The Iranian regime has devoted nearly half a century of national resources, that should have served its own citizens to constructing a vast military and security apparatus designed exclusively to entrench and protect the ruling theocracy, former National Security Adviser John Bolton warned during an interview from 12:59 with CBN News.
Speaking with senior White House correspondent Kelly Wright, Bolton offered a damning structural assessment of the Iranian government one he argued made the current conflict not merely a military confrontation but the culmination of decades of willful international failure to confront a regime that had been transparent about its intentions from the beginning.
Bolton noted that the scale of remaining military targets inside Iran a reality that continued to define the operational landscape of the current campaign was itself a testament to the regime’s priorities. The Revolutionary Guard, the nuclear programme, the ballistic missile infrastructure, the global terrorist network: all of it, he argued, had been built and sustained not for the defence or development of the Iranian nation, but to keep the ayatollahs in power.
“They’ve spent 47 years developing these capabilities,” Bolton said, “not for the benefit of the people of Iran — but to protect the regime. That’s their objective. That’s their only objective.”
Bolton connected this structural argument to the moral case for regime change. A government that had machine-gunned tens of thousands of its own citizens in the streets for daring to protest, that had funnelled national wealth into terrorist proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and that had pursued nuclear weapons in deliberate defiance of international norms — while its people suffered was one that had forfeited any legitimate claim to sovereignty or negotiated accommodation.
He argued that the depth of the regime’s military investment also explained why diplomatic and economic pressure had consistently failed. The regime had not built this infrastructure to be bargained away. It had built it precisely to survive the kind of external pressure the international community had applied for decades.
Bolton was equally direct about the implication for American strategy: because the regime’s capabilities were so deeply embedded and deliberately dispersed — with Revolutionary Guard forces now sheltering inside civilian structures after being driven from their bases patience and persistence would be required alongside military firepower.
The only acceptable endpoint, in Bolton’s assessment, was the removal of the regime itself. Anything less, he warned, would simply buy time before Iran rebuilt and returned — more capable and more dangerous than before. Read_More…