Dr. Sheila Nazarian: We Don’t Want Regime Collapse; We Want Regime Change

Welcome back America. You know, it's an honor to have Dr. Sheila Nazarian here. As a matter of fact, this is her first time on the program. She fled Iran, her family did, when she was a child. She's a board-certified plastic surgeon, and I may have to see you someday about some of my work here. And she's the star of Netflix's Skin Decision Before and After. Doctor, an Iranian-American, how old were you when you and your family left? And also, what do you think the Iranian people want? And are a number of them, a significant percentage of them, willing to take up arms and go against this regime if we help them? Great to be with you, Mark. Thank you for having me. So yes, my family escaped in 1985. My father was a pathologist in Iran, and he ran the Shah's Heart Hospital, and one of his lab techs told him, you saved my eyesight, I'm going to save your life, you're on the list to be killed. And before we knew it, the next day, my father left to Vienna, he said he was going on a medical conference, and left our passports with the government, me, my mom, and my sister. About a few months later, we hired smugglers to smuggle us across the desert, across the border into Pakistan. We were shot at by border police, the Iranian border police, they didn't want us to leave. We left everything behind in Iran, left everything my parents had worked for to come to America, as many do, to come to this amazing country that has given me all of these opportunities. By the time I made it here, I was seven years old, and I'm so blessed to be an outspoken woman in a country that allows for free speech. So what do the Iranian people want? It goes back and forth, Mark, to be honest. I would say in January, they want democracy, they want freedom, the freedoms that you and I enjoy here every single day. When the bombing started initially, they were excited, you know, they were excited to see the Ayatollah gone, and they are still to this day grateful for that. But, you know, they've been under economic sanctions for many years. They are hardened people, and the top 10% are the ones that are living, Mark, in homes you and I have never seen the likes of. They are so wealthy. They live, they run the country, they don't care about the other 90% who are suffering, who don't have electricity, who don't have food. Prostitution is high. It's cheaper to get a woman than a loaf of bread in some areas, just to give you an idea of how hardened these people are. What do they want today? Well, the regime is telling them now, either you, you know, you don't like us, but without us, there is no Iran. There is a sentiment in Iran that America will come and split the country up. Factions will be fighting, like happened in Syria after Assad's regime fell. Like in Yugoslavia, the country might be split up. This is what the regime is telling the people. You might not like us, but they're going to come and there will be no more Iran without us. So I think the messaging that needs to go out is we don't want regime collapse. We want regime change. We want the regime changed. We want to respect Iran's territorial integrity. The Iranian people need to hear that over and over again so that they trust America. Because what I'm hearing out of Iran right now is, you know, all of these economic sanctions, it just means the rich, the top 10% mark, their son won't have a new BMW this year. That's the effect it'll have on the ultra-rich. So what do we do to have regime change? It's not just arming the Iranian people. And you're right, they do not have a Second Amendment. They do not have a way of taking down the people with the guns. And they're just like you and me, Mark. What are they going to do, run into the bullets and hope it runs out before it hits their kids behind them? They have jobs, they have families, they have a life. We wouldn't expect us to do that, so we don't expect them to do that without being armed. So yes, arming them is one thing. The other thing is going after the private wealth of the top 10%. They need to feel it, because they're the ones making the decisions for the country. They're the ones that will suffer very little from these economic sanctions.