Michael Doran argues eliminating Ayatollah Khomeini could destabilize Iran’s regime, citing the Revolutionary Guard’s entrenched control and Trump’s potential war strategy despite past restraints. He dismisses conspiracy theories about Jewish influence, framing Israel as a vulnerable U.S. ally, and critiques Carlson’s anti-Semitic narratives while defending Israel’s military actions against Hamas. Doran warns Iran’s survivalist ideology makes it impervious to protests or pre-Khomeini monarchy restorations, urging Trump to prioritize decapitation tactics over misplaced peace efforts. [Automatically generated summary]
Surely they know that if they actually get into a shooting war with America, they'll be obliterated, though.
Or do they not kill?
I don't think they know that.
Okay.
I don't think they know that.
And I'm not sure that that's true.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with Mike Duran, Michael Duran.
And we always like to bring Mike on when we are talking about the Middle East, because he is the most realistic observer of the Middle East that I know.
And that includes in or out of the government.
And right now, as we know, the Middle East is a hotspot.
We have got a million ships off the coast of Iran.
Things look like they're going badly as Trump has said that he will never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon, which of course is the wisest thing he can possibly say.
But it may mean gunfire and it may mean people getting killed.
And so this is a dangerous moment, a tense moment.
And I wanted to bring somebody on who knew what he was talking about because otherwise you'd have to listen to me.
Michael Duran is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute.
He specializes in Middle East security issues and co-hosts the Counterbalance podcast.
He served in the Bush administration as a senior advisor in the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Pentagon.
Mike, I got to tell you, if you are the director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East, you're doing a terrible job because there is no.
So you've been writing.
Can I address that slur?
Yeah, please.
Knock yourself out.
I did it as kind of a joke when I titled the center.
Because I don't know if you remember at the beginning of the Biden administration, that's when we set up the center.
Mike Huckabee's Unexpected Challenges00:04:46
They refused to say Abraham Accords or they didn't even want to say that they were trying to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia because the Abraham Accords, the normalization of ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Bin went against everything that John Kerry said was possible to do.
So they were really upset about it.
So I said, okay, if those guys are no longer for peace and security, then we can be.
Yeah, they hate this because it worked, right?
They hate it because Trump came up with a change the game and it actually seems to be working.
It was working better than anything they've had before.
But now, you know, before I get to what's happening in Iran, the last time Trump bombed Iran, which seemed to be one of the great military missions of all time, I mean, it seemed simple, it seemed difficult, but they pulled it off so brilliantly and it did set back their nuclear project.
I remember Tucker Carlson clasping his heart because he had said this is going to be the beginning of World War III and he let go of the psy.
And the other day, Tucker Carlson was on with Mike Huckabee, a guy I really like and respect, and he's a fairly decent guy.
And I felt Huckabee was a little bit blindsided by the pure venomous anti-Semitic hatred that now just comes off of Tucker like smoke.
Now, you wrote a piece about this interview, which was really interesting because it showed how much Tucker distorts things.
What was your take on listening to that conversation?
Well, my take was that Mike Huckabee walked into a buzzsaw.
He didn't really understand what the game was because he's a decent guy because he's known Tucker for 30 years.
And for many other reasons, he thought this was going to be a normal interview where he, as the guy who's at the center of this storm right now, I mean, this potential war with Iran, Huckabee's there in all the meetings between the president and the prime minister of Israel.
Huckabee thought that Tucker would ask him questions, give him time to answer, would be genuinely interested in what his answers were.
But what really happened is that Tucker staged a little political theater and he cast Huckabee in a particular part and he wouldn't let Huckabee break out of that part.
The part that Huckabee was to play was the dishonest representative of a corrupt elite that refuses to admit that the government is really controlled by the Jews.
Or, you know, Tucker would say, I never said that.
Just some Jews, right?
Some Jews have access that no normal citizen has.
And so he peppered Huckabee with all kinds of questions that you would never ask any other ambassador.
Why haven't the Epstein files been released?
What about the Israel is harboring pedophiles?
Nobody goes to the ambassador, Charles Kushner, Trump's ambassador to France, and says, how come France, what was his name?
The director of Chinatown, famous.
Roman Polanski.
How come Switzerland and France, why are you harboring Roman Polanski?
Anyway, all of this was because Tucker knows that his audience believes that American institutions no longer represent them.
They're unaccountable and unelected powers that have concentrated concentrations of unelected and unaccountable power.
And he is putting a face on that, those concentrations of power.
The face is the Jews, the Israelis.
And he wouldn't let Huckabee get out of that frame.
Huckabee didn't really realize that that was what he was up against.
And so he scored some points against Tucker, I think, but Tucker's audience saw what Tucker wanted them to see.
And anyone who was inclined to see the anti-Semitism that Tucker was, that Tucker represents already knew that.
And so I don't think either one of them changed any minds.
So I don't want to stay on this forever, but there are two questions I want to ask you about.
And the reason I want to ask you is people in the audience who don't know who you are.
You famously have only one motive in your Middle East commentary, which is the good of the United States.
You've said this repeatedly.
It drives people crazy about you.
Israel's Focused Laser Beam00:06:04
People hate you for it.
But you have always said you want things in the Middle East to go in such a way that they help America.
I want the U.S. to be the top dog.
Yes.
And it's pretty obvious from everything you write.
So two things.
One of the moments that just appalled me was when Tucker started going on and on about how he would never kill a 14-year-old, even if that 14-year-old was pointing a machine gun at his family.
He's such a phony.
And he accused Mike Huckabee, of all people, of supporting the killing of children.
Can you explain to the audience why that's nonsense?
It's nonsense because he's talking about Hamas in Gaza.
And one of the claims against Israel is that it's carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
It's not true because Israel is fighting a terrorist army.
A terrorist army puts its own civilians between it and its enemy and uses its own civilians as human shields.
A democratic army puts its army between its civilians and its enemy.
It's as simple as that.
You are violating rules of war when you behave like a terrorist army.
And the death of civilians is on you morally.
It's not on the democratic army that is trying to defend itself.
The Hamas has tunnels under every structure in Gaza.
It puts snipers on the top of every building.
The only way, and it does not care about the killing of civilians, just like the Iranians don't care about the killing of their civilians.
They mow down civilians with glee.
It doesn't bother them a bit to do that.
When you're up against an enemy like that, there's no way you can destroy it without killing some civilians.
Of course, it is your duty to protect your own civilians.
And so innocent lives are going to die.
But the entire Western world, the entire world should be saying clearly that Hamas is responsible for every death in Gaza.
So my other question is this.
You were in the government under Bush.
You know Netanyahu, Netanyahu, and to Tucker's horror, Netanyahu and Trump seem to really get along.
Netanyahu visits often.
Are the Jews controlling America?
Well, you're of Jewish origin.
So you are not.
Nobody asked me anything.
But you're part of a cabal, are you not?
Didn't we establish that the last time I came on?
I know.
I can't even control my car.
I don't.
It's called you, Tucker.
Drew, it's so ridiculous.
The reality is the exact opposite of what Tucker Carlson is saying.
Israel is a small, vulnerable country with incredibly outsized talents.
It's a cyber superpower.
You know, there are five cyber superpowers in the world.
China, Russia, the United States, Britain, and Israel.
So Israel's punching way above its league.
And man for man, in terms of their cyber forces, the Israelis are the best because they have all of these brilliant kids around the country.
They're tested by the military before they go in the military.
If they test well for capabilities that would succeed in the cyber forces of the military, they give them the option to go in.
Every smart kid who is given that option wants to take it because he knows that if he does that, he can go on to become a millionaire or a billionaire afterwards going to work in Silicon Valley.
So we have all of those, just let's talk about that.
We won't talk about their intelligence capabilities, their air force, anything else.
Just everything that comes from their cyber capabilities.
That is all 100% at the use, put at the service of the United States because they are small and vulnerable.
And they have these outsized talents.
They do whatever we tell them.
Tucker wants you to believe that the Mossad is manipulating Americans.
Yeah, Mossad is, Candace Owens wants us to believe that Mossad is trying to kill her as if she's that important, as if they don't have better things to do.
The other thing about Israel is it's small.
It's small and their intelligence services are incredibly focused.
They are, I know this from my time in the government.
They are not focused on anything going on in the United States.
Nothing, zero.
It's not happening.
They're not even focused on a country like Turkey.
I happen to know this as well.
They're not collecting on there.
They're not collecting on Turkey here.
Every other week in the Turkish press, there are Mossad agents arrested here, Mossad agents arrested there.
They are focused like a laser on the existential threat to them, which is the Iranian nuclear program.
That's where all their resources are focused.
and they will do whatever we tell them.
And this is, then also, if I keep going on this cyber question, these kids, they come out, they're incredibly good at what they do.
They're cyber forces.
Then they come up and come out and they participate in Startup Nation.
And they create these fantastic startups, which are unable as Israeli companies to go to scale globally.
So what do they do?
They sell them to the United States.
You see, Google just acquired Wiz, a cybersecurity company.
Google didn't do that because the Jews are controlling Google.
It didn't do it because the Mossad is manipulating them.
Cutting Deals with Khomeini00:15:41
It did it because it's a good return on investment.
It was a purely capitalist motive there.
Every major, every major high-tech company in the world has a research and development office in Israel.
And all of that research and development ends up being fed back into the American economy.
It creates jobs and security in America.
So I can't, I'm, I'm, I feel bad that we even have to start making these arguments, but apparently we have to because Tucker's out there saying crazy things about how the Israelis are manipulating us.
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So here we are.
I mean, one of the things I think about Donald Trump is he doesn't like starting wars.
He likes ending wars.
He likes there to be peace in his administration, and he likes to brag about it.
It's one of the things he brags about all the time.
And I feel kind of sure that he does not want us to be into a long-term shooting war with Iran.
You wrote a piece for the free press, Donald Trump's Iran Trap.
What did you mean by that?
Well, I think I agree with you 100% about Trump's motives.
Trump wants peace.
He wants peace and prosperity.
That's what he wants.
I think he truly wants it in his heart, but he also wants to go down in history as the guy who, as the guy who made it possible.
And he doesn't understand a leader like Ali Khamenei in Iran.
Trump tends to assume, as a good capitalist, he tends to assume that the profit motive is at the center of everyone's motivations.
And when he's a completely ideological foe, which doesn't care about the prosperity of its own people at all, is something that doesn't really compute for him.
So he's misspelling profit in this case, I think.
Profit, P-R-O-F-I-T.
The bloody nose he gave to the Iranians in June, he assumed would bring them to their senses.
They would understand it's better to work with the United States, finding an accommodation, and we can cut a deal.
He wants to cut a deal.
These guys are not about cutting deals.
They're about destroying the United States, destroying Israel.
And they have a victory definition, which is that if they survive, they win.
They've gone up against the largest power on earth.
If they continue to survive, they can go back, start rebuilding their nuclear program, rebuild their ballistic missile program, then they are the winners.
They have been putting out statements very clearly since June 12th saying we won, America lost.
It's not, partly it's propaganda of a weakened regime that's fearful of showing any vulnerability whatsoever.
But there's also an element of truth to it, which is that this is, if you understand how they see the world, there's an element of sincerity with which they're saying we won.
Khomeini says, you know, we didn't call for a ceasefire.
We were fighting.
We were willing to go on fighting.
It was Trump who insisted on the ceasefire, and we never accepted it.
And it's true.
They never formally accepted a ceasefire.
Trump imposed it.
They went along with it.
They stopped shooting, but they have never accepted it.
And they say the Americans had to call for a ceasefire because Israel was hurting too much and America was using too much of its munitions.
And so it had to bring this to an end.
So as far as they're concerned, they're ahead of the game.
Surely they know that if they actually get into a shooting war with America, they'll be obliterated, though.
Or do they not care?
I don't think they know that.
I don't think they know that.
And I'm not sure that that's true.
All right.
Because what they have read correctly about the United States since 1979 until today, it's that the United States doesn't think a true victory, I mean, toppling them, destroying them, is really in our interest.
It's not really worth it because there'll be so much disruption.
Refugee flows, civil war, who knows what, you know, loose nukes, I mean, loose WMD, who knows what all kinds of problems you could have.
And they figured that if they just hold on and hold out, that the United States will stop short of actually destroying them.
So far, that from 1979 until yesterday, that's been a very good calculation.
So if they went in, I mean, what is your take on the protests that are going on there?
How serious is that in terms of being a threat to the regime?
It's a very serious threat in the sense that the extent of them is greater than anything we've seen.
So the legitimacy of the regime is at a low point.
But we haven't seen any cracks in the regime whatsoever.
We've seen no signs that the protests have brought about the beginning of the end.
The protesters have not been able to take any sort of four-star symbolic territory and hold on to it, you know, storm the parliament and hold on to the parliament or take over the broadcasting or anything like that.
And we haven't seen security forces siding with them or fighting with each other.
The one thing that you can see really clearly is that there is a split in the elite, in the regime, pro-regime elements about what to do in the crisis.
The regime is in a terrible crisis.
They can't provide enough water for Tehran.
A country that's unbelievably well endowed in oil and natural gas can't keep the lights on.
And they have electricity outages and so on.
And there's no way because of the corruption and because of the sanctions that they're under, there's no way that they can fix those problems.
So there is a faction in the regime that is saying we really ought to cut a deal with the Americans.
We really ought to scale back some of our support for proxies around the region, because if we don't come out from under American sanctions, we can't solve any of these problems at home.
But none of the people who are saying, and you hear this kind of message from the president, Pazeshkian, who's, by the way, an Azerbaijani ethnically, he's an interesting fellow.
But he's signaling that he believes all of that, signaling it openly.
And he's also showing that we can't move in that direction because the Ayatollah Khomeini won't let us.
So what you have in Iran is a dictatorship ruled with an iron fist by Ali Khomeini, who is imposing a line on everyone.
But there is a range of licit disagreement with the supreme leader that gets aired in the country.
So I wouldn't say it's freedom of expression, but people signal very clearly that they're not in agreement with Ali Khamenei, but they also signal that they're absolutely powerless to do anything about it.
What about the idea of making Persia great again, of bringing the Persian prince back and reestablishing the pre-Khomeini world of Iran, which is kind of, it wasn't a free country, but it was a modern country before the Shah was tossed out.
I think that's a very unrealistic, unrealistic option.
Reza Pahlavi, the Shah's son, is an attractive figure because he's the only figure around which you could get any possibility of unity of the opposition.
The regime has been very ruthless at home and abroad about eliminating anyone who could be a serious symbol of opposition to the regime.
The only one, the only person who could possibly play that kind of symbolic role is Reza Pahlavi.
There are three problems here, though.
One is that if we or the Israelis or Father Time decapitate the regime and Ali Khomeini and his people are somehow eliminated, the country is still going to be controlled by the IRGC, by the Revolutionary Guard.
And so it's like you think about the Soviet Union after Gorbachev.
Who's really running the Soviet Union?
I mean, I think Russia after the fall of the wall.
Who's really running it?
Well, the KGB.
Okay, They rebrand themselves as the FSB and they put on suits and they take over the oil company and so on.
But it's really the security services, the inner core of the security services who are still in charge.
That's the situation you would have in Iran unless you rooted all of those guys out.
And the Revolutionary Guard doesn't just control the instruments of repression, it also controls the economy.
So if Reza Fallaby was to go to Tehran, he would at best be the puppet of those forces.
I don't think he would have any influence.
They would like, more than likely, he would die within hours of arriving or be sent back into exile.
That's problem one.
Problem number two, he has no experience.
I mean, he's lived his life in Potomac.
He's never run anything.
He's a lovely guy.
He's a principled guy.
But I don't think that he's the man for the job.
And finally, there's this issue that nobody wants to talk about, which is the ethnic issue in Iran.
Iran is less than 50% Persian.
And to the ethnic minorities, he is seen as the face of Persian nationalism.
And he's not legitimate to them.
And so I just understand white people are attracted to him because for want of an alternative, but it's not a real alternative.
I'm sorry.
So, you know, the way I see Trump's position here, you know, I don't think it's a very popular idea for us to be at war with Iran or with anybody at this point.
You know, I think that people are tired of it.
They're tired of trying to reform the Middle East.
We've got all these, you know, people like Tucker Cross and telling him that the Jews are all behind it and all this.
Though not one of them has been able to explain why it's a bad thing for us to get rid of Iran's nuclear power.
I don't understand that at all.
I thought you were going to say nobody has explained to us why it's a bad thing to be controlled by the Jews.
Our economic system would be a lot better, I think.
But what should Trump do?
What's his best move here?
I think his best move is decapitation, taking out Ali Khamenei and the people around him.
It's not a complete solution to the problem, but it will at least break the log jam.
You can begin.
We have to be aware that once you start down this path, who knows what's going to happen.
But if it's possible, you get the closest you could have to a Maduro option in Iran.
I think that's going to be attractive to Trump.
If it's operationally possible, I don't know what the operational possibilities are, but if you can get rid of Khomeini, everything changes, not just in Iran, but also in the region.
Everything that Trump wants in Gaza, everything he wants in Lebanon is impossible as long as Ali Khamenei is there enforcing this hard line, hard line on the Iranian nuclear program and hard line on support for the proxies around the region.
And if the Jews were in fact in control of the country of America, what do they want?
I mean, they must want this country to obliterate it at this point, right?
Well, you know, the Jews are arguing with themselves all the time.
Always, yes.
It's a sport.
Yeah, it's a national sport.
But no, Prime Minister Netanyahu Does not want just simply another round, which could be because Israel is going to be hit with medium-range ballistic missiles.
We don't know what the Iranians have in store.
I mean, they have serious capabilities and they have learned from every time that there's been a round of conflict with us.
There was a good piece in the Wall Street Journal today.
I think it was probably written in order to try to prevent Trump from going to war, but it had a lot of very interesting information about our conflict with the Houthis and how dangerous the Houthis were to our forces, you know, to our pilots.
And they have some Houthis, you think of the ragtag militia in Yemen, they have some very serious capabilities, which they've gotten from the Iranians and the Chinese who are quietly backing the Iranians and their proxies.
So we can't assume that everything that we're going to see, that there is another conflict, that everything that we saw in June is what we're going to, it's just going to be a repeat.
Widgets and Spies00:04:51
They may have some tricks up their some tricks up their sleeve.
We have to be worried about that.
Finally, this is something that really bothers.
I'm kind of the opposite of the conspiracy theorist in the sense that I don't think people are smart enough to pull off the kind of conspiracies that conspiracy theorists talk about.
But where is our CIA?
I mean, the CIA seems to be spending so much time screwing with the heads of Americans and trying to convince us that Trump is a Russian agent or whatever the hell they're doing last week.
Why aren't they able to, you know, they used to at least be able to go into these countries and start trouble.
Where are they?
Are they doing anything, in your opinion?
I don't think they were ever as good at carrying out regime change as they wanted you to believe they were.
It's a very hard thing to pull off in the best of times.
And all of these regimes that developed during the Cold War, including the Islamic Republic, even though it was not a satellite of Russia, it grew up in that era.
And they are incredibly adept at counterintelligence.
It's very hard to put a spy on the ground for the United States to put a spy on the ground without getting them caught.
Now, the Israelis have done a lot.
And that's one of the, by the way, it's another reason why we want them as allies, because when they put their minds to something like this, they're very, very good at it.
But there's a limit to what you can do.
I mean, Ali Khamenei is surrounded by loyalists.
He's well protected.
I don't think it's easy to take him out by remote control.
And so, I mean, is our intelligence from this area any good?
I mean, are we getting the kind of intelligence we should get in your opinion?
The CIA is the greatest intelligence gathering machine on the planet.
What we in the United States, but that's because we are Rome.
We are the center of the empire and everybody tells us everything.
So what we, the United States, are exceptionally good at, probably better than anyone, is signals intelligence, at listening to people's electronic communications.
Nobody's better at that than we are.
It gets really, really good when you combine human intelligence with signals intelligence.
So when you have a spy who's the mistress of the leader and she puts a widget under his pillow, right?
And the widget is our signals intelligence, but the placement is human intelligence.
When you have the widget under the pillow of it, it gets really, really good.
The Israelis are much better at human intelligence than we are, but then we benefit because a lot of their human intelligence they give to us.
And all of our other partners do too.
There's no intelligence surprise that the United States has suffered since the beginning of the Cold War as a result of lack of information.
It was always a result of poor analysis.
We always, when they go back after Pearl Harbor, 9-11, whatever, they go back and they look at what they knew.
They had it in the files that there was in the work.
For some reason, they discounted it.
One reason or another, they discounted it.
But we always have the information.
Now, the clandestine operations is another thing.
These are much more difficult than you think on the basis of the movies.
Yeah.
All right.
Michael Duran, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute.
He writes for free press.
Where else are you writing?
Where else can we find yourself?
I write for Tablet Magazine.
I write Tablet, framing articles for the Tablet magazine, littler things for free press, and some other places too.
I occasionally appear in the Wall Street Journal.
Yeah, I've seen you in the journal as well.
Great stuff, Mike.
It's always good to talk to you about this.
You really have a very clear-eyed view of the thing.
And I'm disappointed to learn the Jews aren't running the country.
But aside from that, thank you.
I hope you come back again.
Thank you.
It's a great pleasure.
Bye-bye.
Always the most realistic voice out of the Middle East and always the voice that is thinking first and foremost and only about American interests.
Michael Duran from the Hudson Institute.
Love talking to him.
Come to the show on Friday, the Andrew Clavin Show.