Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told CBS that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made essentially the same case for striking Iran to the Obama administration in 2009 that he later successfully made to President Trump. A portion of this interview aired Sunday on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.” In this segment, which did not air on TV, Gates said Netanyahu has been making the same prediction — that the Iranian regime would “crumble” after a few days of air strikes — for at least 17 years. “He was saying in 2009, the regime is fragile, it’ll crumble at the first attack, and they won’t have time to do anything else,” Gates said. “I told him then, he was wrong.” “He was underestimating the resilience of the Iranians,” Gates said. “I thought he had been lulled into an unrealistic position by the absence of an Iraqi reaction when the Israelis destroyed the Osirak reactor in Iraq.”

SECRETARY GATES: I think it would be hard to say the war is over, from either the standpoint of the U.S. or Israel, at this point. MARGARET BRENNAN: Prime Minister Netanyahu is someone you had a lot of experience with over the years. SECRETARY GATES: Yes. MARGARET BRENNAN: And you were very critical of him in your 2014 book. You referred to his arrogance and outlandish ambition in his approach, specifically to Iran. You recalled a disagreement during a 2009 meeting, where he argued an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would trigger the Iranian people to overthrow the regime, and that Iran would not attack, he said, American targets or oil facilities in the region. That was in 2009 and he was trying to press an American president to do what this American president has done. Was he overly optimistic then, and is he now? SECRETARY GATES: He told me all those things in July of 2009 and I told him then he was dead wrong, that he was underestimating the resilience of the Iranians, that I thought he had been lulled into an unrealistic position by the absence of an Iraqi reaction when the Israelis destroyed the Osirak reactor in Iraq. he- he’d been lulled by the Syrian lack of reaction when we destroyed their- when Israel destroyed their reactor, that was during the second Bush administration, and I told him– MARGARET BRENNAN: But this is the war he’s been trying to sell for years? SECRETARY GATES: –and I told him that this notion, that he was saying in 2009, the regime is fragile, it’ll crumble at the first attack, and they won’t have time to do anything else. I told him then, he was wrong. MARGARET BRENNAN: The regime was historically weak at the moment of these strikes. Is it possible he’s- right now, even though we haven’t seen those things, like an uprising among the Iranian people? SECRETARY GATES: I think that the likelihood of an uprising, of course, this is one of those predictions that can get you into a lot of trouble, but I think the likelihood of a near-term uprising is very low, because the besiege and the internal controls seem very much intact in Iran. You haven’t seen any demonstrations, or very few demonstrations in the street. People are cowed, they’re afraid, and right now they’re concerned with how they- how they can eat and live under the current circumstance. This is a regime that couldn’t provide water to Tehran before the attack started. So I think when the danger will come, will be some time after the war stops. But I also think what you generally see in regimes like this is not so much a change of regime from the streets, but that the regime itself begins to fracture, and that you have people within the regime who want to take a different tack, and so you have an internal fight for control.

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