I'm John Batchel with Ben and Ben Talibu.

My colleague, he's a senior fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, discussing

Iran, much in the conversation in Israel, as it is exhausted after a year of war, but continues

because of the threats from Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in Gaza and the

Houthis in Yemen and bad actors on the West Bank, all of them are being driven by Iran.

So what is to be done?

But the people of Iran are not driving this.

It's the regime.

It's the Mullahs.

It's the IRGC.

And therefore, Benham, it is clear that Iran can be stripped of all

resources, and the Iranian people have no defenses. So therefore, the thinking is there has to be a

day after planning that if the regime goes, if the regime topples, if the Ayatollah and his guardians flee or whatever is

their end, that the country doesn't pass into the hands of even worse, anarchy or a new

dictator. Is there any thinking about that that you've seen? Because I've been hearing noise

about people thinking that through and saying, you know, we're not

ready to topple the regime because it could be worse.

Well, this is the Middle East, John, which means they can always get worse, not better.

But fundamentally, this is where, and forgive me for doing what it seems like fleshing out

the outline of an op-ed, but I have this in a forthcoming op-ed about an imagination problem.

And I have two audiences in this op-ed for an imagination problem.

The first audience is the Western policy audience, where we have a fundamental lack of imagination, an inability to conceive of a flipped Iran, of a Middle East without the biggest arsonist of conflict,

...