"Can you or the American military or the Israeli military get to what’s left of their third string and their fourth string and their fifth string? Do you know where they are? Can you kill them?"
I posed those questions to President Donald Trump Monday, July 13.
"Yeah, I do, but we don’t want to talk about that," the president replied.
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"But we certainly are watching, yeah," he added. "I know a lot about that subject. I know a lot, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about it right now."
Trump’s restraint about clearing the bench of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is interesting.
The public faces of the rump regime in Iran — President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi — don’t have any authority over the killers with the guns. (Trump puts the number of Iranians massacred by the regime over two days in January at 52,000, so we know the ruthlessness of the men in charge.) When the campaign against Iran by the U.S. and Israel opened on Feb. 28, those strikes devastated the first and second tiers of "leadership" in Iran. Pezeshkian and Araghchi were not important enough to be in the command bunkers.
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Sixty-eight-year-old Ahmad Vahidi emerged from the wreckage and his "retirement" after the wipeout of the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic to take command of the IRGC. Imagine how utterly ruthless a benched and passed-over killer must be, and how many grudges he must hold against those who put him out to pasture in the first place.
Eli Lake is among the most respected national security reporters in the U.S. On Tuesday, July 14, Lake wholly agreed with what Trump told me Monday: It is unrealistic to expect the Iranian people to rise up only months after such a traumatic mass murder.
Instead, Lake explained, students of the history of regime collapses tell us we ought to be watching for splits within the ranks of the men with guns. That’s how revolutions against dictators and their henchmen at the top begin and then gain momentum. The lower levels of security services or a cadre within the military become unwilling to join in the killing anymore. They see the end game and they don’t want to be around or on the wrong side when everything falls apart. Sometimes they flee. Sometimes they turn the weapons on the top men. When that begins, Lake added, it can accelerate quickly.
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With the first Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) torn up by the IRGC, all bets were off. I’ve called the MOU the equivalent of "halftime" in the battle with Iran since it was inked, but was surprised when the rump regime came out of its locker room first and began shooting at ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran received a thin lifeline of oil revenue from the MOU when we lifted the blockade. The blockade is back, as are the bombings. If the president does indeed ratchet up the air campaign, the already tattered Iranian economy will struggle to meet basic needs.
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The suffering of the population doesn’t matter to Vahidi et al. They can loot the country (and will) and assign whatever imports are getting in to themselves, just as the Hamas terrorists did in Gaza. They may be living underground, but the IRGC bosses won’t be hungry.
The vast masses of Iranians know the truth — though they dare not speak it. But if even a handful of colonels or even junior officers decide the time has come for them to rule and save the country (and themselves), they can act. If they succeed, they can shrug off the awful burden of "Twelver" theology and rule as normal juntas rule: with absolute power but without making war on the world.
It only takes a few people to crack the whole of the IRGC tyranny. Trump says to the public that he isn’t going to rush that takeover. But who knows what he and the Israelis see and hear courtesy of their intelligence communities. The allies certainly had all the information they needed on Feb. 28. Don’t doubt that they have more and add to their collection every day.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
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