Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces, driven from their military installations by sustained American airstrikes, have taken refuge inside civilian structures including schools, hospitals, and mosques — exploiting the constraints of American rules of engagement to shield themselves from further bombardment, according to former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Bolton made the assessment during a live interview from 12:36 with CBN News senior White House correspondent Kelly Wright, describing the development as a direct consequence of effective American military pressure while simultaneously characterising it as a cynical tactic consistent with the character of the regime he had long urged the United States to confront.
American forces, Bolton explained, had methodically targeted every identifiable Revolutionary Guard installation, rendering those facilities unusable. Faced with destruction of their established infrastructure, Guard units dispersed and embedded themselves within civilian locations they calculated would be immune from American attack. The strategy, Bolton suggested, was entirely deliberate — a calculated bet on American moral restraint.
However, Bolton expressed confidence that the tactic had a finite lifespan. Unable to conduct sustained military operations effectively from within schools and mosques, and deprived of their established command and logistics infrastructure, Guard forces would eventually be compelled to re-emerge into the open — at which point, he argued, American forces would be able to resume targeting them.
Bolton placed this battlefield dynamic within the context of his broader argument about the nature of the Iranian regime. He described the Revolutionary Guard not merely as a military organisation but as the ideological backbone of a theocratic government run by what he called fanatics — individuals committed to the destruction of Western civilisation and the establishment of regional and Islamic dominance. The willingness to hide behind civilians, he implied, was simply an extension of a regime that had already demonstrated its contempt for human life by massacring tens of thousands of its own citizens during street protests.
The former ambassador also connected the Guard’s displacement to the strategic necessity of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, noting that while American forces were successfully degrading Iran’s military posture, Iranian oil revenue continued to flow — funding the very regime and forces that American service members were fighting. Sustained military pressure, combined with resolute strategic purpose, remained in his view the only path to a durable resolution. Read_More…