Our first guest today is Roya Hakakian, author of Journey from the Land of No. Born and raised in Iran, Roya explains that what has unfolded there over the past two weeks is comparable in national trauma and moral consequence to the September 11, 2001 attacks or the October 7 terrorist massacre. She argues that the world's failure to grasp the scale of these events is akin to 9/11 happening and no one paying attention. The reports are horrific—reminiscent of genocidal campaigns of the 20th century—including accounts of security forces in Mashhad beheading teenagers and municipal workers being instructed not to clean blood from the streets, deliberately leaving visible reminders to terrorize the population.
We are also joined by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA Iranian targets officer who spent years identifying, assessing, and attempting to recruit Iranians with access to valuable intelligence. He argues that short of direct military action, the United States can play a far more aggressive role by helping protesters secure communications and cyber capabilities to disrupt the regime's control. The regime, he notes, appears to have taken a "shotgun" approach—systematically eliminating anyone who has demonstrated leadership in street protests—and that targeted repression is strategically significant.
Our third guest is Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Iran Program, where he oversees the organization's Iran-related research and analysis. He contends that if President Trump intends to help catalyze the next phase of protests in Iran—to give momentum and protection to those already in the streets—the United States will need to act in a way that is politically consequential. Political pressure and military signaling, he argues, must be fused. While Qatar fears regime collapse, Turkey arguably has the most to lose and has been among the most vocal opponents of an Iranian implosion. The regime's more than 12-day internet blackout, Taleblu notes, is designed to prevent images and videos that violate its own red lines from escaping and saturating the global media environment.