"Can you or the American military or the Israeli military get to what’s left of their third string and their fourth string and their fifth string? Do you know where they are? Can you kill them?"I posed those questions to President Donald Trump Monday, July 13."Yeah, I do, but we don’t want to talk about that," the president replied.TRUMP SAYS HE LEFT INSTRUCTIONS TO 'BOMB' IRAN 'AT LEVELS' NEVER SEEN IF HE IS ASSASSINATED"But we certainly are watching, yeah," he added."I know a lot about that subject.
I know a lot, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about it right now."A satellite image shows damage at the control tower in the port of Chabahar, Iran, July 9, 2026.(2026 PLANET LABS PBC/Handout via Reuters)Trump’s restraint about clearing the bench of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is interesting.The public faces of the rump regime in Iran — President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi — don’t have any authority over the killers with the guns.
(Trump puts the number of Iranians massacred by the regime over two days in January at 52,000, so we know the ruthlessness of the men in charge.) When the campaign against Iran by the U.S.and Israel opened on February 28, those strikes devastated the first and second tiers of "leadership" in Iran.
Pezeshkian and Araghchi were not important enough to be in the command bunkers.TRUMP CALLS TERRORIST IRANIAN A ‘CANCER.’ IS HE FINALLY THE ONE TO REMOVE IT?Sixty-eight-year-old Ahmad Vahidi emerged from the wreckage and his "retirement" after the wipeout of the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic to take command of the IRGC.Imagine how utterly ruthless a benched and passed-over killer must be, and how many grudges he must hold against those who put him out to pasture in the first place.Eli Lake is among the most respected national security reporters in the U.S.
On Tuesday, July 14, Lake wholly agreed with what Trump told me Monday: It is unrealistic to expect the Ir...