“You’ll find out pretty soon” was President Donald Trump’s answer this weekend to a reporter’s question about whether he had a “message” for the Iranian opposition.
Speaking to the press aboard Air Force One on Sunday, an unnamed reporter asked Trump, “Is your administration in contact with the Iranian opposition leaders as this is unfolding?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
“What’s the message to them?”
To which Trump said, “You’ll find out pretty soon.”
What’s that mean in practice? Well, that’s where things could get mighty interesting — or maybe they already have.
While Trump was dueling with the press and (presumably) hashing out with his national security team what to do to help anti-regime protestors in Iran — who have been slaughtered in the streets by the hundreds or perhaps even thousands if anti-regime claims are to be believed — my best friend and I tried solving the world’s problems over our weekly bowls of pho.
It isn’t as easy as you might think, especially when it comes to massive, nationwide street protests.
Operation Midnight Hammer last summer was relatively straightforward. “These are the bombers. There are the targets. Insert Bomb A into Target B. Repeat as needed.”
I’m being glib, sure, but you know me.
But what good is a bunker buster in aiding street protests? Iran’s main weapon in the current fight appears to be its usual regime thugs, aided by snipers well-versed in spotting and taking out the lead troublemakers. There’s not much for the USAF to do from 40,000 feet.
Me, I like the direct approach of smuggling rifles to anti-regime protestors, preferably ones with military or police experience. My best friend Matt prefers a longer-term approach, modeled on how the Green Berets armed and trained the Montagnards during Vietnam — effectively taking brave-but-foolish warriors and turning them into effective anti-guerilla soldiers.
It might be wisest to use both approaches — perhaps aided by a bombing run or two against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards barracks, depots, and headquarters — but I just can’t get over the need for “now.” Or at least, as Trump put it, “pretty soon.”
Street protests peter out, particularly when the regime isn’t afraid to use snipers (or worse) to violently encourage a return to complacency.
Besides, as Soviet dissident (and part-time labor camp resident) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive…?”
Regime “security” forces are used to act with impunity. You can’t help but wonder what effect just a few caskets might have on their morale.
We might find out “pretty soon,” indeed, if this report pans out: IRGC Commanders Assassinated; U.S., Israeli Help Expected. “Reports of Mossad agents on the ground helping the revolution,” Lawrence Person added at Battleswarm blog. “This is the sort of thing that both sides in the conflict would say to help shore up resolve in their respective bases, but the drone attack [against Reza Kasab, head of a ballistic missile unit in Kashan] suggests it’s true.”
I’d still like to see a few arms in the hands of the protestors. They deserve to do at least as much against their own regime as Mossad.
But back to President Trump, who also claimed on Sunday that “Iran called to negotiate.”
“The leaders of Iran, they want to negotiate,” he continued. “I think they’re tired of being beat up by the United States. Iran wants to negotiate with us.”
As the bodies of hundreds — or is it thousands? — of dead protestors could attest, the time for negotiations is past.
But, as always, Trump’s national security team keeps its plans close to the vest, and whatever plans they’re formulating, we won’t know until things start going “BOOM!” or perhaps less likely, when Khamenei’s security troops start numbering their own losses in the hundreds.
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