Containment Redux: Persian Gulf War Lessons from Iraq for U.S. Strategy Toward Iran

MAY: Well, welcome and thank you so much for joining us for today’s discussion, hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. I’m Cliff May. I’m the founder and president of FDD, and it’s Wednesday, November 5th.

Before we begin, I want to share just a few words about FDD for those who may be new to us. FDD was founded shortly after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, almost a quarter of a century ago, to my amazement. And ever since, we’ve operated as a fiercely independent, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.

At FDD, we conduct actionable research by experts, researchers, and scholars from a variety of backgrounds and viewpoints, all with the aim of strengthening U.S. national security, and reducing or eliminating threats posed by adversaries and enemies of the United States and other free nations. As a point of pride and point of principle, we do not accept foreign government funding.

Today’s timely panel is a result of a historical analogy coined and brought to the public’s attention by FDD’s distinguished Iran Program Senior Director Behnam Ben Taleblu.

Ever since the 12-Day War, Behnam has been stressing the importance for U.S. policymakers of learning from the last time an anti-American, anti-Israeli, oil-rich Middle East dictator who repressed his own people, sought weapons of mass destruction, and supported terrorism was beaten by a superior Western-style military, but then allowed to keep his control on power.

While there are clear, critical differences between Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Ali Khamenei in Iran, the similar conditions offer an opportunity to examine the lessons of the late ’90s containment policy and reinvigorate discussions over how to deter, and maybe defeat, the Islamic Republic while supporting the Iranian people.

Here to compare, contrast, and chart a better course ahead for U.S. policy – for U.S.-Iran policy for the post-12-Day War are:

Reuel Marc Gerecht, FDD resident scholar. Reuel served as an Iran targets officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. He was a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the director of the Middle East Initiative at the Project for the New American Century. At FDD, Reuel focuses on Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, terrorism, and intelligence.

Ken Pollack, an old friend of this institution, he is now vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute. Ken served twice at the National Security Council, first as director of Near East and South Asian affairs, and then as director for Persian Gulf affairs. He was a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He began his career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA, where he authored classified post-mortem on Iraqi strategy and military operations during the Persian Gulf War.

Moderating today’s conversation is the aforementioned Behnam Ben Taleblu. Behnam is senior director of FDD’s Iran Program, where he oversees the breadth and depth of FDD’s work on Iran, in addition to serving as a senior fellow specializing in Iranian security and political issues. Frequently quoted in U.S. and international media, Behnam has testified before the U.S. Congress, Canadian Parliament, and U.K. House of Commons on Iran.

And with that, Behnam, the floor is yours.

TALEBLU: Thank you so much, Cliff.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for turning out today. I just have to share a small nerd note. I grew up on the tomes of literature put out by the two men to my right. Watching them debate – often debate each other, was one of the great pleasures of me learning about Iran and Iraq in the 1990s.

So, I couldn’t think of a more dynamic, intelligent, fun – perhaps, maybe with Reuel, too fun – panel to put together for you today, and so let’s jump right into it.

Am I wrong? Am I overdrawing the parallels between Iraq after 1991 and Iran after the 12-Day War in 2025? Am I overstressing the factors that Cliff said, which I would also add to by the way, the last country besides Iran to directly fire ballistic missiles at Israel was Saddam’s Iraq. The last country in the Middle East which didn’t really control its airspace in this way, for many years, was Iraq. You remember Operation Northern Watch and Southern Watch.

And then also, by the way, the last country subject to this level of stringent UN Security Council resolutions based on nonproliferation after they lost the conventional war was also Iraq in this part of the world.

So, Ken, am I right? Am I wrong? Why or why not? Reuel, is Ken wrong?

POLLACK: Sure. So, first, let me say a word of thanks. Thank you, Behnam. Thank you, Cliff. Thank you, Reuel. It’s such a pleasure to be here at FDD where I have so many dear friends, and a place that does such phenomenal work. It’s just great to be here with you guys.

Look, I think that you are absolutely correct in the sense that we need to be looking at the Iraq case as we think about the Iran case. I’m a big believer, as all of you guys know, probably many in the audience know, in learning from history, right? I read history all the time and I don’t do it just for history’s sake. For me, it is the only set of evidence, the only way to learn to do things better.

And there were certainly things that we learned in the course of our containment of Iraq. We did some things badly. We did some things better. But I think there’s no question that we learned a tremendous amount. And I think it would be absolutely appalling if we forgot all of those lessons, if we forgot everything that we experienced and learned from our experience with Iraq as we confront Iran once again.

To do so is, more or less, to consign that period of history to a wastebasket as having been meaningless. If we’re not going to learn from our experiences, we’re, as George Santayana pointed out, “doomed to repeat them.”

I will just add the caveat, though, that obviously the Iraq cases and the Iran cases are different. These are different countries. They are in different geostrategic circumstances. They are in different chronological circumstances.

We’re also different, right? And we need to keep that in mind as well. The United States of the mid-2020s is very different from the United States of the 1990s in a whole variety of different ways. And so, as we think about it, and as we try – and I think we absolutely should, that’s why I was so delighted to do this panel when you asked me, because we do need to learn from those past experiences.

But as we do so, we also have to be very careful not to misapply the lessons. To recognize that we’re different. To recognize Iran is different. To recognize that the whole world is different.

And I think that in many ways that’s part of – it’s not the only, but it’s part of the challenge of dealing with Iraq at this point in time, is how do we learn the right lessons from Iraq so that we can apply them properly to Iran rather than taking the wrong lessons and misapplying them to Iran?

TALEBLU: I absolutely want to get to the thing you mentioned, which is near and dear to my heart: the changes in us, the American psyche, unipolarity to multipolarity, non-partisanship to hyper-partisanship.

But before that, Reuel?

GERECHT: I still can’t believe that Ken and I actually served in the agency together and we never ran into each other. I just – I find it just – too big a building…

POLLACK: Well, they kept you in a part of the agency…

GERECHT: Well, no, they let me go to 7E. They let me to go over there on occasion, but, you know, so.

POLLACK: Under guard, I’m sure.

GERECHT: Yes. But, no, we had free reign on your side. You just couldn’t come on our side.

I don’t – I have to say, I told Behnam when he suggested this idea. I just don’t see very many parallels. I don’t see very many parallels. First, we’ll take the American side. I don’t see it. I mean, people have forgotten, but there was sort of a Democratic-Republican consensus on Iraq. Most people were, in fact, in favor of going to war against Iraq.

The discussions of Iraq on the Democratic side sometimes were indistinguishable from discussions on the Republican side. In fact, there – a lot of Republicans I knew back then were worried profoundly that the Republicans were going to flake out on Iraq. So, you know, mutatis mutandis, I just don’t see it now.

I’m uncertain, if anything, that I think the consensus on the Democratic and Republican side is that “Let’s not go there. Let’s not even think about any type of serious, sustained military operation against Iran, let alone a land invasion.” So, I don’t see that.

I also don’t see that many parallels between Iraq and Iran, the two political systems, the inside. So, I’m – one, if nothing else, I think the Iranians are too – I hate to use the word “clever” because everyone overdoes how clever the Iranian regime is. But I don’t see them repeating the mistakes of Saddam Hussein. So, I’m just, I’m pushed hard to imagine a scenario where the United States gets involved in a sustained military conflict with Iran, let alone a military engagement.

I might revise that opinion if we saw the Iranians engage in aggressive behavior in the Persian Gulf where they started, you know, shooting missiles at ships and they did it in a sustained way. And if Donald Trump decided to not do what he did in 2019 with Abqaiq and Khurais and run away from the conflict, and he actually decided to go after Iranian missilery and ships.

I could see a situation where that could drag out or turn into some type of American, perhaps, littoral invasion. But beyond that, I just don’t see it. I think the differences outweigh any of the similarities. Some of which I like, by the way. I hadn’t thought of some of those that I like, but I just…I’m pressed to see it.

TALEBLU: Well, then let me press you on the difference. And I know you’ve written a few psychological profiles in your day, and I’m not going to ask you to compare Clinton to Trump because I think we’d be here all day. But I do – I would like to ask you to compare Khamenei with Saddam. Is one more deterrable than the other? Is one crazier than the other? How would you compare and contrast Saddam then and Khamenei now?

And, Ken, if you have any two cents on this, just on the men who have made the conflict.

GERECHT: Well, I mean I think Saddam was much more aggressive, so.

TALEBLU: Are you taunting Khamenei?

GERECHT: I mean, I don’t – I mean, Khamenei certainly, up until he was proved wrong after October 7th, 2023, he had his desire to operate through proxies and through aggression, but that was cheap man’s imperialism. It certainly wasn’t Saddam who would come at you head on. So, I don’t see it.

And there is an argument out there. I’m not much for hypotheticals, but there is an argument out there that if Qasem Soleimani had not been killed in 2020 that he could have perhaps kept the reins on Siwar and the – you know, Hamas wouldn’t have made its terrible mistake and unleashed the Israeli military.

Again, I don’t know if that’s really plausible, but at least it is an argument that one could consider. And I think if Qasem Soleimani had been there and he made that argument, I’m sure that Khamenei would have agreed with him. So again, I just don’t see the type of appetite. Saddam had a really voracious appetite, and I think people have forgotten that.

POLLACK: Yeah. So, I think it’s a great question. Let me add some points, ’cause I absolutely agree with Reuel, but I might phrase it slightly differently. It’s not just that Saddam was aggressive, he was. He was an egomaniac, absolutely wanted to dominate the Middle East, wanted to destroy the state of Israel. We know this from the tapes of his conversations that we recovered after the invasion of Iraq. So, we literally have him on tape talking about these things. But I’d go a step further, that what made Saddam so…

GERECHT: … it should be said that Ken’s got a book that’s coming out that was that mentioned – did you mention that? That he has a …

TALEBLU: … feel free to plug the book.

GERECHT: He has a very, he has a very short, 800-page book, 1,000 pages with notes, out soon on everything you ever wanted to know about Iraq. So, it…

POLLACK: And then some.

GERECHT: …and then some. OK.

POLLACK: Thank you, Reuel, I appreciate that. Your check is in the mail.

(LAUGHTER)

Saddam was also deeply delusional, right? And, you know, we were always wondering – say we all have our own models of Khamenei in our head, right, we all try to theorize how this guy thinks.

However he thinks – and he does say all kinds of things that do seem to be at variance with reality at different points in time – his actions do seem to be very, very prudent, much more cautious than Saddam’s. He too has a big agenda, but he seems to go about it in a more cautious manner.

Saddam was deeply delusional, right? He would see things and interpret them in absolutely bizarre ways, and ways that were bizarre to other Iraqis and bizarre to those around him, right? We also captured all of his, all of the people around him and extensively debriefed them. And what comes through from those debriefings, some of which are available on the web, but also from the tapes themselves, it’s very clear they don’t agree with him, right?

He is constantly saying, I’m going to do this and it’s going to work out great and nobody’s going to challenge me, or, if the Americans challenge me, I’ll beat them. And you get his cronies – and we always think of Saddam as being so terrifying that no one would contradict him, but there are ways to contradict within a totalitarian system.

And they would ask questions, right, maybe a little bit like Tucker Carlson, right? They’d just ask questions, you know? “Hey, boss, how are we going to deal with the fact that the Americans have X, Y, and Z?” And Saddam would just kind of wipe it away, you know? Utterly meaningless.

And again, unlike Khamenei, he would act on these incredible delusions, right? And that’s what made him so incredibly difficult to deter. And there’s just case after case, and I do go through all of them in my book. Reuel, you’ll be happy to know that. And I go through each one of them.

And again, what’s stunning is how different, how much a variance he was than any typical decision-maker. Khamenei is a nasty – also an empire-builder, an aggressive anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, anti-Arab. You can throw all that stuff out there. But he does not come across – he’s never struck me as being as delusional and as willing to act on his delusions as Saddam was.

TALEBLU: So, in that sense, does that make Khamenei more – I’m going to use the “c” word – containable?

And I would argue that, for the past 46 years with a brief few blips, even empirically under President Carter – our friend Ray Takeyh, in his recent book, did some really good archival work that showed Carter may have authorized something close to even a regime change finding on countering the Islamic Republic in 1979 and 1980. But beyond that, I would say broadly for the past 46 years, U.S. policy has been, more or less, soft to hard containment, just depending on the president and depending on the time.

Is that the way it should be post-12-Day War, moving ahead? Should we be just in the business of containing a threat like this, especially if Khamenei does respond to these signals? He is more cautious; there are more external stimuli that go into Iranian national security-making than Iraqi national security-making? Or should we go big or go home, have a bigger appetite, because, well, this is a person who simply responds to this kind of pressure? Anyone?

GERECHT: Well, I don’t think the United States is in the containment business in the Middle East. So, I don’t see President Trump doing that. I mean, we can – the only aspect of that – and I would argue it, it’s shouldn’t be the preeminent aspect because it’s not the most efficacious, but it’s important. Even with sanctions, the United States has, I think, been pretty lackadaisical on sanctions against the Islamic Republic under Donald Trump.

It’s a real theoretical. Realistically, the United States isn’t going to engage in a containment policy against the Islamic Republic in the Middle East. Could Israel do a bit of that? Yes, it could a bit, but, you know, Israel’s a small country and it can’t sustain itself far away. And Iran, I think, is too far away.

I mean, the Israelis may try to engage in certain nefarious activities inside of the Islamic Republic. They’ve obviously demonstrated with the 12-Day War, and before that they had – they have covert action capacity, but covert action isn’t as rewarding in some – depending upon what you’re trying to do, as it once was. Certainly, if you’re trying to engage in regime change, the Islamic Republic is a big, complicated state, and I think you have to get really, really lucky. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but I think you have to get really lucky.

So, I don’t – I think containment just isn’t in the cards for the United States. The only exception there might be the Persian Gulf because the United States does seriously – is concerned about oil. And the lack of a response by Donald Trump in 2019, I think, they probably wouldn’t let that happen again.

So yes, we’re in the Persian Gulf, we’re going to keep the oil flowing, but beyond that, I don’t see the United States seriously engaged in any type of effort to contain or roll back the Islamic Republic.

TALEBLU: Before we get to Ken on this, I just want to stress for the audience, and hopefully even the Trump administration if they’re listening, what you said. I asked you about going big or going home, and you still talked about containment, and yet you said the Trump administration is not even willing to contain the Islamic Republic of Iran.

If you had to put a label on it, Reuel, what would you say is U.S. policy towards Iran then? Because containment, as you know, has been a bad word in the Iran policy debate. Ken, you wrote a book in 2013 merely on the nuclear side, trying to contain a nuclear Iran, and that debate went off the rails because I don’t think they properly – both the reviewers and the political backlash that followed – did not really understand, I think, what aggressive containment could be and what you outlined in the book. But really, you’re not even offering that here to the president. So, what do you think is on offer?

GERECHT: Presidential whimsy. I mean, I think if you go back and you look at the president’s earliest statements that I could find on the Islamic Republic, they revolve around the hostages and the seizure of the U.S. embassy. And he didn’t, he really didn’t like that. So, I suspect that as that if something transgresses his conception of American dignity, his own dignity, then the president of the United States could strike out. But I don’t think you’re going to see any articulated regime’s change or containment strategy. I don’t think individuals below him would countenance it.

So, I just don’t, I don’t see that developing. I suspect he’ll continue to give somewhat of a green light to the Israelis. But even there, one has to be cautious. I think the Israelis really wanted to continue their bombing campaign of Iran. I would argue that would have been the correct thing to do. They should have gone on for a few more weeks, but obviously the president of the United States disagreed and so he called the Israelis off. So, you know, there’s – I think what I said, “presidential whimsy” is sort of the accurate way to put it.

TALEBLU: Ken?

POLLACK: So, I will start where Reuel ended off, which is to say that, yeah, I don’t see it in the cards for the moment. I don’t-

TALEBLU: Containment?

POLLACK: Containment. I don’t think that this administration is interested in containment because as Reuel pointed out, I don’t think the president is. I think the president wants a deal with the Iranians, and I think that he’s made that very, very clear. That said, I’m a big believer that one of the roles that think tanks need to play is to say what policy should be as opposed to just what it is and what it will be. And in that light, I will say that I think that, absolutely, containment has to be our approach going forward. But I want to back that up. First and foremost, I think that the United States needs to have a long-term policy of regime change in Iran.

And I say that, and I think many of you probably know that I have been a big believer in engagement with Iran at earlier points in my career. I was President Clinton’s Persian Gulf director at the end of the Clinton administration when he was trying very hard to forge a rapprochement with the Iranians. I was supportive of the Obama administration, although I also thought that they were being overly optimistic, and I had a number of fights with them about that.

But nevertheless, I thought it was important to try; it was important to test the proposition of whether or not this regime was interested in having any kind of a better relationship with the United States. I think we’ve repeatedly tested the proposition. Every single American president since Jimmy Carter has tried in some way, shape, or form to reach out to the Iranians. It has ranged from George H.W. Bush saying, “Goodwill begets goodwill,” all the way to Barack Obama being, more or less, willing – and this is a little bit of hyperbole, but not much – to give the Iranians half the Middle East in return for a deal with them. And the Iranians have said no every single time. They are not interested. They define themselves as our enemies.

And unfortunately, I say this with no joy, I think we just have to recognize that is where this regime stands and we have to act accordingly. And given that they’re not interested in any kind of a better relationship with them, I think that we have to pursue a long-term strategy of regime change. Now, that said, as Reuel’s pointed out, I don’t think there’s any appetite for invading Iran. I would not advocate for that, certainly not under current circumstances.

And so therefore, we’re going to wind up in a world of containment, or we should wind up in a world of containment. And I will end by saying I think that that is true even if we do get a new nuclear deal with Iran. And I think it would be very helpful to get a new nuclear deal with Iran. But we have to recognize-

GERECHT: Why?

POLLACK: Because Iran’s nuclear program remains a problem for the region. And the more that we can take it off the table, the better off that we will be. But the problem with Iran goes way beyond the nuclear program, right? And first and foremost, the problem with Iran is its efforts to overthrow our allies all across the Middle East, to drive the United States out of the region, to destroy the state of Israel, to fight us across the board.

And from my perspective, this was one of the greatest failings of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], of the debate around the JCPOA, which is it was hyper-focused on the nuclear issue, as if that were the only problem out there with the Iranians. My feeling at the time, and for those who are interested, I’ve got all kinds of congressional testimony where I kept trying to make this argument, and of course no one was interested, they just wanted to debate the terms of the JCPOA, where I kept saying, look, you know, the JCPOA and its technical terms really aren’t the issue.

What the real issue is is what happens in the region. What are the Iranians going to do in the region and are we willing to fight them and help our allies across the region? That is where we singularly failed. That is why up until October 7, 2023, the Iranians could say, “We’re winning,” right? And unfortunately, most of the people in the region felt that they were correct because we were not fighting them across the region. We were not aiding our allies. We were not pushing back on them.

And that’s why for me, when we talk about a strategy of containment for Iran, again, I think that a nuclear deal would be useful to have. And you can hash that out, Reuel, you know I’m glad to, but again, I don’t want to make too much of that. That’s been the problem all along. The real issue is Iran’s aggressive behavior all across the Middle East. And the real question for us is what we’re willing to do to contain them in that realm.

TALEBLU: So, the good news is that my forthcoming op-ed is not busted by you two, which is called “Make Containment Great Again.” The bad news is it seems like what we’ll substitute for strategy in the short- to medium-term is none of this kinetic stuff, particularly post-12-Day War, is not standing with the Iranian people, plus 1,000 of which have been killed in 2025 at state executions alone, 21,000 arrested since the 12-Day War alone, and repression continuing.

But it seems like the major tool then is sanctions. And again, two men who wrote and lived the Iraq experience, what does the sanctions experience about Iraq tell us about what we need to do with Iran now? How can we use max pressure 2.0 sanctions to prevent Iran from, it’s a borrowed phrase from President Biden, building back better?

POLLACK: Should I start this one? Thank you.

So, I think that both the Iraq experience and the Iran experience need to make us very, very humble when it comes to the role of sanctions. And again, this is something that I’ve seen in American policy over the past 30 or more years, where we’ve increasingly invested in sanctions as being kind of, you know, wonder tools. I won’t say wonder weapons, but certainly wonder tools, that can do all kinds of things.

First, there’s actually a very good academic literature on sanctions that point out that they have very, very limited utility unless they are really well targeted, really well thought through, and bought into by large number, not the entire international community, all the key players for it. But the other point is, at the end of the day, sanctions tend to be a blunt tool. We learned this in Iraq. We had the tightest sanctions regime on Iraq that anyone could imagine. We had UN resolutions, unanimously approved that put comprehensive sanctions on Iraq.

And when we did it, the whole world bought onto it. The French, the Russians, the Chinese, you name it, everyone was interested. And again, in my book, I’ve got all kinds of wonderful quotes from Russians and French and Chinese talking about how important it was to maintain the sanctions, the sanctity of the sanctions. The Iraqis had to comply with all of them, every single one of them, right? And that was all in 1991, 1992, ’93. By 1998, ’99, 100- 2000, the world had tired of the sanctions.

And I think we see the same sanctions fatigue on Iran. The Iranians last month managed to export about 2 million barrels of oil per day. That’s a phenomenal number under what are supposed to be comprehensive American sanctions, right? Once again, we are not applying the sanctions. And at the end of the day, again, the point I’m making is that we can only count on the sanctions to do so much. Sanctions are useful. I’m not saying we should take them off. Taking them off in many ways would be very problematic unless we’re going to get something for them that would be very useful.

But we can’t see sanctions as being the be all and end all of containment. They can be a tool, they can be part of it, they can be useful to it. But there has to be so much more to containment, both in terms of our own actions in trying to block the Iranians, and to an even greater extent in trying to help and support our allies, who are really the ones on the front lines.

TALEBLU: Reuel, do you want to defend the signature economic warfare strategy of FDD, or should I leave the moderator’s role to do that?

GERECHT: I think you should probably do that. I mean, the sanctions have their place, but as general rule of thumbs, if you don’t want to fight, you sanction. And it just usually doesn’t turn out the way you want it to. And as long as China doesn’t want to play ball, and obviously it’s pretty clear now that President Trump views China as a larger issue than he views Iran. So, I just don’t see sanctions producing the result that you want. And I’m not even sure what that result is. I mean, it’s not clear to me what U.S. policy actually is on the Islamic Republic.

So, no, I think it gives you the – it can give you the illusion that you’re doing something quite substantive, but in fact, you’re not. But I agree with Ken that I think you have to have them. If you imagine a world without sanctions, then the Islamic Republic is in a much better place. And I don’t think the argument that was once put forth by my good friend Karim Sadjadpour actually holds. And that is, that if Iran becomes richer, you’re more likely to see rebellion. I think that was a plausible argument maybe at one time, but I don’t think-

POLLACK: I don’t think Karim agrees with that anymore.

GERECHT: Yeah, I think Karim has abandoned that argument. And certainly, the history that we’ve seen in the Islamic Republic since 2009, particularly 2017, I think argues strenuously against that view, but…

TALEBLU: Which by the way, correlates with peak periods of American sanctions. And unlike the sanctions literature, which see me after for the full pro-sanctions seminar, but unlike the literature which says that this actually bridges the gap between state and society, it actually kept the gap wide and widened the gap between state and society. And in the place of actually having to fight, Donald Trump in term one scored immense wins for the strength of the U.S. dollar as a weapon of war without only having to fire a shot. And in term one, when he did fire a shot, he, as you guys mentioned a few moments ago in the panel, handicapped the regime’s axis of resistance by taking out Qasem Soleimani.

So, I don’t think max pressure, which at the heart of it was sanctions, really threw the president off. I think he did it once, he could do it again. To me, it reads like a question of political will and priorities. And in a world in which you have two months back-to-back of 2 million barrels of oil a day, a lot of congressional and Senate offices, Republican offices, don’t know this, don’t have this data. There are a lot of people that think, like, max pressure is going swimmingly like it was in term one.

I actually wonder out loud, does President Trump know this? That his signature economic policy, which in term one handicapped the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, and brought the most pro-American, pro-Israeli population to his side, is not working in term two anywhere at all it was in term one? That’s just a rhetorical question.

Now, speaking of victory laps, speaking of victory laps, post-12-Day War, my big fear and the reason we had this event today is not just because I like history and you guys have lived through this, is because of a sense of a premature victory lap that I fear President Trump may be taking. You know, in fact, we have lots of members of the Iranian diaspora here who don’t even want a containment policy. They want something more aggressive. They want something, you know, more consistent with American values. They want regime change.

So, taking a premature victory lap here, does this help Khamenei? Doesn’t he know that he can just wait out the president, you know? In a world where he’s not like Saddam, to constantly test the barrier of containment, isn’t the reason why we aren’t having a repeat of 2019 not because of the strength of America’s lax containment? Isn’t it just because of the wisdom of Khamenei not to push back after, you know, you’ve been beaten on the battlefield? And has our enemy read us that well?

POLLACK: I will say, unfortunately, I am afraid that that is correct. I’m afraid of the exact same thing. You know, the president has declared the Iranian nuclear program has been obliterated. So, we’re done. Go home. I don’t know. I think we’ve done a tremendous amount of damage to it. But from my perspective, the question was only ever about what would the Iranians do afterwards? Would they reconstitute? You know-

TALEBLU: Can you tell us something about Iraq here?

POLLACK: I was just about to. Thank you, Behnam, for that. But yes, of course, this is a wonderful opportunity to use an example from Iraq that I think is critically important here, which is in 1981 – some in the audience are old enough to remember this, most of you aren’t. But in 1981, the Israelis struck the Osirak reactor, Tuwaitha, Iraq. Brilliant military operation that no one believed they could do at the time. And of course they did it.

And at the time, it was widely, universally, believed that in doing so, Israel had obliterated Iraq’s nuclear program. And even more than that, the widespread belief was that in 1990, the reason that the world did not have to confront a nuclear armed Saddam was because of the Osirak strike in 1981.

What we learned afterwards, both after 1991, when the inspectors went into Iraq and started finding out the truth, but even to a greater extent after 2003, when we had access to all of the Iraqi records and all the scientists, was the exact opposite. That before 1981, Iraq had a nuclear program. It was designed to produce a bomb, it was bad program, but it was a low priority for Saddam. He was putting his resources elsewhere. There were all kinds of issues in the program.

After 1981, he was absolutely infuriated by the strike and started pouring resources into the program, to the extent that by 1991, the Iraqis were somewhere. And again, the estimates vary, and it depends on who you speak to, but they were somewhere between six months and three years or so from having a nuclear weapon, right? Much, much closer than anyone realized at the time.

My colleagues at the agency [CIA], I guess Reuel’s too, but my side of the house, all thought the Iraqis were 10 years or more away from having a nuclear weapon. And as I said, we found out afterwards it was more like somewhere between six months to maybe three years. And the only reason we didn’t face a nuclear Saddam after he invaded Kuwait was that he was too stupid to wait until he had a nuclear weapon before he invaded Kuwait, right?

And this has always been my great concern with the Iranians – and we’ve seen the Iranians say this, and to some extent they’re probably playing into it deliberately, but they’ve consistently said – they haven’t done it so far – “If we get bombed, we are going to withdraw from the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] and we are going to build nuclear weapons.” Now, again, they haven’t done it. They have gotten bombed. They haven’t withdrawn from the NPT. They do continue to talk about it.

At this point in time my fear is that they won’t withdraw from the NPT because doing so would trigger a new round of attacks on them, but they mill- may still wind up doing so, right?

This, to me, is just the kind of first evidence that the Iranian threat is not finished and that we can’t take a victory lap. But again, just to finish off the point, I want to come back to the point that I keep making, because again, I think that we overly focus on the Iranian nuclear program, which is that the principal problem that Iran poses to the United States, to all of our allies, frankly to the world, is its outrageous aggressive behavior all across the region.

And for those in the audience and the diaspora, I will add, obviously is a tragedy for the Iranian people that this regime continues to rule in Tehran. The problem there is that it may require a lot more to prevent this regime from continuing to rule in Tehran than will be likely to prevent them from continuing to act aggressively beyond their borders.

TALEBLU: Reuel, before we get to counter-proliferation versus counter-regime, ’cause there’s lots of lessons there because countering the Islamic Republic is not a scientific equation or a technical matter, it’s a political matter – I’d love your insights on that – but just on the intelligence landscape, I mean, the 12-Day War really showed us how penetrated the Islamic Republic’s military and political and security apparatus actually is. And potentially, that penetration is a major deterrent to prevent Iran from being able to build back better.

I mean, I don’t know the degree to which Iraq’s security apparatus was penetrated after ’91 or throughout the 1990s. Ken, I think the U.S. may have encouraged a whole series of coups and whatnot and tried to flirt with elements of the Iraqi military, almost all to no avail, if I am not mistaken.

But what can you tell us about the intelligence landscape then versus now, what you can in terms of covert operations and the susceptibility of these two very different autocratic systems to this other important element of American national security tradecraft?

GERECHT: It’s good questions. I mean, one, I think on Iraq, I think we were dependent upon walk-ins. I don’t think the agency had much at all.

And I always liked to tell the story: I had a colleague of mine who was responsible for delivering the liaison information to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, and every time he delivered the liaison information for the battlefront, he would come home, have a big stiff drink, and hope the Iranians broke through. So much for proximity.

You know, I have to say I don’t know actually how good the Israeli intelligence was. It was obviously quite good for certain covert actions.

(CROSS-TALK)

TALEBLU: Like building a drone base in Iran.

GERECHT: Yeah, yeah. And you’ve got to always keep in your mind there are differences between covert action intelligence and human intelligence, where you’re trying to penetrate a – an organization, or be it a nuclear program or, say, the ruling circles in the Islamic Republic.

I’m skeptical that the Israelis have good intel inside of Khamenei’s inner circle or that they may even have a – good penetrations inside of the nuclear program, but I could be wrong. They certainly had excellent covert action penetrations at just the right junctures for allow them to, for example, have a very effective assassination campaign. And their technical intelligence was certainly good enough to allow them to target certain sites.

And I suspect all in all, if you were to compare American and Israeli intelligence penetrations, the Israelis would win by far, and that’s because the Israelis take this threat much more seriously than we do. If you don’t take a threat that seriously, then you’re not going to take the risks involved, which are inherent in the profession. You’re not going to take those risks because you know a lot of people could end up dead.

So, I don’t see that changing on the American side. The Israeli side obviously – however good the Israelis were before, they need to be better now. And I’m sure both the IDF and Mossad know that.

And we’re only going to see the proof, you know, proof in the pudding. If we keep seeing Iranian scientists whacked, then I suspect the deterrent effect on that, the convulsive effect inside of the Iranian system will be profound and it will further elongate the Iranian capacity to reach a nuke. I would say this: I also think the Iranian capacity to cause mayhem was, in some circles, overblown. I think it was exaggerated both with the Hezbollah, which hardly proved itself the A-Team of dark operations, and just take the Iranian regime.

I mean, they’re going – they’re hiring criminal organizations. Both the French, the Germans, the Brits, and the Americans sent the Iranians a warning about using criminal organizations to assassinate and kidnap people. In my mind, that is translated in they’re not doing a very good job on their own. I mean, if you’re out there trying to contract a criminal organizations to kill people and kidnap them, that means one, you don’t have the capacity in-house to do that and two, you’re obviously trying to get a little bit more buffer up. Not good enough.

And that we may have – some people may have over-estimated the capacity for the Iranians to do dark operations outside of the Middle East. I think in certain Arab countries, they’re OK. I wouldn’t get overly excited about it. I think the Iranians are dependent upon the Hezbollah to do a lot of things in the Arab world, because the Iranians have a way of alienating Arabs, and they need Hezbollah as an important cultural buffer. But outside, I mean, Iran should have engaged in a bit more terrorism by now.

TALEBLU: Let’s not have that statement out of context.

GERECHT: Should have killed a few more Jews.

TALEBLU: Or that.

GERECHT: And that hasn’t happened yet, and I think that tells us something.

TALEBLU: Ken, no comment?

POLLACK: I’ll leave that one alone.

TALEBLU: All right. I do want to go back to something you both mentioned very early on, which is a, I think, a major contrast that we all agree on, the bipartisanship and the American unipolarity then and the multipolarity now.

What does each conflict tell us about us? Are there real limits? Even as three think tankers here who are prescribing, hopefully, what would be the next generation of Iran policy, what does our knowledge of America have to tell us about the limits of what we can prescribe? Again, Iraq, the Iraq case then, bipartisanship, American unipolarity, and the Iran case now, hyper-partisanship, and multipolarity.

GERECHT: You go there.

(LAUGHTER)

POLLACK: Gee, thanks. So, again, I think this is the hardest. And of course, it’s the hardest for folks like us who don’t study the United States of America. So, I’m going to put it in the frame of, you know, what I saw then, what I’ve seen since, in terms of American support for foreign policy.

So, first point is, I could actually make a case that there remains, and I’m going to use the word very carefully, “bipartisan support” for a tough Iran policy, right? The problem is that the parties themselves are fragmented.

So, there are Democrats who are very much in favor of a tough Iran policy. There are still Republicans who are in favor of a tough Iran policy. I get to speak to both Democrats and Republicans who are unhappy with the president’s policy, who feel the same way that I think all three of us do, which is, you know, he’s looking to cut a deal, and a deal pretty much just on the nuclear front, and that leaves them very, very concerned.

The problems that each of them has is that the Democrats have their progressive wing, and the Republicans have their MAGA wing, or part of the MAGA wing, neither of which have any interest. The MAGA wing will just follow the president, and the progressives believe that the United States is the problem, not Iran at all.

So, again, I could make a case that there is still a bipartisan. The problem is that it’s not clear that that’s the right way to think about American political support for Iran policy. But from my perspective, again, having worked for three or four presidents, and having observed any number since then what always strikes me is how important and influential the president is on any issue, but particularly on foreign policy. Right?

If the president wants to go before the American people and make a case for almost anything, the American public will follow their president. One of the moments that was most interesting for me, kind of striking, was when Barack Obama in 2013 couldn’t get the American public and the American Congress to support his Syria policy, in large part because no one believed he had a Syria policy.

For those who remember, this is when Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons on his own people, and the Obama administration kind of suddenly decided, yeah, we’re going to do something about that. We want to use force. And there was kind of a revolt across the country and in the Congress.

But again, what was fascinating about the revolt was it wasn’t a, “No, no, no, don’t use force.” It was very much a, “Give us a strategy that deals with the wider Syrian war and show us how using force to prevent Assad using chemical warfare is part of that strategy,” right? And so, again, it was the American people actually saying to their president, “We’re looking for a policy. Give us something we can get behind and we’ll get behind you.” And it was when there was a just complete absence of that, that the public was kind of left to say, “Well, then we’re not going to support that.” But again, I’ve seen time and again, policies that seemed utterly impossible or that ran contrary to the public opinion.

TALEBLU: (OFF-MIKE)

POLLACK: Exactly. Six months later, 12 months later, the president can turn them around. And so, again, I think that this is a matter of what does the president want to do? That’s why I agree with Reuel that I think it unlikely we’re going to get a policy of robust or aggressive containment toward Iran, because I don’t think that this president has any interest in doing so. So, he’s not out there building the public support for it.

GERECHT: I might just add two quick things briefly, please. One, I’m not sure now President Trump can generate a bipartisan policy on Iran. I think we may have gone past that point.

I would say that given what has happened since October 7, 2023, and what happened in the 12-Day War, the president of the United States has sort of open running room. Now, he’s not going to get a bipartisan policy, but if he wanted to sort of create, in the short term, his own policy that could be fairly aggressive, he could probably do it. Now, whether it could achieve the ends that you would want it to achieve by the end of his term is a different issue. But I do think that bipartisan policy on Iran is going to be pretty bloody hard to obtain.

TALEBLU: We have a few minutes left before we turn it over to the distinguished audience for questions. So, get your questions ready. We’ll try to grab as many as we can. We’ll have about 15 minutes max for questions because we have a hard out of 3:45.

But because I’m the moderator and an Iranian-American, I get to have the last words about the future of the Iranian people. Like any authoritarian regime that loses a war abroad, the Islamic Republic has come home to crack skulls. You know, we’ve been seeing that every day on social media coming out of Iran.

One interesting parallel, and I mean nothing by it politically, is the encouragement that President Bush Sr. gave to Iraqis to rise up after 1991, and the encouragement that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been giving throughout the end of the 12-Day War and in the political space that followed.

What would you say about this encouragement? Is it wise? Can it help drive American policy? Can it help change the government in Iran? Is it just opportunistic cover for a potential – another limited conflict with the Islamic Republic? Or does this represent a fundamentally different consensus in Israel that you can’t manage this problem. You can’t contain this problem. You have to fundamentally tackle the root of this problem.

So, how would you compare and contrast both Bush and Netanyahu’s overtures – public overtures, kind of inviting the next round of anti-regime protests in each period?

POLLACK: I want to segue to you. So, I think it’s a great question, and I think it’s also another great example, great analogy from the Iraq experience that I take away from that, which is don’t do it unless you’re prepared to support it.

That was the mistake that President Bush Sr. made, and I’m an enormous fan of President Bush Sr. I loved working for him. I think he was just a phenomenal president in any number of ways, which is not to say he didn’t make mistakes. And I think one of the worst mistakes was to encourage the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then to fail to support them. I think that was the great tragedy of that moment.

And the administration had not thought through how it would support them, which made it even harder to do so when they suddenly had the opportunity. And when they had the opportunity, they chose not to do so.

I think that if you’re going to tell people to rise up against their government, George Will once said that “it is fundamentally irresponsible to will the ends without willing the means.” And I think that that should absolutely apply to people living under horrible autocratic regimes. If you’re going to encourage them to rise up, you need to be ready to support them.

And I think that, again, as I’ve said, I think the United States needs to have a policy of long-term regime change in Iran. One of the great questions that I’ve always had, and I’ve talked about this with Reuel from time to time, and so this is my segue over to him, is whether, especially after the 12-Day War and after the wider war that went before it, whether we actually can help the Iranian people to throw off these shackles.

GERECHT: Yeah. First, I would agree everything that Ken just said. I thought it was perverse to ask the Iraqi people to rise up and then to watch the Shia get slaughtered, and we did nothing. I mean, it was just perverse.

You know, I think Ray Takeyh would forgive me for me saying that. I mean, literally every single day, Ray and I, we talk in the morning and go over the Persian press, and we talk about…

TALEBLU: Family must love that.

GERECHT: We talk about regime change on most days. You know, it’s hard. I could think up a variety of things to try, but all of them are dependent upon an American administration, a political system, that is willing to endure failure because that’s what you’re going to do for a while.

You’re going to fail and fail over again, and it’s going to be messy, and it’s going to be bloody, blah-blah-blah-blah. So, unless you’re willing to accept that as a given, then I’m not sure you should start.

TALEBLU: And last question, because I really want to end with something electric and fun fact, the audience may not know this. In your pursuit of, or support for, the cause of liberation in Iraq, you’ve dabbled, both of you, with elements of the Iraqi diaspora. And both of you have written very, very different, but very interesting obituaries of Ahmed Chalabi.

And without any political parallel or any moral equivalence to any Iranian figure inside the country or in the diaspora, or in the opposition, what advice do you have for the Iranian diaspora today? And how do you make sense of any kind of political gains or losses they’ve made, compared to what you saw with the Iraqis, particularly ’98 to 2003?

That’s really a grenade.

GERECHT: You go first.

POLLACK: I won’t touch the Ahmed Chalabi thing because, you know, my problems with Ahmed Chalabi were about Ahmed, right? They’re not about-

TALEBLU: The man?

POLLACK: Yes, the man. That’s literally what I wrote about him and said about him on a number of occasions.

I actually think that a diaspora has an important role to play, but I think that it has to be a combination of different things. First, it is about building political support for a set of policies, which has to happen over the long term, and has to be very much grounded in both political realities here, and strategic realities in the country itself.

It is way too easy, I saw this happen over and over again with Iraq, for people who just weren’t interested in supporting the Iraqi opposition for any number of reasons to take, you know, some plan that someone had and said, “This is ridiculous, this will never work, therefore, we should not try at all.” Right?

And my feeling was always, “Well, yeah, OK, that’s ridiculous, but maybe we can come up with something that’s more realistic. And shouldn’t we look at that?” And in those internal bureaucratic battles, you know, being unrealistic is just death for that kind of stuff. So, being thinking long term, being very, very realistic. That’s one role.

Another role is to think about what the alternative can look like. What the day after in Iran can look like. I think you’re probably all aware, again, from the Iraq example of the “Future of Iraq” group that the State Department put together in the run up to the Iraq war. Now, people have made more of that than it actually was.

But what it was and what it could have been very helpful for, had the administration chosen to employ it, was a group of people having conversations about what Iraq could, should look like afterwards. That then could have fed into plans for how you go about doing things or simply identifying people, right?

There was a real role that could have been played by that group of people in those circumstances, looking at those problems. And I said, the Bush administration, for a whole variety of reasons, all of which I talk about in my book, chose to just disregard.

But, again, the idea I think is a very good one. And the more that the diaspora can start to think about, OK, what would a different Iran look like, that is also a very, very helpful thing. It’s often very, very useful to be able to contrast what exists now with what a realistic better could look like, because right now, you’ve got nothing.

You’ve simply got the bad and a bunch of pipe dreams. And realistic bad winds up beating pipe dreams. If you can come up with a realistic better, now you’re cooking with gas.

TALEBLU: Reuel, any last words before we open it up to the audience?

GERECHT: I would say there’s one I just have to mention this with Ahmed. I had a lot of different issues with him, but I will remain eternally grateful in that I was going to a meeting in Baghdad with some Iraqi Shia, and I get a telephone call from Ahmed. And Ahmed said, “You know, I really wouldn’t go to that meeting.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, it might be your last meeting.” And so, I am indebted to that man for that telephone call.

You know, I have dealt with the Iranian diaspora in my former life. And as a general rule of thumb, I always found out that I thought that covert action programs worked better if you had fewer Iranian expatriates working on them. I don’t mean to be mean. It’s a nightmare. It’s just an unending nightmare.

(LAUGHTER)

That doesn’t mean you don’t do it, but I think you have to keep your expectations low. You have to have exceptional patience. You need to have case officers with the languages and then be just prepared for profound frustration. But again, that doesn’t mean you don’t do it. It just means you have to come into it with low expectations. And if you have little successes, build on them.

TALEBLU: All right. On that inspirational note, 10 minutes for questions. Let’s take two at a time. Navid and Holly, and then we’ll move this way. Just introduce yourself and where you’re from.

MOHEBBI: Thank you, Behnam. Thank you FDD for this amazing event. I’m Navid Mohebbi. I’m a DC-based Iran analyst and I have a question for Ken. You mentioned that the U.S. needs to have a long-term strategy of regime change in Iran. And my question is that: what policies should be included in those strategies that we haven’t tried yet? If you ask Iranian – Iranians and Iranian dissidents and Iranian diaspora, they tell you that they want the United States and the West to provide maximum support for the Iranian people so that they can fight off the regime.

They mentioned that – they point out to the fact that the Iranian regime, the Islamic Republic, is providing extensive support to its proxies to fight U.S. – United States and Israel. They mentioned the fact that for example, 14 years ago Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said, “Assad must go.” He stood by them. And just last month President Trump gave credit to Erdogan for achieving regime change in Syria. What’s your take on that? Do you think the United States should support the same level of support that Iranian regime is providing to its proxies to the Iranian opposition? Do you think that works?

TALEBLU: And let’s take it two at a time. So, we had Holly, we’re going to bunch it.

DAGRES: Hi, Holly Dagres, The Washington Institute. I want to peel back another layer of your last comments on the diaspora. And I was hoping you guys, from your approach, can you tell us what the Iranian diaspora has been doing right and wrong in these past few years?

TALEBLU: So, two comments. Basically, the support, and right and wrong of the diaspora.

POLLACK: So, I’ll take Navid’s. So first, I’ve been writing about what a regime change policy should look like in Iran. At least I think I wrote one with Ray [Takeyh] in 2010. I think that’s the first time I wrote one. But I’ve done it very consistently, and again, from my perspective, it needs to be across the board. So yes, absolutely sanctions, but also enforced sanctions, right? Also support to our allies in the region, fighting back on the Iranian aggression across the region.

But I’ll pick up the piece that you particularly mentioned – that you already mentioned. I, actually, I’ve been saying for a long time, I think the United States should be at the very least exploring how to support all kinds of groups inside of Iran for pretty much the same reason that you tried out, Navid, which is the Iranians do it to all of our allies. So why the hell shouldn’t we be doing it to them? You know, this strikes me as that the parallelism is pretty severe out there, and it is clear that there are a lot of unhappy Iranians.

And I think, you know, that was made gallingly true in 2009 when I think the Obama administration just abandoned – another instance of, in effect, calling on people to rise up or having done so and then abandoning them. I think ever since then, we’ve been at least wondering what would be possible without having really tried to explore what could be possible. And again, this would require us also to start working with a whole variety of our own allies in terms of what kind of support could be provided.

So yeah, my feeling is it should be across the board. And this is how you contain them, by putting, you know, put tremendous pressure on them through containment. It’s what I refer to as an aggressive containment regime as Behnam pointed out before.

GERECHT: Yeah, the only thing I’d add to that is, I agree with what Ken said, and my only counsel would be, whatever you’re going to do, start it now because it’s going to take a lot longer than you think it will. Whatever you’re going to do, it’s going to take a while. So, don’t hesitate. Start, and start small and then get bigger. If you succeed, get bigger. Even if you fail, get bigger. So.

TALEBLU: And Holly’s-

GERECHT: The diaspora? That one’s easy. I think the diaspora has served an enormous purpose, an enormous positive purpose. And that is, it always checks the regime when it lies. And it informs family and friends back inside of Iran what reality is in the United States or in France or the United Kingdom. And it just, it provides other conduits of information that just allow reality checks. And I think the diaspora does, even though the diaspora is very frustrating if you have to work with them, that their existence, their informational value has, I think has been very, very healthy.

TALEBLU: Ambassador Jeffery, Nahal, and then Laurie.

JEFFREY: Thanks. We’re looking at containment from the standpoint of after 1991 with Saddam. I would argue, and Ken, we could disagree, that all in all, that very vigorous with large amounts of military actions, not a lot of force, but actions, was pretty effective, minus sanctions slippage in keeping Saddam contained, unlike what we did with Iran, which was 20 years of failures.

So, my question is: even though these guys are driven by whimsy and they hate the word containment, the Trump administration is pretty active right now in Gaza. They’ve been active in Yemen. They’ve been active in Syria. They’ve been active in Lebanon. They seem to be trying to be active in Iraq. Where regionally would you have them doing different things, to do a containment strategy, than they’re doing right now?

TALEBLU: Nahal. And then for the – right, before you go, just because we’re getting close on time, Nahal. And then we’ll have them answer, and then Laurie and Fatima and we’ll see if there’s time for more after that.

TOOSI: OK. I’m Nahal Toosi of Politico. Thank you guys so much for doing this. It does seem like the president is interested in regime change somewhere right now, which is Venezuela. And so, I was just curious. I’m not asking you to be experts in Venezuela, but are you concerned-

TALEBLU: You’re supposed to play one on TV.

TOOSI: But are you concerned at all about how, first of all, we’re going into that? And secondly, are you worried that it’s going to perhaps draw attention away from places like Iran and the Middle East, where obviously you guys have very strong feelings about regime change? And also, one quick thing, if you want to address it. Is Reza Pahlavi the uniting diaspora figure that he aspires to be and says he is for the Iranians?

TALEBLU: Way to ask the non-Iranians on the panel.

(LAUGHTER)

We’ll talk about that after.

(LAUGHTER)

So, you guys want to-

POLLACK: I’ll start, and I’ll take Jim’s. So first, Jim, I would characterize containment of Iraq slightly differently. Say – I think you’re right. Containment of Iraq succeeded, but it was failing, right? That’s the problem we got to in 2000, 2001, was that it had succeeded, but there was no expectation that it would continue to work thereafter. In terms of your main question, though, to me, I would actually say, you know, where would I like them to do more better? Pretty much across the board. I think you’re right. They’re doing some stuff with Iraq right now.

You know, I think you and I could, in a heartbeat, come up with a list of more they could do there. For me, Lebanon. Patricia, you know, you’re in the audience. Lebanon, to me, is the biggest one of all. Lebanon is such an opportunity right now. And I’m glad that we’re doing something for Lebanon, but what we are doing for Lebanon is a pittance compared to what we should be doing. And what if we did do, I think could absolutely transform Lebanon.

I think we have a real opportunity right now to disarm Hezbollah, to eliminate it as a political and military force in Lebanon, which would just be phenomenal. I think we should be handling the Houthis differently. I think that we should be handling-

GERECHT: What would you do with Houthis?

POLLACK: That’s a great one. I would be backing all of the opposition movements to the Houthis. I’d like to, you know, for me – Yemen. I’ve been saying this for about eight years now. Yemen is a place where we should be employing the Reagan Doctrine, right? There are, you know, the Houthis are only in control of half the country. They are having tremendous difficulty ruling the country. You know, they love the war against Israel because it diverts attention from it.

And what we’ve seen is when they are challenged on the ground, they go into a defensive crouch. That is their biggest problem. The mistake we made in 2018, 2019 was pulling back the Emiratis from Hudaydah. We had a tremendous opportunity there. I’m not going to go into too much detail because we’re out of time, but to simply say, I think across the board, there is more that we can and should be doing.

TALEBLU: And Nahal’s question on Venezuela?

GERECHT: I’ll defer to Elliott Abrams.

TALEBLU: Who was supposed to be here.

GERECHT: Yeah, so I’ll pass on that. I mean, I don’t think the thinking about – I mean, it’s a good question. The United States really has a hard time doing more than one thing at any given moment, even though we are a superpower. But I don’t think the Venezuelan issue probably will get in the way of the Iran issue.

You know, I would just say this to Jim’s question. I would, and I agree with what Ken said, though I am little curious about some of the details with the Houthis. I would invest more in Iraq, a lot more, because that’s where the Iranians have to play, and I think we have a good chance to play a lot better there. And they are going to have their sixth election, and a lot of folks in the United States and Washington in particular, tend to forget that. So, I would work really hard on Iraq.

TOOSI: What about Pahlavi?

GERECHT: Oh, see, you have to forgive me. I still have a tendency to call him Baby Shaw.

TALEBLU: That’s not nice.

GERECHT: I know it’s not nice. It’s not nice. And I said you have to forgive me. It’s just that we go way back. You know, I leave that to the Iranian community to decide. I did witness in the past – I saw some of the nostalgia for him in action. It was quite impressive. I saw in my former life, I saw Iranians risk their lives to engage in that nostalgia. So, I don’t belittle that. And the rest of that, again, that’s an internal Iranian debate, and I’ll stay out of it.

TALEBLU: I would love to have Fatima and Laurie’s questions, but I think we’re running up really tightly against time. Just footnote on that last thing, don’t forget about his name: Omid Sarlak. A young Iranian kid, at the height of his life, was actually a monarchist dissident who was killed in that grotesque fashion. So, things really do come full circle.

Thank you, Nahal. Thank you, Holly. Thank you, Ambassador Jeffery. Thank you, Navid. And most importantly, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming today, and join me in thanking Reuel Marc Gerecht and Kenneth Pollack for a really insightful discussion. Thank you.

You can follow FDD on Instagram, Twitter, all these fancy things I don’t have, YouTube. But there will be a livestream up on the website shortly. Thank you so much.

END