CSPAN - Washington Journal Elise Labott
Aired: 2026-03-31
Duration: 10:58


=== Organized Opposition and Defections (08:01) ===

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[00:01:31]  We're just going to speak very briefly to Elise Labbitt, who is a Cosmopolitics Substack founder and global affairs journalist Elise.
[00:01:38]  Welcome.
[00:01:38]  Good to be with you.
[00:01:39]  Let's start with the latest news, which is this Kuwaiti oil tanker that was hit by Iran and I believe might still be on fire.
[00:01:47]  That's right.
[00:01:48]  Iran is continuing its approach of going after the energy targets of the region.
[00:01:56]  You know, it's seen that this asymmetrical warfare that we're talking about, they can't respond with, you know, bombs and missiles as much as they were, but they see that this, you know, squeezing the international energy and global oil market is really the card that they have to play.
[00:02:13]  And so they're playing it all over the region and also really going after the Gulf allies to inflict that pain so that they put pressure on the United States to end the war.
[00:02:23]  But in fact, we're seeing reporting that they're going the opposite way, that they're encouraging President Trump to finish the war, to keep fighting.
[00:02:32]  That's right.
[00:02:32]  Initially, the countries knew that they were in the blast radius and they were hesitant to have them go.
[00:02:38]  But now that they're going, the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia used to say, you have to cut the head off the stake.
[00:02:47]  And we've talked before that we don't really know once they cut off the head who's going to grow back.
[00:02:52]  But now that the war is in train and they see the pain that Iran is inflicting across the region, especially in the United Arab Emirates in Kuwait, they hit a U.S. air base in Saudi Arabia the other day.
[00:03:05]  They're saying you really have to go all the way now.
[00:03:08]  There have been new threats by President Trump to, quote, obliterate Iran's energy infrastructure if there isn't a deal.
[00:03:16]  Shortly, he's also threatened desalination plants.
[00:03:19]  Are there talks happening right now?
[00:03:21]  There are indirect talks happening.
[00:03:23]  So, you know, the president is saying that we're having great negotiations with the Iranians.
[00:03:29]  The Iranians are saying there are no negotiations.
[00:03:32]  The truth is somewhere in the middle.
[00:03:33]  There are indirect talks.
[00:03:35]  Pakistan is really leading the charge, but there are a couple of countries involved, the Qataris, the Saudis, the Turks, the Egyptians, and they're all kind of met in Pakistan the other day to see if they could get some talks going.
[00:03:50]  But we see that the two sides are very still far apart.
[00:03:54]  President Trump introduced his 15-point plan, which was really for Iran's unconditional surrender.
[00:04:01]  And the Iranians feel that, you know, they're not losing here.
[00:04:05]  They may not be winning, but they definitely don't feel like they're losing.
[00:04:08]  And they put forward their own five-point plan, which is end the war, stop attacking all our proxies, get out of the region, and pay us for the damage that you did.
[00:04:19]  So you can see the two-part control over that straight-and control over the Strait of Hormuz.
[00:04:23]  So you see the two sides are very far apart, and you don't get together and actually sit at the same table until you see that there's an opportunity to bridge that gap.
[00:04:34]  So Secretary Rubio had said we're not going to tell you who we're talking to, because that could be dangerous to them, for their own domestic audience.
[00:04:41]  But do we know that the people that we're talking to or that the other intermediaries are talking to actually have control in Iran, that they have a say?
[00:04:53]  Well, I mean, one of the people that you've heard about is the Speaker of the Parliament, Mohamed Bagr Golabov.
[00:05:00]  And he seems to be kind of leading, he seems to be the face of the Iranian regime right now.
[00:05:07]  Even if Mustabah Khamani, the new supreme leader, we haven't seen him.
[00:05:12]  He's reported to be hurt.
[00:05:14]  We don't really know.
[00:05:15]  But it's not really one person, Mimi.
[00:05:17]  It's a whole system.
[00:05:18]  So it's not just Gholabaf.
[00:05:21]  No one person has a say.
[00:05:23]  It's really being run by committee right now.
[00:05:25]  The IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards also has a say.
[00:05:31]  And so it's more of a system.
[00:05:33]  If they wanted to come to a deal, I think they could probably come to some kind of consensus.
[00:05:39]  But it is true that the Iranian regime is in transition right now.
[00:05:44]  There's a lot of jockeying for leadership.
[00:05:47]  So once those very wide gaps become more narrow, we'll be looking to see if Golabaf or someone else emerges as that face.
[00:05:58]  The administration thinks he might be someone who's more, they say, reasonable.
[00:06:03]  He seems to be ambitious, maybe sometimes a little bit more pragmatic, but make no mistake, he's still a hardliner.
[00:06:10]  Yeah, I was going to say, it seems that the word reasonable kind of has a lot of space as far as what do they actually do.
[00:06:17]  They're trying to play to the fact that we've read he's very ambitious.
[00:06:21]  Maybe he feels that this is his time.
[00:06:24]  But there's no one known to be in the Iranian leadership that's actually reasonable.
[00:06:30]  It's really just a question of who can inflict more pain on the other one before the other one says uncle.
[00:06:35]  And it doesn't look like the Iranian regime is ready to say uncle anytime soon.
[00:06:39]  What about an organized opposition in Iran?
[00:06:41]  Is there any sign of that?
[00:06:43]  There's not.
[00:06:44]  There are a lot of different groups also that are jockeying for power right now.
[00:06:48]  One of the leading figures is the son of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi, who's seen as maybe like a transitional figure, but he doesn't have a huge constituency inside the country.
[00:07:02]  A lot of people in the diaspora think of this kind of nostalgia of the time of the Shah when things were better in Iran, that maybe he's been speaking out a lot.
[00:07:12]  You just saw him speaking at CPAC, interestingly enough, to conservatives in the U.S. political system.
[00:07:22]  But he's not seen as someone that really has the constituency inside the country.
[00:07:27]  There are also different factions, whether it's the Kurds, the Azeris.
[00:07:32]  The thing is, what you really want to see is an organized opposition with a leader that you can see defections in the military.
[00:07:41]  The people with the guns, who are they going to turn to?
[00:07:44]  And there seems to be, at least in reports, some disaffection within the system.
[00:07:49]  And people are afraid of what's going on with the military campaign.
[00:07:53]  But there's nobody to defect to.
[00:07:55]  There's no credible alternative.
[00:07:57]  And meanwhile, the U.S. military buildup continues in the region.

=== No Ground Invasion Expected (02:57) ===

[00:08:01]  What's the latest on that?
[00:08:02]  Well, 3,500 additional Marines are coming.
[00:08:07]  You know, the question is, is there going to be a ground invasion?
[00:08:12]  What military experts don't see that happening?
[00:08:15]  You know, a real ground invasion like we saw in Iraq could have upwards of 100,000, 150,000 troops.
[00:08:22]  It doesn't look like there'll be a ground invasion.
[00:08:25]  What's headed to the region right now, it's still a lot of troops, and they could be used for some limited operations, such as seizing this Karg Island to help open up the Strait of Hormuz or taking the enriched uranium that's buried underground.
[00:08:44]  So that's still a very dangerous proposition, and there could be a lot of casualties.
[00:08:48]  So when people say, oh, you know, it's not that many troops, it is a lot of troops.
[00:08:53]  Anytime you put troops in harm's way, it's very dangerous.
[00:08:57]  And meanwhile, we see these oil markets.
[00:09:00]  You know, we saw gas at over $4 a gallon today.
[00:09:05]  The energy markets are going to continue to be in flux.
[00:09:10]  All right.
[00:09:10]  Elise Labbitt, her sub stack is Cosmopolitics.
[00:09:14]  You can find that at cosmopolitics.news.
[00:09:16]  Thanks so much.
[00:09:17]  Good to be with you.
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