Where this was said
The Khomeini Funeral: Scale, Shock, and Strategic Implications
At 6:58 · chapter starts 3:51
Ben Meiselas dives in with the central image: tens of millions of Iranians flooding Tehran and neighboring cities for Ayatollah Khomeini's farewell ceremony, with mist stations and free food distributed in 35-degree Celsius heat. He describes watching the B-roll footage and immediately thinking about the Trump regime's consideration of a ground invasion — and how those crowd scenes would have translated into what he calls an American 'meat grinder.' He notes not just the scale but the composition of the attendance, including official delegations from dozens of countries, and frames this as a spectacular failure of the Trump-Netanyahu isolation strategy. He reflects honestly that he does not consider himself an apologist for the Iranian regime — acknowledging real internal dissatisfaction — but insists the footage demands a realistic intelligence assessment. The eulogist's words at the Tehran prayer hall — 'we have not come to bury our leader, we have come to avenge him' — punctuate the gravity of the moment. [1] — Ben Meiselas "Tens of millions of Iranians turned out for the Ayatollah's funeral — and the Trump administration had no idea it was coming. By killing th…" 03:51
Tens of millions of Iranians turned out for the Ayatollah's funeral — and the Trump administration had no idea it was coming. By killing the Supreme Leader, Trump and Netanyahu turned him into a martyr and handed the regime a massive surge in domestic and international legitimacy.
The Trump regime considered a ground invasion of Iran — a 90-million-person country with a deeply embedded, socially resilient regime and a Shia religious base stretching from Iraq to Pakistan to Yemen. Meiselas watched the funeral footage and thought: this would have been a meat grinder for American troops.
