David Kilcullen: former advisor to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on the odds of Trump bringing in 'regime change' for Iran following US strikes

A past-advisor to a former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says a clear and timely assessment of damage to Iran's nuclear programme, is unlikely.

David Kilcullen says the US is presenting its strikes as complete destruction.

"There's really no way to tell that until somebody gets in there and takes a look - and there's very little chance of that." 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Donald Trump has hinted that he might be after a
regime change in Iran. After all, he's posted on social
media it's not politically correct to use the term regime change,
but if a current Iranian regime is unable to make
a run great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change? Now?
This would be a mission change because it was previously
the bombs were previously only about getting rid of the

(00:20):
nuclear weapons. And David kilcullen served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was an advisor to former US Secretary of State
Condoleeza Rice is now a professor at Cambrie University and
with US Hello David, hey, hether, what do you reckon?
Does this get bigger? Does this become about regime change?

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Well, the real answer is nobody knows. There are certainly
people within Donald Trump's coalition of supporters in the US
that would be extraordinarily unhappy at any escalation or any
bigger conflict, and we've seen them getting very vocal over
the last few days. But there are also influential people

(00:58):
in the Senate and elsewhere who would like to see
a regime change. So it's really a I think, you know,
as any other veteran will probably tell you. Starting a conflict,
politicians may think they've got a clear idea where it
ends up, but you almost never do, and once the
bombs drop, you know, it can really escalate in unexpected directions.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Do you believe that Iran was working on a nuclear weapon?

Speaker 2 (01:25):
We know that they were prior to two thousand and three.
There have been basically three different assessments that are out there.
One is the US Intelligence Community assessment, which is recently
as March this year, said that they had not restarted
that program since two thousand and three. They were talking
about it more, but they hadn't. The second version of

(01:50):
events is the Israeli version, which suggests that they were
days two weeks away from having a functioning nuclear weapon,
which should caveate that, but by saying that the Israelis
have been saying some version of that for about twenty
years now, so there's some debate about whether that's more
of a political statement or more of an analytical statement.

(02:12):
And then the third option is what the IAEA, the
International Atomic Energy Authority, said on the night for June,
which was that the Iranians seem to have enough fissile material,
but they haven't currently made a bomb, so there's really
a lot of dispute out there as to what the

(02:34):
actual state of the Iranian nuclear program is.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
If they were in fact making a bomb or getting
very close to the possibility of switching to that, blowing
these three sites up to the extent that the US
has does this, I mean, it seems to me this
would only delay it. Right, It's not going to stop
what they're doing, is it.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Well. The Israelis, of course, have been in an active
war with Iran for about ten days and have killed
a number of major nuclear scientists as well as damaging
lots of other sites. The reason for the US strike
being so essential to Iran's war plans is that to

(03:14):
target the Photo site, which is the one that's deeply
buried under a mountain, you needed a weapon that only
the US has, which is the so called massive ordinance penetrator,
which is a sort of fourteen thousand pounds bomb. So,
you know, I think the chances of US getting a

(03:34):
clear battle damage assessment anytime soon are pretty slim. I
think the US government is trying to portray it as
complete destruction of Photo, but there's really no way to
tell that until somebody gets in there and takes a look,
and of course there's very little chance of that.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
David, thank you very much, really appreciate your time. That's
David Kilcallum, who is of course a former advisor to
Secretary of State US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. For
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