What Could Go Wrong, or Right, in a War with Iran

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When protests ignited across Iran in December, and reports emerged that the regime was killing thousands of protesters, Donald Trump threatened to intervene then and there. He did not.

But the Pentagon began building up a huge military presence around the Gulf region, and meanwhile, the regime, it turns out, may have killed as many as 30,000 of its own people, according to some estimates. Iran has seen huge protests in the country before, and the regime has responded with violence before. But this time seems something of a different order of magnitude. Some Iranians who oppose the regime have been in the crazy position of hoping for the US to strike, to bomb their own country, even if it leads to full scale war. Reporter Cora Engelbrecht has been recording her conversations with people in Iran about what that could all mean.

Now we've altered or overdubbed their voices to protect these people. from reprisal. It is the topic of uh the past uh 40 days like uh it is the topic that every two Iranian would speak about uh when they would ever meet one of the people who spoke with me is a young man who works in a hospital about four hours north of Tehran I mean I'm having a very good people's mind processing all these uh different thoughts because uh on theory, like on paper, I would uh be against a foreign intervention. Uh I would believe that uh democracy would only come from within.

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