Following the killing of three U.S. service members by the regime, U.S. Central Command continues to pound targets in Iran. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump warned that the U.S. would hit "any site" where Iran is considering developing their nuclear capabilities.
Retired Air Force Brigadier Gen. John Teichert, a former assistant deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for International Affairs, recently told "Washington Watch" that nothing has changed in Iran in 47 years.
"Their No. 1 priority, they say it, death to America, is to kill Americans, and sadly and tragically, some of that happened this weekend," he lamented.
He called the ceasefire period "a disaster" and said, "Iran has been enticed by our weakness."
"Now is the time to return to a language they actually understand," he added. "We've got to use a language that they understand in Tehran and return to major kinetic operations."
Teichert believes the Kurds, one of the world's largest stateless peoples, are the key, that they would carry out a ground operation against the regime.
"They are a powerful, capable Western fighting force," he asserted.
The Kurds are an ethnic group of roughly 30–40 million people spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
Historically, their identity has been more closely tied to ethnicity, language, and shared culture than to religion, which has allowed Kurdish Muslims, Yazidis, Christians, and others to share a broader Kurdish national identity despite religious differences.
They have long sought greater autonomy or independence and have been key U.S. allies, particularly in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War and in the fight against ISIS, where Kurdish forces served as some of America's most effective ground partners.
"I have seen them in action, and they are massively capable," Teichert reported. "We have armed them sufficiently, and if we provided them the top cover of air power, then those strikes that I mentioned previously, coupled with a real threat of a ground invasion not by Americans, not by Israelis, but by the Kurds … would be sufficient to potentially create the wave of what we would need to see the regime flip."
But that can only be accomplished with trust, and many Kurds remain skeptical of the United States because they believe Washington has repeatedly prioritized broader strategic interests over Kurdish aspirations, citing events such as the end of U.S. support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels in 1975 and the 2019 withdrawal of U.S. troops from parts of northern Syria that preceded a Turkish offensive against Kurdish-led forces.
