Behnam Ben Taleblu Looking at Iran from the Outside In Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Sarah: Afternoon and welcome to yet another extremely topical and extremely timely EMET webinar where we explore the complex realities that both Israel and the United States are up against. After 12 days of intensive conflict by the state of Israel and three days of intense B-2 bombing and GBU-57, massive ordinance penetrating by the United States into Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan, where some considerable destruction was made, President Trump announced late Monday night that there would be a ceasefire between Iran and Israel. This was of course shortly after the Iranians launched shortened medium range missiles over the Al-Udeid air base. By Tuesday morning, however, just three and a half hours after President Trump announced the ceasefire, the Islamic Republic of Iran had already violated the terms of the ceasefire launching a ballistic missile into Northern Israel. The waning hours between the president’s announcement and the ceasefire, four other Israelis from Beersheba were murdered, leaving the death toll of Israeli civilians killed by Iranian missiles at 28.

As we all know, there were about 3000 Israelis civilians that had been wounded, and more than 9,000 people had been displaced from their homes that had been Israelis that were badly destroyed or damaged. The Islamic Republic did aim their missiles into neighborhoods such as where I am sitting right now in Central Israel. While the Israeli defense forces targeted the IRGC, the heads of the Iranian military, and the nuclear scientists and nuclear facilities. This escalation has left many questioning not only the immediate stability in the region, but also the larger geopolitical ramifications. Iran’s ability to quickly retaliate following the ceasefire announcement demonstrates both their preparedness and resilience. The international community, particularly Western allies, are closely monitoring this to see whether this momentary cease fire will hold or fracture under the weight of further unresolved tensions.

First of all, I do want to thank all of you in our audience for tuning in once again and thank you so much for all of your flexibility. There is no one better to discuss what exactly is happening both inside and outside of Iran. Can the Iranians easily reconstitute their nuclear weapons program? Benham Ben Taleblu has closely monitored this. He’s a senior director of FDD’s Iran program where he oversees both 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 for well over a decade, Benham has supported FDD’s Iran program as a senior fellow, research fellow, and senior Iran analyst. Prior to his joining FDD Benham worked on non-proliferation issues at an arms control think tank in Washington. Benham closely tracks everything. He has testified before various committees in the United States Congress, the Canadian Parliament, and the United Kingdom’s House of Commons. His analysis have been quoted in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Fox News, AP, Agence France-Presse, Politico, Axios among others.

He’s contributed or co-authored articles for the Wall Street Journal, foreign Affairs, foreign Policy, political Europe, Fox News, The Hill, War on the Rocks, Newsweek, and the National Interest. He’s appeared constantly on PBS NewsHour, BBC News, Fox News, CNN International, CBS News, C-SPAN, France 24, i24 News, and Deutsche Welle. He’s earned his MA with honors and international relations from the University of Chicago and his BA in International Affairs and Middle East studies from the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is a wonderful friend of mine and above EMET’s and is truly a joy to have on.

So then a preliminary US intelligence report found that the US and Israeli military strikes and Iran only set these sites back for a few months. You’re quoted in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal saying the regime is wounded, but still lethal. Any victory lap now despite the real successes, the real military successes would still be premature. Will the United States together with Israel ensure that there’s longevity to these military successes or is this a piece that might endure for more than just a few months?

Benham Ben Taleblu: Well, thank you Sarah, and the greetings to all virtually joining us today. Tuning in again to EMET’s, I say again because please pardon the logistical error, getting the time zone wrong. That’s entirely my fault, but it’s always a pleasure and honor to be with you all. Thank you for giving me again, this opportunity to share my analysis with you at a pretty critical time when I’m sure you guys like me are pretty sleep deprived, monitoring everything coming in from every direction, friend, family member, acquaintance, multiple continents, multiple news stories. There is a lot going on, and let me delve right into it with this BDA, which is the three letter acronym du jour for several days now. Coming out of Washington, BDA stands for battle damage assessment. There can be initial or preliminary ones within 24 hours of any kind of military or kinetic event, and then a more detailed one that tends to come in three to four days later.

The inputs of these BDAs are various streams and sources of intelligence that America or any other country’s intelligence professionals put together when they’re putting together an assessment. In this case, there was an exclusive, but a leak at the same time as an exclusive to CNN, which first had at least four people unnamed but on the record, sharing the skepticism that one can only infer from their commentary about the efficacy of the US involvement in this larger Israel Iran 12-day war. We are now allegedly living in day one and a half two of this ceasefire if you can even call it that following that 12-day Israeli Ron War. But the climax or the peak of it involved not Israel, but the United States of America entering decisively almost copy pasting some of the tactics that you see from Israeli military campaigns in the Cold War period against Arab states where military action is short and sharp, but also decisive.

Despite I think five presidents now in the US going back to the post-Cold War period saying the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot get a nuclear weapon, and at least I think four of them using some lingo related to all options on the table, I think we now have considerable proof that Donald Trump meant that all options were on the table, tried diplomacy, stuck with max pressure, and then meaningfully entered with military force. Now, the debate that you’re hearing and seeing with intelligence professionals as well as the former US government people, as well as lots of political talking heads, is most unfortunately being also broadcast and understood in Tehran. For example, Iran’s semi-official test name news agency with close ties to these Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was all too happy to take the news screenshotted and copy pasted from some of this western media reporting that was almost hyping up the fact that America Strike was uneffective to basically say, look, even Trump’s own intel organizations say these strikes were uneffective and this redound to the status dividend of the regime, which helps to bolster back in the medium to long term their security.

Because all of these things that the regime cares about are ultimately turned back to status and security, ideology and strategy. These two things are two sides of the same coin. To unpack the impact of that battle damage assessment, you have to unfortunately spend a little bit of time again, no one has read the full thing, but you have to spend a little bit of time going through the claims made in each of the reports, particularly the CNN one because it was the first one to really see that there was an issue here, that this was actually a low confidence assessment, that there had been other assessments as well, potentially even from Israeli intelligence. Even in the case where the US Intel drew from clear intelligence sources like signals intelligence, popularly known as SIGINT, which is the chatter, for example, of Iranian commanders talking with one another, it is increasingly appearing that one reason why this may have been a low confidence assessment that the US only set back the nuclear program by a couple of months here, is because the chatter that it may have picked up from Iranian military officials like most authoritarian regimes, the mid to high level chatter of military professionals once their military assessment has to filter up through their system to people of political grades who make national security decision making is designed to put the best spin on it, is basically designed to, in Persian, we use the word [foreign word], which is to rub yogurt on it or to swipe it under the rug or to say, look, nothing ever happened.

That was not just apparently consistent with the public diplomacy of the regime. That based on the signals intelligence that the US had was consistent with the internal chatter. But this deception operation for the Iranian military officials to save their own skins in their own authoritarian Islamist system, to dupe the next class of political elites and individuals, instead of duping the next class of their own political elites, it appears in the short term, was reflected in the reporting of our own intelligence professionals. That, I think, if this is true is I would say a strategic mistake and that’s putting it very politely. So too is of course the pushback that makes this very political going after it because it’s CNN or going after a particular reporter, if there is going to be any qualm to be had with these stories and with these events, they need to be taken on head on and only fact on.

To that end, you can critique the CNN report by looking at, for example the fact that the US struck three facilities, Esfahan, which has above ground and below ground, Natanz, which has one above ground one below ground, and Fordow, which is exclusively underground. But the way the CNN reporting spun the story was to say that the only parts of the US strike that were successful were the above ground parts. How does a facility that is 300 feet underground not be successful and only be successful when it’s above ground, when there is no above ground part? There are so many little issues like this that because potentially the news agency did not have access to the full information that the intel org did, really does look like a pump and dump leak operation, and the speed of that pump and dump leak operation does not run down to the political left or the political right.

It unfortunately hurts America and America’s standing and America’s deterrence and the efficacy of America’s military tools whose awe inspiring deterrence is designed to help prevent their use and prevents conflict in the first place. So these things unfortunately encourage our adversary to play to the edge because they represent our divisions. I’m sorry we had to trod over such political terrain to get to this conclusion, but this is as much of a political war as it is a shooting war. That one thing I’ve been stressing throughout this entire conflict has been the Islamic Republic of Iran understands that it is conventionally outgunned, conventionally outgunned against a regional superpower like the Israelis and conventionally outgunned against a global superpower like the Americans. So what then is their strategy? Their strategy is to win the narrative war, the media war. Unfortunately, things like this enable their strategy.

Sarah: So we had seen that in the first four months of 2025, Iran executed 75% more people than in 2024 and in 2024, they executed 975 people, the highest rate of any nation. There have been at least five massive protest movements since 2009. The execution rate has affected mostly women, minorities, and political dissonance. What now with this disinformation campaign are the current risks of dissenting against the regime?

Benham: Unfortunately, in a regime like the Islamic Republic of Iran, even basic freedom of assembly, civil protests, freedom of speech, those things are not guaranteed. You saw a risk averse Iranian population over the past three decades, first try to embrace in a system that was so tightly controlled and ideological, try to embrace a contradiction in terms, try to embrace a ballot box in an authoritarian system just to signal their desire to use peaceful means to achieve political change. When that was stunted, they went to labor strikes. when that was stunted, you got the boom and bust cycle of anti-regime protests from 2017 to present that have been so violently repressed, most notably and most recently, the 2022 2023 women life freedom movement.

Now, for those of you who are overlaying this trajectory and this history and this evolution of, let’s be honest, seeking regime change from within the society against that state. If you’ve been following this, you may also have been following how this connected with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s language and rhetoric and commentary, and even some other Israeli political and military elite language and rhetoric and commentary calling on Iranians to rise up. Having sometimes what in military terms is they called a dialogue of targets, where the Iranians tell you their intentions by nature of the targets that they strike, which Sarah, as you mentioned, were almost exclusively civilian population centers. These were in military terms, counter value strikes. They just wanted to erode the will of the population to support the government to fight. They clearly don’t know much about Zionism in that case. But on the flip side, the nature of the Israeli targeting, going after the apparatus of reoppression, targeting the doors of Evin prison, targeting the Islamic Republic of Iran broadcasting, targeting the besiege, targeting the law enforcement forces, these were things that if it was just a narrow counterproliferation operation, you would not necessarily see from an actor who certainly has high tech and great means, but a limited quantity to keep firing.

So the Israelis have been doing this symbolic targeting to signal their support for the streets, but yet there has not been a major protest. Why? a, you had Iranians welcome the strikes in the first few days of the operations, but then you’ve had the Iranian repressive apparatus, the injustice department, the injustice ministry I like to say, signal that even post on social media will be met with arrests. Since this 12-day war, reportedly the regime has arrested up to 700 people and executed anywhere from three to five people. The fear now is essentially that under the cover of a crackdown, we are moving. I have been ringing the alarm bell about this both publicly and privately, that we are moving, God forbid, towards a 1991 Iraq style situation where a military defeat of an authoritarian predatory state may produce a sense of confidence in a western democracy that has imposed that defeat on that state.

That country, which doesn’t have the capability to continue the fight abroad turns inward and cracks skulls to signal resolve to a domestic population lest they rise up. So we are in a very precarious moment. So I understand why in the short term following a strike, there is no major protest because whether you are anti-regime or pro-regime, your priority right now if you are Iranian, is survival. yes, I think Israel and America have a potential to really drive things once the dust settles, but also they have to contend with that given the limited capabilities of the Islamic Republic and given that the army, the Islamic Republic has always feared more than the IDF or the US Air Force is the Iranian people themselves. We’re going to have to think long and hard about what it means to support them militarily when we talk about things like maximum support for the Iranian people on the back end of a situation like this which is a strike. Because I can tell you the mood is not a positive mood and in terms of a population in the heart of the Muslim Middle East, losing the fact that the Iranian people are the most pro-American, pro-Israeli population is going to come with long-term strategic consequences about the ability to erect and sustain a more stable, peaceful, and prosperous Middle Eastern order.

Sarah: So you’re calling the Iranian people at the most long-term pro-American, pro-Israeli population. How do we know it? Iran is a vast mosaic of cultures, Persians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Lurs, Arabs, Balchiks, Turkics. How do we know how many are secular? And is this just from your years and years of following everything that’s ever been written in Farsi and following what’s in the Iranian media?

Benham: Well, there are some things that are anecdotal and there’s some things that are empirical. One thing that is empirical, for example, is even religious folk where they may be actually not secular, but straight up religious, if not orthodox, and orthoprax have qualms with the Islamic Republic. One of the things that we have to do when talking about this, because I do believe, and this might be a controversial opinion, I do believe as Henry Kissinger once said, that foreign policy is not missionary work. But foreign policy gets to take on a different character if you can marry your state craft with your soul craft, if your strategy can also be bolstering your values. Because your interests don’t occur in a vacuum, they occur based on how you see the world and how you make sense of the world. Both Israel and America have a fundamentally different approach to this. So that’s why I’m saying it would be a shame to it. So one example that’s empirical.

You have had more religious criticism and religious issues with the government of the Islamic Republic from the traditional next generation that the Islamic Republic had invested in to be its next generation of supporters. They have been also, particularly in 2017, in the holy city of Mashhad, for example, they have been at the front lines the people that the regime thought would be demographically and geographically more disposed to support it. One of the things we have to be careful not to do is we’re not looking to socially engineer the next generation of Iranians. The next generations of Iranians are already actually militantly secular.

What we have to do is make sure that there is a pathway for them to affect political change in their own country, ideally as peacefully as possible, because a more representative Iranian government would not be doing things like funding Hezbollah and funding Hamas and supporting these groups because since 2009, you don’t have to take it from me. You can take it from the vast videos that you can find of all of these anti regime folks saying, not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life only for Iran. If you want to know the converse of that, you actually get to live it right now because this is in some ways a social science experiment. You have a government that has been prioritizing Gaza, that has been prioritizing Lebanon, and the net result of that is October 7 and the boom and bust cycle of the multi-front war against Israel that has also been targeting Americans in the heart of the Middle East. So these are the actual measures of this crisis.

Sarah: Do we have any way of gleaming what remains of the Iranian arsenal. Do we know what’s the extent of their ballistic missile program that aims to reach the continental United States? What’s going on with the 900 pounds of highly enriched uranium that Rafael Grossi cited? Or is this still too premature, too early to tell?

Benham: There are some things that are premature, but there are some things that we know and we even with open source could forecast the trend line. Before this conflict began, the Islamic Republic was home to the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East. An estimated 3000 plus, actually given that 2021 and 2023 were the years that former US government officials, particularly military officials, gave a back of the envelope assessment as to the 3000 number, and that the regime has been interested in producing more. So we say that 3000 is the baseline. Of these 3000, depending on how many you believe are medium range meaning capable of going over 1000 kilometers, because the average distance between Israel and Iran point to point is anywhere from 1200 to 1400 kilometers.

You can do it back of the envelope assessment based on the types of missiles. Iran has to see that anywhere from 1000 to 2000, probably more, so 2000 or 2000 plus were RBMs or medium range ballistic missiles. The Islamic Republic tells you the address that they have in mind for this, because even in their imagery and even in the things that they write on these projectiles, and even in terms of the graphics that official and semi-official media outlets put out, they call a whole class of medium range ballistic missiles, Israel hitting missiles, they’re telling you their target. You saw them rehearse this in April of 2024, in October of 2024 and then in the nature of the response, ballistic missiles was the primary vector of the response in June of 2025. You saw the Israelis be able to thwart through a decapitation operation, the ballistic missile command of the Iranians, allegedly, there was a New York Times story that said that part of this initial Iranian response that the Israelis were able to preempt and stop was to, in the event of a crisis, in the event of a war, in the event of hostilities, the first volley would be 1000 ballistic missiles. So that would be drastically designed to overwhelm interceptors.

That never happened. then the way the Israelis have been forcing the Iranians to fire from deeper and deeper within Iranian territory, pushing them eastward, forcing them to use their older systems, allowed them to basically intercept more but also go after the launchers. So you could have a huge missile arsenal, but if you don’t have the launchers for it, or every time you fire one, you lose a launcher and you risk not being able to fire more. You get to see how the Israeli military campaign on Iranian territory was actually designed to drive the Iranian command to make mistakes and then once they make mistakes to be identified and targeted. This was the logic of the way the Israelis were operating, essentially uncontested on Iranian airspace, marrying high technical prowess with a significant intelligence capacity. That’s where we are on missile.

On nuclear, I’ve been trying to also tell friends and colleagues about this. Yes, we have an issue with the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism pursuing nuclear weapons, but we primarily need to see this as an issue of the government, of the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, meaning this isn’t just Japan pursuing a significant amount of highly rich uranium, this is this government pursuing it. So you need to have your counterproliferation policy be part of your Iran policy. Stopping the bomb has to be a larger function of stopping the regime. It can’t be just stopping the bomb. The reason I’m coming up with this, forgive me, boring philosophical framework, is because in a world where the US strike is believed to be successful, and then you have conflicting stories, one from CNBC, one from free press one saying that the Iranians were able to, before the American strike, divert uranium away from the sites, and then the other one essentially saying that no, the Iranians were so confident in the impenetrability of this underground bunker, that they brought more uranium into the site for storage purposes.

Which one do you believe? This is going to be increasingly a problem, but either way, there is going to be a diversion element here. In the world where there’s diversion, some friends, particularly some Israelis, are resting assured, given the fact that so many of the scientists have been eradicated. So many of the missile engineers have been eradicated. So many of the labs, the conversion facilities, the enrichment facilities have been gone, such that even if there is this, god forbid, loose, highly enriched, facile material, there is nothing to “really do with it”, that you can’t really weaponize it. That is true from a technical perspective, but that is not true from a political perspective because what a wounded regime that is still in power can do is use that loose fissile material to bargain for their survival.

So right now, when President Trump reportedly is going to be meeting with the Iranians or Steve Witkoff, more likely the special envoy is going to be meeting directly or indirectly, it doesn’t matter with the Iranians next week, in order to maximize his shadow of power to borrow from Secretary of State Joel Schwartz over the negotiating table, he’s going to need to play up the military successes Israel and America have had. So how does the regime respond by threatening the potential of, hey, if you play up your shadow of power, you shadow the state, and when you shatter the state, you can’t guarantee that you will find this loose fissile material. So it’s to divert, dangle and deter, to make it costlier and harder for American Israel to even through peaceful means achieve their goals. So that’s why this quantity of uranium matters very much in my view.

Sarah: So how likely do you think there might be scientists from say, North Korea working with the Iranian regime, the Islamic Republic, to reconstitute the whole nuclear program?

Benham: We don’t know. because we don’t know, we have to essentially guesstimate here, and I’m guesstimating saying that this is low probability, but if it’s occurring, it’s high impact. No doubt, the regime after having absorbed the first direct hits after two decades against this nuclear program will want to drive it underground, reconstitute. It may not have the capability and the material given the success of the Israeli strikes, but it will have the intent. It’ll have some of the brain power, and it’ll want to find ways to connect the dots between what’s left of these multiple graveyards of material that the Israelis and the Americans have essentially created on their own soil when it comes to centrifuge assembly and heavy metals and uranium conversion and a whole host of other facilities.

So that is one fear, but something that may be playing to our advantage, which is given that the trigger was finally pulled there has been a lot of concern about a new axes of aggressors or acts of authoritarians. Sometimes you hear the acronym CRINK, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, for example. CRINK got crooked because a rising tide for these guys. These are not like NATO. They’re not trying to help everyone together. If Russia is bogged down here, they’re not going to be able to come bail out the Iranians, just as you see this mismatch in the relationship because of Russia and Ukraine and the Iranians saying, hey, help us, and the Russians essentially not being willing or able to deliver. So in this world, the CRINK folks benefit when there is a dependency on one another. While in the short term American military action may have deterred the entrance of one of these other anti-American actors onto Iranian world to help them rebuild or reconstitute or patchwork their air defense stuff together in the medium to long term. Unfortunately, that threat lingers, especially from a mercantilist perspective, where if these guys see that Iran is weak, still anti-American, they can deploy the regime as a pawn as part of their larger game of strategic competition. So we have to be wary of that.

Sarah: Right. So do you have any idea of how many missiles are remaining now? Medium of [crosstalk]

Benham: Of how many missiles are left now?

Sarah: Yes.

Benham: We don’t have an accurate number, but there is a number that we believe was fired and a number that we assume, or I think I’ve seen not confirmed, but said was targeted so about I think a little over 500 fired and a little over 800 targeted on Iranian territory. If the regime in terms of medium range ballistic missiles goes into the triple digits, so into the nine hundreds to the five hundreds, then that’s their red zone. One reason we assume why the regimes valleys went from 100 to 50 to 20 to just a couple at a time is probably because they wanted to conserve, but also because they had a strategy still of trying to not overwhelm the interceptors that the Israelis have, but in the medium term expend the interceptors that the Israelis have. In this case, you get to have multiple numbers wars, how many Iranians missiles versus how many Israeli interceptors.

That’s why in this “ceasefire period”, what each side does to re-arm and double down matters greatly. I want to say that from a non-military perspective with respect to the Islamic Republic, because if ever there was a time for maximum pressure and maximum support to bring down the walls in the regime from within and from without, it is now. It is containment and rollback in a post-strike scenario to magnify the regime senses of weakness so they don’t dash, or that if they do dash, they assume that they’ll get caught and they have to hedge. You have to keep them in that frightful hedging posture rather than have them be confident that they can get away with it.

Sarah: Okay. One of our viewers asked, is it not naive to think that Iran’s regime will had never abandon its nuclear ambitions through negotiation when destroying the Jewish state is one of its only raison d’etres and negotiation has always been just a mere tactic towards that end?

Benham: No doubt this regime is obsessed with survival. You had an 86-year-old ideologue, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, who is the Middle East, longest serving contemporary autocrat, be able to game out from a bunker while his regime is crumbling before him, while his military is underperforming before him. What to do to best preserve, protect, and defend his regime while so outgunned and unfortunately he played to the edge. Unfortunately, he understood the restraint impulses and the Iraq war hangover impulses and these material limitations that the Israelis and the Americans might face if the war kind of continues to sustain. That was the rationale of going after civilian population centers. That was the rationale of threatening to leave the NPT and close the Strait of Hormuz. It’s the rationale of widening a war to make more responsible actors have to exercise more restraint, and then you as the irresponsible actor, get to deter wider war by threatening a wider war?

It’s a very converse logic, and the reason I’m saying this in a question about negotiations is because negotiations have always been a means for the Islamic Republic to achieve certain ends. We in the West have so opposed and contrasted negotiations to military action. We’ve made it look like these are two totally different forces, when in reality they should be part of a larger continuum of American power about what tool to use at what time against what target. I think the Iranians have been able to align that, unfortunately better than us. that’s why the weaker power have been able to have such strong political cards, whereas we have had the luxury of having strong military cards and thus far have not exercised well the political muscle. Like any muscle, if you don’t exercise it well, it can atrophy. The only real resetting when it comes to the Islamic Republic or when it comes to Iran’s nuclear ambitions will be if there is no Islamic Republic. Everything then is a pay to delay game and then you’re just in the world of what tool, at what time, at what target.

Sarah: Speaking of pay to delay do you have any estimate of whether or not this set the regime back a few months or a few years? We’ve heard very, very varying estimates there.

Benham: It would be dishonest for me to give you a number because we don’t have the numbers that are going into the input, just like it was unfair for one intel assessment to have to rely only on one stream of intel to come up with something like this. That being said, if you have the Israelis saying a little over two years and the Americans saying a little under three months, the real answer is probably somewhere in between. It can be scaled up or scaled down based on the actions again that you take post-strike to shape Iranian decision making and to drive them and to force them to have to hedge more rather than to push them towards something and to get them to double down. So this is where our behavior can move the median further to the right or further to the left.

Sarah: Right. If you had any recommendations for avenues to help the dissidents to help the secular or more secular people living within the Islamic Republic what would your suggestions be?

Benham: At first the Western governments, I would say, do no harm. In a world where even post-strike you’re interested in deal making with the Islamic Republic, you would be locking in that wounded tiger. So here, I would say I’d ring the alarm bell drastically on when it comes to the potential Iraq 91 scenario, rather than the thing DC always obsesses over, which is the Iraq 2003 scenario. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, I’d make sure that in bright lights, the American government, the Israeli government, European, the international community, essentially understands that what is happening in Iran now is the next phase of the war, which is the war on their own population. Every case, every story has to be foot stomp, has to be shared. Just so we all know the high cost of inaction here, as well as to be able to put a spotlight on the Islamic Republic to say, you think you can shut down the internet and get away with this? You can’t. We will deter through detection. We will try to deter and expose you for doing this.

The third is to actually, as much as the regime is having a communications war, you need to have communications, war. Intercepting IRIB broadcasting and hacking it with opposition messaging can do a lot to stiffen the spine. In a world where, again, if you escalate max pressure on the back end of a strike, this is when you should be confiscating Iranian oil assets and turning that over to the Iranian people. Just like successfully in the past you have had the US confiscate Iranian weapons shipments, that particularly arms going to the Houthis and give that even if only symbolically to the Ukrainians to fight against the Russians, what’s good for thee needs to be good for me. There’s a ton more that we can do.

There’s even a very creative bill at least in terms of philosophy, FTD and FTD action and a whole host of our friends and partners in DC like NUFDI, the National Union for Democracy in Iran, have been helping with. That other friendly coalition groups, EMET, Vandenberg, JINSA, everyone has talked about this, which is maximum support for the Iranian people. There is a bill tied to that. Now, it’s not passed, but certainly in the world of the shooting war between Israel and Iran, when people discovered mostly through the NetBlocks Twitter account, that the internet was being selectively turned on and off and being throttled. People remember that these were tests for much larger nationwide blackouts that, hey, perhaps we should go look at things that are already on the table that are designed to provide satellite communications and direct to cell technologies to make sure Iranians can communicate with one another and with the outside world, even at a time of crisis. Wouldn’t it be good to have a counter regime, media playbook, a counter regime, communications playbook, ready and passed now so that you can actually act on that stuff whenever the next wave comes?

Sarah: Okay. Yesterday, or maybe it was Monday, Reza Pahlavi, the former Crown Prince of Iran and the son of late Shah pleaded with the international community and saying, “Not to extend Khomenei lifeline saying that this is their Berlin moment.” Is there any way at all of gleaming how popular Reza Pahlavi is within Iran? Can he create a mass movement? Are there other leaders who might possibly take the helm? Should it be someone who is on the inside of the regime rather than on the outside? Do you have any feelings about that?

Benham: Listen, I think that there’s certainly a lot of different opinions within the Iranian diaspora about the efficacy of the foreign opposition, the efficacy of certain moves on the ground against the regime in Iran, particularly as we’ve seen in the multiple rounds of anti-regime protests. Often young led protest movements that are unarmed, basically be taken down round after round after round by an armed lethal and ideological security force. So one thing that actually the son of the late Shah has talked about is marrying max pressure and max support with ax defections getting the security forces to not fire on their own compatriots. If there is a nationalist messaging way for any element of the Iranian diaspora or any ailment of the internal Iranian opposition, to be able to message this better, to peel off elements of the security forces because thus far, they’ve largely, but not exclusively been cohesive. This would be really a game changer.

What I would also say in terms of, you mentioned the popularity of the son of late Shah. Unfortunately, there’s been a whole stream of articles, I think in my view, needlessly going after him coming out of a political vacuum. But at the same time, I will say that this is not like you pick one brand of toothpaste and you stick with it. This is, if someone likes a different message, they’re welcome to follow a different message. If someone likes his message, they’re welcome to follow his message. This is not an issue that the US government needs to get involved in. Where the US government and other governments need to get involved in is actually to see which one of these opposition groups can be the best bridge head to create a political future where we can get to what Sarah, you just so eloquently said, which is what about the inside? What about the nation of 91 million people inside who have been hostage now to the whims of 186-year-old who is an ideologue in a bunker? Talk about human shields. This is a 91 plus million population human shield right now.

So in my view, yeah, I think the son of the late Shah has had a relatively moderate secular liberal nationalist democratic message. I think this is in the political world, a pretty big tent thing, but if someone disagrees with it as someone who believes in little deed democracy at the foundation for defense of democracies, you’re welcome to pursue something else. This is not about picking an opposition group or an activist group that one likes or doesn’t like. It’s about aligning your ways and means and ends together to make whatever is on the outside, whatever talents, whatever capabilities, whatever learned experiences the diaspora has had for over four decades, living largely in Western democracies. It’s about marshaling those resources and those assets for the freedom of their own homeland. That is really the art of the deal here. Do I think one individual is a good bridgehead? Yes, but the key word is bridgehead to a better political future where the people on the ground in Iran who have risen up time and time again, they will be in the position to decide because they are the real revolutionaries. You can have a foreign leader, but the body, the critical mass, the revolutionaries is inside the country already and let them vote.

Sarah: Beautiful. Just one final word, if you would like to comment on the preamble to the constitution of the Islamic Republic which proclaims that it is an Islamic duty and using its military power, not only for defense, but to spread Islam to the world and that it’ll obtain all possible weapons to do so. This is a brutal repressive theocracy. Is there any way that this can be disabused from those elements within the Islamic Republic that really truly believe it?

Benham: I think military defeat is a very good way to disabuse them of that, sustained military defeat. In this case, I’m thinking about Argentina, for example, in the Falcons War, autocratic regimes often, but not, not always, often when they face significant external defeats can create these doubts and cracks in their security forces. You saw that very little, not a lot, very little with Saddam in ’91, but Saddam had so well co proofed his regime that, that contained didn’t have a large contagion effect. You had the opposite in 1980 with the revolutionary regime in Iran, the nascent Islamic Republic actually congealed and got stronger under the auspices of a foreign imposed war, and they extended the war to actually harden in calcify and purify their Islamic revolution and their hold on power back in Tehran. But there are examples, Argentina being one, but not the only one where it can have the reverse effects.

So I think a string of military defeats just like you’ve seen the Israelis impose on the axis of resistance, can begin to disabuse them. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to flip overnight, but it shows that there’s real barriers to their message. But in terms of getting the population you don’t need to convince or socially engineer Iranians, they’re already there. That these things are not just bad, but deplorable ideas and not a way to organize a society and not a way to orient all of the oil revenue and taxes that go into the foreign policy apparatus of a state. This is not about Gaza or Lebanon. This is not about an ideological revolution. If anything, if there is one coherent ideology between inside and outside, between domestic dissident and foreign diaspora is this proto new nationalism that builds on older strains of nationalism. That is, for lack of a better word, saying Iran first and Iran come home.

When traditionally nationalism is seen as predatory and irredentist, I think if you actually have a representative system in Iran, Iranian power is something that you need not fear, because you know the ends to which that power is wielded. For the past 46 years, the ends to which that power is wielded is exactly that element of the Iranian constitution that you read. In a secular liberal democratic society, I have no doubt that that’s one of the first things that would go,

Sarah: Thank you so much, Behnam Ben Taleblu. It is always an esteem pleasure to be able to learn from your years and years of wisdom and really hard earned experience. As we are talking, part of our staff is [inaudible] right now. We’re working on trying to get internet providers to dissidents and other means of communication that they can help themselves out of the morass that they’re now finding themselves in. We really do need your support. So if you can please support us at wwwemetonline.org and please also support the very good work of FDD, the Foundation for Defensive Democracies. It is a wonderful, wonderful organization. They’re also at fdd.org. Thank you so much, [inaudible].

Benham: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

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