On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX) said that he thinks there will be “American special operators on the ground” in Iran and “I don’t think this is going to end like Venezuela, where you just have a new leader that wants to be at least cooperative with the United States.”
Fallon said, [relevant remarks begin around 1:45] “[A]s far as the mullahs and what’s left of the Iranian regime, can you trust them? Absolutely not. It’s got to be a President Reagan trust but verify. I don’t think this is going to end like Venezuela, where you just have a new leader that wants to be at least cooperative with the United States. That would be great, but this is, they’re dedicated theocrats that — they were willing, just recently, to kill 32,000 of their own citizens…just to stay in power. I think they’d be perfectly fine with remaining in power, even if their economy was devastated and they want back to, like say, an Afghanistan, Taliban regime. They’d be fine with that. So, I personally think it’s going to be boots, at least special ops, American special operators on the ground, with allied — allies in the region and air cover, and we’ve got to — we have to change the [tack] of the Tehran government or we can’t leave. We can’t leave until the job is done.”
Guest host Cheryl Casone then asked, “So, you do believe that we’re going to have some boots on the ground?”
Fallon answered, “I just don’t see any other way. Iran is 93 million people, it’s five times the size of Iraq, it’s larger in size than Spain, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany combined. It’s massive, 93 million people. When we invaded Iraq, they had a population of 25 million people. But here’s the thing that’s in our favor: 80% of the people in Iran hate this regime. So, once an action like that is taken, I do believe that people are going to rise up and the IRGC is going to melt away, and then we can see some kind of moderate faction coming out, and then, eventually, taking over.”
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