00:00The US-Israeli war against Iran has entered its sixth week, and though it's seen a temporary pause
00:07to the fighting, an end to the conflict remains out of sight. There was the welcomed news of a
00:12ceasefire for a two-week period on Tuesday to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while Iran's regime
00:19is saved from an onslaught that Donald Trump threatened would erase a whole civilisation.
00:25An Iranian delegation is in Islamabad for Pakistan-brokered talks with the US,
00:31as Vice President J.D. Vance leads the negotiations. But a deal hangs in the balance. Israel continues
00:38to bomb Lebanon, insisting they are not part of the truce, despite Islamabad announcing so hours
00:45before. Mike Lyons is a United States Army combat veteran who took part in Operation Desert Storm,
00:52aka the Gulf War, where he commanded an artillery battery and was awarded a Bronze Star. From a
00:59purely military perspective, he tells the Independent the Iran war has so far been a resounding success.
01:06I think the military was given three objectives. Number one was to destroy their military capability
01:12of projecting power in the region. I think number two, it was destroy specifically their navy,
01:18and then number three, destroy the infrastructure that existed around their nuclear capability.
01:23And as of today, 38 days, 39 days into it with a pause now, it appears that those objectives have
01:29been accomplished. Now, they probably aren't finished. They haven't been, they've been degraded,
01:35not necessarily completely annihilated. It's very difficult to do that. But if you look at the
01:38military as an extension of foreign policy, the military has given the president the leverage in
01:45order to move any kind of negotiations forward. I think the IRGC has been completely degraded,
01:51destroyed in so many ways, no military capability left. Anybody thinking that Iran has anything
01:56after this is just not really paying attention. They've now resorted to asymmetrical type tactics,
02:03which means, you know, small country trying to do the one-off little thing against the bigger
02:08country. So from their perspective, their ability to project power, especially on their neighbors,
02:13very much degraded to the point where it's going to take them years and outside help in order to get
02:18that back up and running. I mean, taking 13 casualties at this point, 38 days in, we had many more
02:26in
02:26other places. It's very clear that Iran has prevailed. This is Hossein Benai, professor of
02:32international studies at Indiana University, who has written multiple books on the straining
02:38relationship between the US and Iran. Its regime is intact. It has managed to demonstrate that can
02:45really inflict tremendous economic damage. And that's where, you know, the ceasefire ultimately
02:51came out of. Before the conflict began, Trump had publicly declared his support for regime change
02:57in Iran, calling it the best thing that could happen and indicating there are people he wants to
03:03take over. But just how feasible is this to achieve through force?
03:08In order to make a deal with the regime, the current leadership of the regime needs to change.
03:13So there is kind of like a layer of regime change to have in mind, not a complete regime change.
03:19So I think as more time has passed, it's become very clear that the Trump administration envisioned
03:25regime change in Iran to look like something similar to what it did to Venezuela,
03:31which is to remove the obstacles to the administration's vision of what the future would
03:37look like, and then strike a deal with the remaining elements, not disturb the structure of power so
03:45much so that people can deliver the asks that Washington has of them.
03:50If you look at the Venezuela playbook, what the United States did there, we might not get regime
03:56change here, but we'll get regime compliance. And I think that's that's the the the factor that this
04:01administration is looking for, is that they'll go they'll find a person in Iran, whether they're in the
04:06regime or not, that will comply with what the US demands are, and that will be declared victory.
04:11A regime that is kind of ideologically hardened over the course of 47 years, that very much works in
04:19unison. That is not just made up of some transactional pacts between different factions,
04:26as was the case in Venezuela, perhaps, is not going to respond well to that sort of pressure from
04:32Washington. And so we saw what the consequences of that would be in the outbreak of this war,
04:38you can even kill and remove the top leadership at the United States did by killing the supreme leader
04:44on the first day and 49 other top senior leadership figures in the Islamic Republic.
04:51And very quickly, those vacancies were replenished by new figures. Changing a regime like this was
04:58never going to take place in the manner that Washington had hoped by just basically changing the
05:04management. Rather, you need to commit significant resources. And even then, as historical record shows in
05:12the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, that's not a guarantee at all, either. That's why the best,
05:18easiest, cheapest, most natural and legitimate form of regime change should always take place from
05:24within when the people say, enough, I don't want to deal with this government, we're going to kind of
05:30get enough buy in with defectors from within the government, people who can say, you know what,
05:35I don't want to serve this government anymore. And, you know, through mass mobilization,
05:40perhaps political referenda, internally, a country undertakes to change its regime. Ironically,
05:47this is what happened in Iran in 1979. The revolution came about as a result of that. The
05:52results weren't great. That's not what people had in mind. They didn't want to replace a secular
05:57dictatorship with a theocracy. It's very clear that this war has left in its wake a much more
06:04hardened, a much more determined regime in Iran that has very little appetite for change, very
06:14little appetite for dissent. There have been executions of political dissidents taking place
06:19during this war. So you have a much more hardened regime that does not bode well for ordinary Iranians.
06:26Meanwhile, popularity for the operation remains low, with YouGov claiming 53% of Americans opposed the
06:33war compared to 34% in support. With the midterm elections coming up later this year, could the
06:40conflict shape how America votes? So I remember being in Desert Storm and before the war started,
06:46there was not a lot of support for it. And then as the conflict started and people saw the success
06:52of
06:53the U.S. military, that that switch flipped very quickly to tremendous support. The pendulum swung
06:59very wide. Ultimately, I think it points the direction to a broken promise of this president.
07:04He said, no stupid wars, no new wars. And we got a new, very stupid war. People like myself that
07:11went
07:12to war as a young man. I don't I don't want to do that again. I don't want to send
07:14my children there.
07:15I don't want to do that. Your children. I don't want to send anybody's children to war.
07:17But it's it's the reality of projecting power. If you want to have peace, it's somewhat of a
07:23you know, a hypothetical or paradox. But but that's really the reality, as I've learned,
07:30as I've studied warfare in history. This has been nothing short of a betrayal of that
07:35massive public sentiment that already existed in the U.S. that said we don't want to do this anymore.
07:40We don't want our military just continually engaged in conflicts that, frankly, only bring
07:47misery back home, higher prices, a much more disgraced American profile abroad.
07:59You know, we we want to just focus on the well-being of Americans inside here. We should spend all
08:04that
08:04money on fixing a broken health care system, educational system.
08:08There's no question that Trump when he says America first, it doesn't mean that that that
08:14stops at the shorelines of America. It means America is going to project power
08:18throughout the world when it's in our interest. And finally, how and when does the war end
08:24and what will be the lasting effects on the Iranian people, one of the world's oldest continuous
08:31civilizations? You know, in the case of the new supreme leader, literally his father was killed
08:35by the United States. He's not going to sign a peace deal with Donald Trump.
08:38He's a visual person. He's a former TV producer and he gets the concept. And so in order for us
08:44to
08:45have victory declared, victory is going to have to be assured and it's going to have to be a visual.
08:49Whether that means Marines landing on Karg Island, whether that means complete opening of the
08:55straits in order to get ships through, people are not going to listen to what he says. They're going
09:00to look to what their eyes are showing them and he's going to have to get a visual victory. So
09:05I don't
09:05think until that happens, you'll see him formally declare that as a victory.
09:10I would not bank on an exact date, a kind of a public ceremony where the two sides come together
09:16and say the war has ended. It's going to be drifts and drafts back and forth and really judged to
09:22be
09:23a failure. I still believe that if this war continues to go, which I think it will, you'll see something
09:28unique like that when it comes to taking out the electrical plants or taking out their infrastructure,
09:34cyber attacks, offensive cyber weapons. We really haven't seen them, but I think you're going to see
09:39a lot of things like this.
09:40One of the perhaps most distressing implications of this war is that the Iranian population,
09:4793 million strong, was, you know, always regarded as among the most pro-American population in the
09:56Middle East. The Iranians were by and large because they detested their own government so much and
10:01they remembered the times before the revolution when the U.S. and Iran had a strategic partnership
10:07regarded the United States as a country that could really hold this regime's brutality and
10:14ruthlessness into account without damaging Iranian civil society. But what this war has accomplished
10:21now, it has sent a signal that at least this administration and this president don't care
10:28about the welfare of the Iranian people. And in fact, they have undertaken a war that has left
10:34their tormentors in a much stronger position. The Islamic government is coming out of this with a
10:41narrative of resilience, of revenge, of having a sacred duty to defend the Iranian homeland, precisely
10:51the kind of narrative that this regime was just gasping for. So there's been a massive narrative
10:58change among the public.
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