Top adviser to Iran's Revolutionary Guard leader sits down for rare interview | Hacker News Reader

Top adviser to Iran's Revolutionary Guard leader sits down for rare interview

pbs.org

19 pointsthisislife215 comments

> The longer this war lasts, the more experience we gain. We had never seen a real war to gain real experience to learn how to fight with America. In these five months, we have learned how. We have also seen how the American military is weaker than what we perceived.

This is the most salient point and shows this guy understands the ooda loop — possibly better than the pentagon, which famously hates Boyd and the concept of strategic optimization.

The Iranian government is also highly motivated to adapt in order to survive. In case of a lost war with the US, massive death toll among the current elite is highly likely, and the entire regime could be destabilized enough to fall.

OTOH if America loses, nothing will happen to any member of the current US government nor to their kids etc.

> OTOH if America loses, nothing will happen to any member of the current US government

Trump seems to genuinely suffer when he loses face. That’s what’s happening here.

Would it be possible for the People to observe some of this suffering? It would help preserve what little remaining sense of justice we still have. Usually we see some shame from politicians, or at least some disowning from their supporters. But here it's just continued unrepentant mayhem and destruction.

> Would it be possible for the People to observe some of this suffering?

An all caps tweet is a sign.

How do you discern it from the baseline of just old guy mad at the TV?

Please don’t take away what I believe.

when Trump loses, he just declares victory and face is saved.

The guy touts this as something that favors them but why can't be true in reverse? ie. the US finds Iranian weaknesses?

That's what it should be doing. There's plenty of analysis out there about Iran's strategy (my favorite so far: https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/05/21/mosaic-defense-dispe...) but I get no sense that anybody actually in charge is trying to attack Iran's strategy. Instead they just attack Iran.

The US had a plan for dealing with Iran.

It didn’t have a plan for dealing with Trump.

> One of your most effective weapons in this war has been your missiles and your drones. Reports said before the war you had about 3,000 to 4,000 missiles. How many missiles do you have in your stockpile right now?

What's the point of asking a question like this? Obviously he is not going to answer!

> What's the point of asking a question like this? Obviously he is not going to answer!

I see this all the time with journalists. I've been assuming they're asking the questions with obvious answers for those eho don't realize the answers is obvious. The alternative is too depressing.

You never know - when India elected a Prime Minister, from a new and inexperienced party, in 1977, he blurted out to his Pakistani counterparts on how India had obtained intel on Pakistan's covert nuclear program. Pakistan immediately busted all the Indian R&W agent network and tightened its information security. (How Morarji Desai helped Pakistan become a nuclear state - https://www.dailyo.in/politics/morarji-desai-kargil-war-perv... ). While that incident can be attributed to naivety / inexperience and / or value-based politics, note that it isn't a coincidence that in the last 2 - 3 decades, western media and social platforms have been encouraging everyone to develop narcissistic personality traits leading them to share / brag about all aspects of their life online ...

And note that the IRGC leader didn't stop with "no comments" - he also said that Iran produces more missile in a day than they they use. So that has now given something for the intelligence agencies to actually explore ...

It is going to be perversely funny if Grump starts the process of Iran opening up to the world by prosecuting his distract-from-the-Epstein-files war so incompetently and abhorrently that Iran discovers the value of coming to the table and appealing to the liberal values of the [rest of the] western world. There is obviously a lot of bullshit in this interview, but there are also inklings of legitimate engagement.

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