Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute On What He Hopes President Trump Does To Iran
The Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran –one of the few genuine experts on Iran inside the Beltway– joined me on the program in hour three today to discuss what he thinks President Trump will do and what he hopes POTUS does.
The audio:
The transcript:
HH: As promised, Mike Doran of the Hudson Institute, where he is, of course, one of the resident experts on the Islamic Republic of Iran. And I preface this by saying there are a handful of people who have been actually working on the Islamic Republic of Iran for more than a day or a couple of weeks, or a news cycle or a few. And one of them is Michael Doran. Michael, welcome back. Good to see you. By way of beginning, can you tell people how long you’ve been focused on the Islamic Republic?
MD: Oh, well, first of all, thank you for having me. Great to be here. I guess about 20 years. I worked in the White House for George W. Bush from 2005-07. I was in charge of the Middle East at the National Security Council, and I spent more time reading intelligence on Iran than anything else when I was there.
HH: Okay. That is, that’s why I called you in. I want to find out, do you want, if President Trump calls you today and says, ‘Mike, what do you want me to do about Iran?’, what does Mike Doran say?
MD: Well, I think, I wasn’t expecting that question. I was expecting you to ask me what do I think Trump is going to do. And I’m, what I think he’s going to do, I think is also what I’d like to see him do. I think he should take out Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. I think decapitation is the only way to move forward at this point. I think there’s no possibility of negotiating with the regime as long as he’s in place. There’s no possibility of alleviating the suffering of the people on the ground as long as he’s in place. And so moving him aside, or moving him out of the picture is probably in everyone’s interest.
HH: Now that is regime decapitation. That’s what we did in Venezuela. Assume for the moment we can do that. What do you think would take his place?
MD: Well, I think a leader from within the IRGC, an IRGC general would, Revolutionary Guard general would step up and take charge. Or, it’s also possible that his son or someone else would take the Supreme Leader’s role. But I think that the office itself would be diminished by his departure.
HH: Now Mike Doran, I’ve got a target list. I don’t know anything, right? I’m a civilian. I didn’t, all I know about Iran is what I’ve read about Iran, and over the years, and what you learn on the domestic side over at DOJ when I was in the AG’s office doing FISA warrants. So I don’t know a lot about how it operates other than what Ostovar or you or Karim Sadjadpour or others write about it. Why have we not blown up Kharg Island? And they have two other oil terminals that fill up tankers that provide them hard currency for the regime. Otherwise, there’s just no way for them to get any money if we blow up their terminals. Why haven’t we done that?
MD: We haven’t done that, and that’s actually the logical next question in response to what I said, because there are real inherent dangers in what I said about decapitation. And we haven’t done it, because we’re afraid of the counterattack from the Iranians. There was, back in June when the Israelis and the Iranians were fighting, the Israelis didn’t hit any of the oil facilities of the Iranians because they were afraid that Iran would respond by hitting Saudi and Emirate oil facilities, or by hitting certain facilities in Israel that they, as well, oil facilities in Israel. So there was a kind of mutual restraint in that war. It wasn’t quite all-out war between Israel and Iran. And that’s something I think that we fear as well. The Iranians still have an incredibly potent missile arsenal that they can use to strike our positions and to strike the Israelis and others. I think the President, one of the reasons why I think he’s going to go for a, why he will think seriously about a decapitation strategy is that he’ll get signals from within the Iranian system that there are people at the top levels of the regime who would like to see that happen, too. I’m sure there’s a lot of frustration with the situation right now. They don’t have water in Tehran. They have water shortages. They have electricity shortages. They have a currency that is completely worthless now. If you’re a businessman, you can’t take a loan. If you’re a worker, you can’t have a working wage, because the economy is completely gone, collapsed. And all of that goes back to the American sanctions. So until you get, until you get a negotiation with the Americans, you can’t begin to work on any of the practical problems that they have day to day. And you can’t get a negotiation with the Americans, because the Supreme Leader won’t allow it.
HH: And so Mike Doran, I’m back to the what if’s. I thought in June that their ICBM attack hit at least one utility that was of interest, and that they tried to hit Dimona, which people in Israel who don’t have clearances, and people outside Israel who don’t have clearances, believe to be where their nuclear weapons program is located in Israel, at the Dimona facility. Assume for a moment that Israel has all the defenses that they had, and that the Lincoln will provide more, and that we’ve moved additional batteries of THAAD missiles and other things that we have, that they’re as well-defended as they can be. Why would taking out Khamenei, but not taking out the oil, not trigger an ICBM attack of the sort you’re worried about?
MD: Well, it will. It will, and one should be worried about it. But one would hope that there would be, then, a deescalation process after Khamenei was taken out just like there was the last time around. The Israelis have an escalatory ladder that they did not go up in June. They were restrained by President Trump. I think the President expected that because he restrained the Israelis, that there would be a kind of, I don’t want to use the word gratitude, but at least an awareness on the side of the regime that they were spared thanks to America restraining Israel, and that they would be then more inclined to negotiate with them. But they’ve stiff-armed him since then. So I think he’s going to conclude that they need another lesson. There is another thing they could do, though, Hugh, which they haven’t done, meaning the Trump administration. I’ve got an article coming out in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow morning saying that we can seize the money of the Iranians relatively easily. We know where it is, and so we don’t even have to carry out a kinetic attack against their oil facilities. We can shut down their oil sales by destroying their shadow banking system. And we haven’t wanted to do that until now, because it is being run through one of our close allies. And I think that we have been a little bit too delicate with that ally, namely…
HH: You know, Mike Doran, years ago when you were working for W., W. invited Bill Bennett, Mark Levin, and me, and three other talkers into the Oval to have a conversation about the war in Iraq. And either Bill or I, someone asked him why aren’t we going hard against Iran? And he said lots of things we can do. We can disintermediate the money. Heh. Pretty big word, isn’t it, disintermediate, for me? And it was funny, but I assume that’s what you’re talking about. We can take the money. We know where it is.
MD: Yeah, yeah, and well, we can shut down the shadow banking system that they use to sell their oil to China, because the economic lung of Iran is actually in Dubai. The Dubai banks are where most of the Iranian transactions are being processed. We keep, you know, last Thursday, the Treasury put out some new sanctions, and they hit shell companies that the Iranians use to move this money through the Dubai banking system. But we don’t actually touch the banks. And I think, that’s what my article tomorrow argues. We need to actually begin fining and even sanctioning these banks, because we know what they’re doing. They pretend to not know that this is Iranian money, but it is, and they know it.
HH: Now Mike Doran, when we come back after the break, I want to explore further with you whether you think, why you think he will act, when he’s going to act, and whether or not there’s enough strategic defense that has flowed into the country before then. But a quick exit question – can we do all three? Can we take a shot at Khamenei, who I assume is in a hardened location, can we blow up Kharg Island and the other two terminals, and can we disintermediate their money via the shutdown of the accounts? Can we do all three things at once?
MD: We could do, we could do all three things at once, but if we go after the oil facilities, I think that they will hit the oil facilities of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. And that will be really, that will be quite messy.
HH: Is that why Saudi Arabia, I don’t think the UAE has, MBZ has not called the President, to my knowledge, to urge restraint. But I understand both Israel and Saudi Arabia did last week. I thought that was more in line with getting ducks in a row. Is that what you thought?
MD: No. I think that the Saudis and the Turks who are converging in their view of the region want stability. They fear all of the instability that will come from conflict.
HH: I’m going to come right back with Mike Doran. Follow him on X, [@Doranimated]. And go the Hudson Institute. He is one of the half dozen people who actually knows what they’re talking about when it comes to the mullahs. So stay tuned. I’ll be right back with Mike after this.
— – – – —
HH: Mike, why do you think the President didn’t act last week before the protesters were killed? Although they did not protest because of his assurances of help, because they were blacked out. They can’t rely on that. I mean, they weren’t listening to my radio show ten days ago when the President said, you know, we’ll hit them harder than they’ve ever been hit before, and then he said it to Sean Hannity, and he said it to Tony Dokoupil. I don’t think they’re in the streets to be mowed down by they Iranians because of Donald Trump. So why do you think he didn’t act last week?
MD: Well, there’s what we know, and what you and I were talking about. A lot of the major countries in the region asked him not to, asked him to hold off. I suppose that also because we don’t have enough forces in the region to handle the counterattack. You know, last June, we ran through 25% of our THAAD, of our global THAAD missile arsenal, or interceptor arsenal. And at current rates of production, it would take five years to replace the 25% that we went through. The Iranians, Russians, and Chinese, and the North Koreans, they have discovered a chink in our armor, and that is the question of these interceptors. They can shoot a lot of relatively cheap missiles, drones, and ballistic missiles at us and our allies, and taking them down is very expensive. And so I would expect that our military said to President Trump that they didn’t have the forces in place to handle the counterattack. Their neighbors were uncomfortable. And then there’s what we don’t know, Hugh, and that’s who’s, what have the Iranians been saying, them meaning the regime, to Trump? I wonder if there isn’t some kind of a negotiation going on there. There seems to be from some of the comments that the President has made, but I don’t have any information about it.
HH: Now Mike, on Friday during the big prayers, there’s always a major prayer deal in Tehran on Friday. It wasn’t Khamenei, it was Khatami, who’s another hard-liner. And he said we are going to hang people, and Donald Trump is awful, and he said bad things about the President. Khamenei over the weekend insulted the President again. This is not the behavior of a regime that is afraid of us, is it?
MD: No, it’s not the behavior, and it’s also, though, very important for them to look tough before their own public with respect to the United States. And what they’re, the message isn’t just to Donald Trump. It’s to all the protesters. Don’t think that we are cowed by America. Don’t think that they can do anything to protect you. So it’s a, really, that’s the heart of the message, is really to their own protesters. But they’re very adept at talking one way in public and sending a completely different message in private. You’ll remember that Trump told the story about when they hit al-Asad air base after we killed Soleimani, they called him and said listen, we’re going to keep it limited. Let’s please have a climb-down after this. And so this, that’s typical about the way that the Iranians work. Very tough in public, and sending more conciliatory messages in private.
HH: In June, Mike, I think the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies put out a target list in Iran. And there were 25 different things including oil facilities, IRGC headquarters. They can’t put where the Supreme Leader is, because he’s going to pull a Dick Cheney and go to an undisclosed location, or like W. did go, went to an undisclosed location. Do you think we even have the ability to decapitate the regime? I would imagine they’re on high alert, a lot higher than Nicolas Maduro was.
MD: Yeah, well I can’t know that. But I’m guessing that the Israelis probably know where he is. And they have been, they have shown to have such penetration of the regime, it would really surprise me if they didn’t know that. And if the Israelis know it, then we know it. But it’s possible, it’s possible that we don’t.
HH: You know, Mike, I’ve been reading this book, King of Kings about the Shah. And it was a bestseller last year, and about what the Shah did and didn’t do. And the Iranian army didn’t hang with him. And he was incapable of the kind of violence, the kind of violence we saw last week. I want to get your assessment of this. When we account for population size, 3,000 Americans dead on 9/11 in a country of 300 million. A country of 10 million Israelis, they lose 1,200 dead in a day. In Tiananmen Square, we don’t know how many people the Chinese killed in 1989. I think proportionally, the massacre of last week is far worse than any of those three events. Do you agree with me?
MD: Yeah, I do, and we don’t know, we don’t know the final numbers. But I mean, it’s clearly, it’s clearly in the many thousands. I don’t know how many. We won’t know for some time. But you know, there’s not going to be, there’s not going to be anyone in Iran who doesn’t have a family member who’s been affected.
HH: Okay, so that brings me to this. I don’t think we can bring about regime change. Matt Continetti talked about regime coercion. I talk about regime evolution in Venezuela. We’re hoping that they move like Jeane Kirkpatrick said from dictatorships to democracy. But I don’t think we can change anything, because it’s so, it’s such a malignancy inside, the state within the state is such a malign and everywhere present thing. What is the best way of killing, I thought killing off the oil was the best way to kill off the metastatic IRGC. What do you think is?
MD: I think it’s what I’m arguing in the Wall Street Journal. I think that the cleanest, the easiest move that will give you the most effect with the least disruption is to shut down their banking system. And we can do that in one fell swoop. We can do it. They will work to try to reconstitute, but we can definitely do that. That, I think, is the smartest first step, because this is also the system that is allowing the elite in Iran to live, you know, there’s these two economies. There’s the elite economy and then the economy of everybody else. And the elite is able to live this luxurious lifestyle by immiserating everyone else thanks to this banking system. So you’ll hit the elite hard, and that would position the Americans in, I think, in a much better negotiating position regardless of what they choose to do. If Donald Trump chooses to negotiate, if he chooses to strike, whatever he wants to do, he’ll have more leverage if he shuts down their banking system.
HH: Now do you argue tomorrow and generally that going after Khamenei is the first step? Or is it a coordinated step along with shutting down the shadow banking? Or is there a ladder of escalation in Michael Doran’s mind?
MD: No, I only argued about the, I only argued about the banking, because nobody was talking about this. And they’re talking about a lot of other things like seizing tankers, and you, for example, attacking the oil, which could have all kinds of secondary effects that we might not want to contemplate. And I was actually surprised at myself when I said take out Khamenei. I really think that that’s probably where Trump is thinking because of the success of the Maduro operation and so forth. If I were actually in Donald Trump’s shoes, the thing I think I would first do is go for the money. I would want to have a lot of information that I personally don’t have before I would order a major military operation.
HH: All right, so I’m going to come back with Michael Doran. Don’t go anywhere, America, except over to my YouTube channel. You will see this video there before the end of the day. You’ll also see the transcript over at Hughhewitt.com. Michael Doran can be followed, [@Doranimated]. I’ll ask him that on the other side. I think it’s that. I’ve got it linked. I watch it every day, so I know where Mike is putting stuff up, but I think it’s [@Doranimated]. And don’t go anywhere. I’m coming right back with Mike Doran of the Hudson Institute after this.
— – – – – –
HH: Michael, what is your X account? I left last segment without making sure I got it right. What is it?
MD: Oh, it’s @Doranimated.
HH: @Doranimated. Okay, so people will find it if they get close enough. @Doranimated. Okay, Mike, back to the IRGC. How, I’ve heard so many different views of how many people have guns within the crazy militia, their sort of parallel military. It’s not the Iranian military.
MD: The Basij.
HH: The IRGC. So how many in the IRGC, and how many in the Basij?
MD: Oh, you know, I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips. I think the Basij is about 6,000 armed men, but I don’t have those loaded up in my head right now. And the IRGC is a relatively lean force. You know, they don’t have, the IRGC is there to protect the regime. So it controls the missiles. It controls the proxy network abroad. The Artesh, which is the regular military, has been historically neglected by the regime, because it was associated with the Shah, and with the Americans.
HH: So neglected that during the 12-day war, none of their MIG’s from the old days even flew, because they would have gotten shot down by the IDF. Now I also remember from the June 12-day war, a lot of their missile launchers were destroyed by the Israeli Defense Forces. Do they have enough to mount an attack on the oil facilities of UAE, of Bharain, of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, because I still think unless you cut the oil off, you really are not going to, no one’s going to notice bank account seizures, right? If we’re trying to deter bad people around the world…
MD: But they…
HH: No one’s going to notice that.
MD: They still, they certainly do. They’ve put a lot of effort into building more since then. The Israelis did not getting all of them. They made a point of showing, remember at the end of the war, that they could still get them off. They had, also, many in the far east of the country, which they had been not entirely beyond Israeli purview, but outside of where the Israelis were focusing. And they could bring, they could use those to hit their neighbors. They could bring them westward to shoot the Israelis, at the Israelis. There’s no doubt that they have, that they still have a potent arsenal and the ability to deliver it.
HH: So Mike, is there really any solution here? I don’t think we’re going to go in on a ground war for another decade or two until the Iraq effect is over, and the Afghanistan effect is over, like the Vietnam syndrome. But is there any way to actually dislodge the regime? I don’t think there is, but tell me if I’m wrong.
MD: No, I don’t think, I don’t think this is an easy process. I think we are going to be managing a very, very volatile and messy Iran for years. It’s going to, it’s going to morph into different forms. Once the Supreme Leader is out of the picture, we can begin negotiations with the regime. But the IRGC runs the economy of Iran in some very large percentage. Maybe 80% of the economy, I’m making that number up, but it’s something like that magnitude, is in the hands of the IRGC. So regime change would really mean getting the IRGC out of the economy. And that’s going to take a very, very long time.
HH: Well, that’s like de-Baathification. And of course, everyone remembers what happened in Iraq after we de-Baathified and disbanded the army. It doesn’t want that. In fact, Donald Trump brought it up. Why didn’t you take out all the other people not named Maduro? And he said do you remember Iraq after Paul Bremmer got there? And is that a well-taken lesson? Is that something we should internalize?
MD: I do think it’s, I think it’s important. I think it’s important to be prudent about this whole situation. I’m not saying that we should be looking for an IRGC, a kinder, gentler IRGC to cut a deal with, but we should be careful about big, grand projects of remaking the Middle East. One of the most important issues that isn’t talked about in the Iran context is the ethnic question in Iran. Persians only make up about 47% of the population of Iran. And we have these concentrated ethnic enclaves all around. The Persians are in the middle of the country. It’s kind of a sunflower there, the disc in the middle of the flower. And the petals are all the minorities around the borders. And the minorities are on both sides of the border, so you have Azerbaijanis in the north and the northwest of the country right next to the country of Azerbaijan. So they have strong bonds of affinity with people across the border. The Kurds in Iran are right across the border from Kurds in Iraq and Kurds in Turkey and so forth. So the ethnic composition of Iran is of great concern to Iran’s neighbors, and this is changing significantly while we speak.
HH: All right, I have one more segment with Mike Doran. Don’t go anywhere except @Doranimated, I got it right, on X. @Doranimated, and follow him there, and I have one more segment coming up with Mike Doran of the Hudson Institute. Stay tuned.
— – – – —
HH: Michael, what are the consequences if President Trump hasn’t done anything to punish Iran for the massacre of at least 15,000 people and the imprisonment of tens of thousands more? If he does nothing in a period of time, let’s say two months, because sometimes, it takes two months to get ready for something. What will be the consequences for Donald Trump and for the American deterrence that he has rebuilt, actually, in the first year of his second term?
MD: Well, that’s, you put your finger, I think, on the key word there. You said the key word, which is deterrence. You remember, Donald Trump likes to, he likes to keep all options open, and he likes to put himself in the position of being the decider. And he likes to keep everybody guessing, including the people close to him who are around him. That isn’t such a bad thing, but I think sometimes, he gets the calibration wrong. In the last, in his first term, you remember that he contemplated striking Iran, and then he didn’t. And then the Iranians came to the conclusion that he was a paper tiger. And they tried to then, Qasem Soleimani launched this whole campaign to throw us entirely out of Iraq. And that, then, led to Trump taking down Soleimani. And I think that was an awareness on his part that he had gotten the deterrence wrong. And I think he’s had enough experience with Iran that he won’t make that mistake again. But one of the reasons why I’m saying that I think he’s going to act is because he took such a strong position, and they have flouted so directly. And I think he’s seen this movie before.
HH: I also agree with that. But having been dared, having been taunted by the regime since he took the strong public position for eight days, and they haven’t turned their internet back on, I think just to disintermediate money is bad, because no one can see it. It’s worse to take a shot at Khamenei and miss, you know, have him show up in a secret bunker. So the one thing we can do that I know we can hit. We can hit IRGC headquarters. They’re all over the country. And we can hit the oil terminals. So if the problem is our very closest allies next to Israel are the ‘Little Sparta’, UAE, do you think they want us to get to a conclusion of this? Or do they want, we haven’t done anything to Iran. I mean, we literally have done nothing to them since Midnight Hammer. Do you think they want to leave the status quo with them reconstituting their missile program and nothing else?
MD: No, but they don’t, what they also don’t want, the neighbors don’t want is a wounded animal. They have to live next to Iran always. So if the United States goes in and takes some action against the IRGC bases, IRGC headquarters and then leaves the regime in place, the regime can then, might take out its anger on its neighbors. The other thing the neighbors don’t want or worry about is tremendous disruption. The Turks especially are worried about this. The Turks look at our policies in Iraq, and they look at the Syrian civil war. They still have millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey, created a lot of disruption on their borders. They all crave stability, and none of them, just like they go through the calculations like you just did with me, and they don’t see a simple solution here. There’s no simple set of actions that gets us to a perfectly stable Iran. And there’s no set of really strong acts of retribution against the regime that don’t create the possibility of tremendous disruption with lots of refugees, creation of new pockets for terrorists to work in, and so on. So nobody has the magic bullet here, the answer that gives us everything we want. And so they’re all counseling caution.
HH: So nobody has a magic bullet, nobody can predict the future of what they will do. What do you think the Israelis would prefer President Trump do?
MD: I think that the Israelis want, the number one thing that they want is an end to the Iranian nuclear program. The other thing that they want is an end to the ballistic missile program. So they, if there’s going to be a major attack on Iran, they would like to see, in addition to the stuff that you were talking about, like hitting IRGC headquarters, they would really like to see the ballistic missile program hit hard, very, very hard, and actually taking it offline. I don’t know that we can promise them that, though.
HH: Do you think, do you have faith that Iron Beam works, their new laser?
MD: Oh, everything I’ve seen about it says, suggests that it works. It’s not a total solution to the problem, but it’s an incremental step forward.
HH: Well, if that works and we’ve got the Lincoln there with the full complement of a strike group and all their defensive abilities, and we’ve flooded THAADs in there, what’s the worst-case scenario if Donald Trump does all of the above – IRGC, take a shot at Khamenei and other senior leadership, and take out the oil? What’s the worst-case?
MD: Oh, the worst case is that they would, the worst case is that they would hit, I think, the oil fields in Saudi Arabia. The worst-case is that one of their ballistic missiles would get through and create a mass casualty effect in Israel. We’ve also seen, now, you’ve seen that Catherine Herridge report last week that the Iranians used a dirty bomb, may have, I should be a little bit more cautious in my language, may have used a dirty bomb against us, against al-Asad base in response to the Soleimani killing. They could put something nasty on the end of one of these warheads as well.
HH: You know, I have seen that report. I’ve asked people who were at al-Asad before and after. They evacuated and they went back, were they worried about that. They’re not. Don’t you think we would have tested for that, Mike?
MD: Well, what I’m hearing is that there’s an abnormal, there’s an abnormal number of incidents of thyroid cancer among the people who, the people who survived. All I can say is it looked to me like it was a serious report that should be looked into.
HH: Oh, she’s a good reporter. Yeah.
MD: Yeah. So I can’t speculate as to why. Look, it’s possible that they weren’t aware of it, and it’s only becoming aware now. It’s also possible that they were not fully certain about it, and they didn’t want to say it, because it would require, it would require retribution when the policy didn’t call for that.
HH: Well, Mike, Mike Doran, we will look for your piece in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow to everyone who is listening, and I hope you will come back. Exit question, 10 seconds. Do you think Donald Trump will do something, anything that we notice, within this week?
MD: No. I think it’ll be the week after.
HH: All right. Mike Doran. I love people with answers. Thank you so much. Good to talk to you again. @Doranimated. Go follow him on X.
End of interview.
The post Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute On What He Hopes President Trump Does To Iran appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.