On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” New York Post columnist and author Douglas Murray said that the odds of the Iranian people overthrowing the regime “was always marginal” because an unarmed populace doing so against an armed regime is always difficult, but we should achieve the objective of ensuring that Iran can never get nuclear weapons in our lifetimes.
Murray said, “I think once started, you have to finish this. I don’t agree that it’s failed. It’s been an incredibly successful operation in lots of ways. Supreme leader, dead, Iranian air force destroyed, nuclear sites attacked again, the navy of the Iranian revolutionary government at the bottom of the ocean. These are not small things. It’s not the case that the Iranian revolutionary government has come out of this well. I know some people are wanting to say that after four, six weeks of war, this is some kind of loss for America, it isn’t. It’s been an amazing strategic success, but everyone wants to know what the out is. Now, there are several problems about that: The first is that, at the beginning of this, there was a belief, a hope that the Iranian people might seize the opportunity to rise up and overthrow the government. The fact is that that hope was always marginal, because, as we always know, when a dictatorship like the revolutionary Islamic Government has the guns and the population doesn’t, you’re asking the population to do a hell of a thing. That didn’t happen. The regime is still in place. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be in place for perpetuity. It’s perfectly possible that it could still be toppled in the coming months by the people.”
He continued, “But the crucial thing is, is the main objective of the war achieved or not? And the main objective is not just can the government of Iran get nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future, but can they, in some future presidential term in the U.S.? As I see it, that is the bit that has to be addressed, simply whether or not the Iranian administration, the government there ever has, in our lifetimes, the potential to have breakout to nuclear weapons. My belief is that this is the one shot to make sure they don’t, that the opportunity to make sure that the Iranian revolutionary government doesn’t get weapons is seized now.”
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