out suggests that these are massive. They may be as big as 2022, 2022, 23, women life freedom, which were also massive protests, but there may be many, many more people in these protests that have been killed, arrested. Public executions are set to begin soon. So the regime's reaction may underscore how intense these protests are in comparison. I'll just say one of their point, which I think is a big difference this time around, is the demographics.

I mean, 2009 was a Green Revolution. It was the fraudulent re-election, re-election, quote-unquote, of, Mahmoud Ahmed Inajad. It was a protest movement of middle-class Iranians in North Tehran coming out and saying, where is my vote? But that was a middle-class North Tehran phenomenon. And it was a call for political reform, not for regime change. 2017, 18, 19, that's actually when the blue-collar workers came out as a result of a collapsing economy.

This time they weren't saying, where is my vote? to you had Iranian saying, where's my paycheck? Where's my paycheck? As they were not getting paid and the value of their money was crumbling. 2022, 2023, we're now Iranian woman coming out, protesting against gender apartheid, ripping off their hijabs. That was a more, a broader-based protest. But again, it was more middle class.

I know certainly about political and social rights. Where's my social freedom? where's my political freedom? This protest is combining all of those groups. It's blue-collar workers, right? It's Iran's lower classes who are struggling economically more than anyone. It's Iran's middle class. It's Iran's upper middle class.

All of these people who are coming out and it's coalescing around economic demands, social demands, and political demands. So I think it's different in that sense. I think it's unique, actually, in that sense, which doesn't mean that it's going to succeed, but it certainly means that it's captured a much broader base of the Iranian population. Help us understand how all of this intersects with the conversation we were having just a few weeks ago about the Iranian missile program and what appears to be an Israeli desire to mow the grass

with it. My understanding is something like that was on the agenda when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here meeting with President Trump. I think that was in December. So it's been a busy few weeks. in the national security space marks. I think that was towards the end of December, that Iran generally and potentially that specifically was on the agenda. So it's not like that problem for the Israelis has gone away. How did these two things potentially intersect? Do they proceed on parallel tracks?

Help us understand that. Yeah, I think there's a real point of intersection. So, yes, it was at the end of December, the Prime Minister Dena, who met with President Trump in Mar-a-Lago. They had detailed discussions about Iran, including about Iran's re-expanding or reconstituting missile program, which, as you mentioned, my colleague Ben and Ben Tal-Blu, who knows more about this than anyone on Earth,

certainly in the public space, I think that a great episode with you in describing the threat from the missile program. Look, if I were President Trump today, and I was considering a range of potential strikes, I actually, at the top, near the top of my list would be Iran's missile program. And you might say, well, what's the connection between Iran's missile program and Iranian protests. And the message is clear

is that if the United States were to strike targets inside Iran that was strategic targets to the regime, that would send a message to Iranian protesters that America is intervening on your behalf against your hated regime.

But the other corollary benefit of that is that we would be destroying Iran's missile program and not Israel. And that's really important. Because if the Israelis do what they're going to do, and they are going to do it, and they go back at Iran's missile program, right? That will clearly provoke an Iranian retaliation, a massive retaliation

against Israel, maybe even greater than what we saw during the 12-day war. And, you know, hundreds of, if not thousands of ballistic missiles will be fired at Israel. Israel will have to take retaliatory steps in order to neutralize that. And that might end up escalating into a a major war. But if the United States were to do this and we were to take out Iran's missile program, that would be a message to Chaminé that if you retaliate against the United States, we will take down your regime. And by the way, that message is much more salient today than it ever has been. Because while hundreds of thousands of Iranians are on the streets yelling death to the dictator, death to the Islamic Republic, and we're all talking about the possibility of regime change inside Iran,

a U.S. strike against the missile program would be a message to Haminae that the United States is prepared to go beyond the nuclear program and that if he were to retaliate, he could provoke a U.S. military intervention directly at his regime. So I would put the missile program near the top of my list, as President Trump considers options over the coming days. So I just want to close on kind of a cautionary note here. When you look across America's college campuses and you see all these protesters, occupying the quad in support of the Iranian freedom movement. You know, I understand where they're coming from. And obviously, I share their concerns, but we really need to maintain public order, make sure we're not destroying property or allowing academic business to proceed. Of course, I'm making this up. There are no American student protests at any American university on behalf of the Iranian protesters. Not so much, Mark, I think, because they don't care, but because I think they're on the other side. They're on the side of the Iranian regime. So there's a sad note.

There doesn't, I mean, and I see that across the range of a lot of people who have a lot of things to say about the Israel-Gaza conflict in particular. I detect a notable lack of sympathy or interest in the situation of the Iranian protesters right now. Yeah, it's exactly right. I mean, it's interesting at the Golden Globes. I don't watch the Golden Globes, but I've been sent some commentary on social media. There was no mention of the Golden Globes of the Iranian protesters and the slaughter that is taking place inside of Iran. as we speak, hundreds of not thousands of Iranians being gunned down by the security forces of Hamid. I mean, amazing, not a mention. There was mentioned, by the way, of course, of Gaza and the

Palestinians. But I think it just underscores something that Iranians have known for many, many years. I mean, many of my Iranian friends have said this. And that is that this, the left does not care about them. The left has no interest in seeing the end of the Islamic Republic. For the left, the Islamic Republic is Islamic and therefore if it's Islamic it shall not be criticized and it shall not be condemned because to do so would be Islamophobic

and they are absolutely horrified and incredibly frustrated by this and have been for many many years by the way it's one of the reasons why they actually when there are pro-Israel protests in the United States and Canada Australia Europe and elsewhere

it's Iranian Muslims who are at those protests defending Israel. It's they understand. They understand the hypocrisy on the left. They understand the brutality of the Islamic Republic and they understand the brutality of the proxies that the Islamic Republic has supported funded an arm for many years, including Hamas, Palestine, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. Mark Dubowitz of FDD, obviously this is a fast-moving situation. So we'll have this posted as quickly as possible. And as things develop, I hope you'll be willing to keep helping understand what's going on i'll be grateful to come back thanks a letter