00:00Jim Hansen's a former U.S. Army Special Forces and chief strategist for the Middle East Forum.
00:05Jim, what do you think's going on today in Tehran?
00:09I think they are scrambling.
00:11And anybody who says this fracture between the religious leadership and the military
00:16and their civilian political leadership is a bad thing
00:20doesn't understand how to break a tyrannical regime.
00:24Of course we want them arguing with each other.
00:27And obviously I think the military will come out on top.
00:30As you said, they do have the guns.
00:32But in the end, they don't have much in the way of weapons left.
00:36And any time they poke any of those weapons out of their holes, we destroy them.
00:40So they've got a very short window before they run out of money.
00:44They run out of the ability to pump oil.
00:46They already can't sell it.
00:48And there's not any money coming in to run the regime.
00:51Anybody who thinks they're ahead in this game is not paying attention.
00:55So is it more of a negotiating tactic?
00:58Or is it them trying to consolidate power as they lead negotiations going forward?
01:06They want the world and anybody else to think that they are ahead.
01:10That's why you hear them say things.
01:12Oh, 26 ships broke the blockade.
01:14Well, no, 26 ships got turned back.
01:17And the 27th got a free engine room redecoration courtesy of a USS Destroyer's five-inch gun.
01:24Free ventilation.
01:25That's not how you win.
01:27Next we take a tanker and now we've got two million barrels of free oil.
01:31They don't have any way to come out ahead in the blockade game.
01:35They're wrong if they can think they can wait President Trump out.
01:38And if he has to start breaking some more of their stuff to emphasize the point, we have plenty of
01:44ways to do that.
01:45They have nothing but maybe an opportunity to attack a ship trying to transit the strait.
01:52And they don't have a lot of time left.
01:54You heard Besant say these oil wells, they're going to fill up and they're going to have to shuttle production
02:01soon.
02:02Do you think the president waits and sees how things unfold inside Tehran or do you think he needs to
02:11give him a little nudge?
02:14Here's the thing.
02:15Anything the president blows up right now causes damage for the Iranian people.
02:21And he's got the opportunity.
02:22There was a point there where I guess the defeat mongers thought they were going to convince the world that
02:29President Trump had to stop this because of the pressure.
02:31We can absorb some short term oil price jumps and the political pressure at home is not going to change
02:37President Trump's calculation.
02:39He can beat them at this game.
02:41The fewer things he blows up from here going forward, the better.
02:44But they shouldn't think for a second he will not give them an object lesson in how to make the
02:50rubble bounce.
02:52And the United States and Israel have been accumulating so much intelligence over the last two weeks that whatever fighting
03:00does break out will end pretty quickly.
03:02Is that your understanding?
03:06Yeah, we've got all of their people identified.
03:09You know, if we wanted to, we could take out another layer of their leadership again.
03:13But we need somebody to go ahead and quasi surrender, whatever this ends up being.
03:18So if they want to try and I mean, they can't fight in the in the normal use of that
03:23word.
03:24They can cause damage.
03:25They can be a terrorist state breaking other people's things.
03:29But they can't take us on force on force.
03:31And if they want to go ahead and let the IRGC take a run at being the heads of a
03:37military state as opposed to a theocracy, that will be a very short-lived event.
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