The Iranian regime only cares about its own survival, but is it possible Iranians themselves might rise against the regime? Are there factions emerging that might yet topple the mullahs?
“Maybe there are factions, but only one is really speaking at this point,” said author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer on Mark Levin’s Sunday show. “And that is the most fanatical one.”
As the US war with Iran continues between halting, futile attempts at negotiation, Levin asks whether the regime will ever surrender. “They are never going to stop,” he said, “until they are stopped.”
Schweizer agrees, also noting that the Trump administration’s actions have tried to focus on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the most fanatical part of the Iranian regime, while leaving large Iranian Army targets relatively untouched by its intermittent military strikes.
“The only thing you can hope for is that there is some internal revolt in Iran,” Schweizer replied. “People have said there’s a lot of tension for example, between the Revolutionary Guards, which are the ascendant and most radical power, and the people in the regular army who don’t quite share that ideology. They really don’t have a voice now. They haven’t had a voice in a long time.”
And what about the Iranian people themselves?
Levin points out that the Iranian people were already rising up against the regime’s oppression, even in the face of murderous crackdowns, shootings, and beheadings of protestors.
“Why the hell aren’t we training and arming opposition groups?” Levin asked. “And, if they don’t exist, helping to create them? I’ve seen reports that people are looking to overthrow this government. They’re collecting bricks and shovels and so forth.”
“There are millions of people there that have a really big grudge that they want to settle,” Levin added. “I’ve never seen a population under circumstances like this that is more willing to put their lives on the line. You don’t see that in North Korea, or in China. But you do see it in Iran, because these are really Western people.”
“We know that when the bombing started, the Iranian government distributed some 750,000 rifles to people on the streets that were sympathetic to the Revolutionary Guards,” Schweizer said. “They basically told them, ‘if somebody’s getting out of line, shoot them. You have full authority to do so.’”
Still, the Iranian people resisted. “I think we need to be arming and we need to be organizing the opposition,” Schweizer continued. “These things don’t happen spontaneously.” Just as during the Reagan administration’s anti-communist strategy, “things didn’t happen spontaneously in Nicaragua, Angola, or Laos…They happened because we organized it. We armed them. We trained them. We gave them a political voice. We should be doing the same thing in Iran now.”
Time, however, is of the essence. As the segment ended, Schweizer noted that American strategic policy often changes when a new administration takes over, and that it is in America’s interest not to have the Iranian conflict go on much longer.
“[If] you get a Democrat in there that will sign a quick deal with the Iranians with no requirements, we’re going to end up being in a worse situation than we have been in the past,” Schweizer said. “Iran used to be the most advanced society in that entire region, in terms of individual rights, rights for women, the arts and culture. They are now the most regressive because of this alien regime that Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 created that has been perpetuated by terror ever since.”
Arming and training an Iranian resistance, he added, “is the next logical step… It’s one that is low risk in terms of no direct confrontation, but it gets the job done, which is what we want to happen.”
