414. Israel vs. Iran: What Happens Next

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1:58Welcome to an emergency podcast. And I think unlike Trump Musk, I think that Israel around merits as scrambling, and I must apologise, Rory, I've done something really, really, really stupid. I have left the UK, I'm in France, but I came without my proper recording gear. So I apologise to you and also to the listeners, if the sound is not 100%, we'll do our best. But that to be frank is why we're doing this recorded going out pretty much as soon as we've recorded it, rather than rather than live. Though we did get loads and loads of questions, we'll be announced, we're doing this. So here we are.

2:41I reckon for around two decades, BB Netanyah, who's been thinking about this, military action to take out Iran's nuclear program, and the consequences immediate are pretty serious and long term, possibly even more so. So what have you made of it so far? Well, quick, quick explainer to help people. So Israel launched a series of strikes on two different types of target. One of them was Iranian nuclear facilities, and there are two major types of Iranian nuclear facilities. It seems as though they hit the Natan sites, but not the photo sites. So they did not hit the massive underground, you know, half a mile underground bunker sites.

3:29Possibly because actually they don't even have the kit to do that. They don't have the planes and the bunkabusters to do that. But the Americans do, but they don't. But the Americans do and could provide it. The second thing that they did was that they hit most senior members of the Iranian regime. So took out the head of the entire armed forces. So number two in the entire Iranian government, the head of the Revolutionary Guard, the chief negotiator in the Iran -Israel negotiations, and a series of nuclear scientists.

4:07I think there's so many different ramifications of this. But before we get on to, I think what for me are the two biggest questions, which is what does this mean for peace? And related to that, what on earth is the US doing in all of this? Let's look at it from purely military point of view. From a purely technical military point of view, this was a very, very effective attack. It's something that one of the reasons why many people in the Israeli services objected to these kind of attacks even two, three years ago is they would have worried that Iran would have struck back with ballistic missiles.

4:49They would have worried that there would have been attacks coming in from Iranian proxy groups. So Hizb -ul -A 'in Lebanon, the Houthis, and Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq. But of course, what's happened since October 7th is Israel has dismantled the Hizb -ul -A' groups, taken out most of their entire, basically missile capacity, and their leadership with this attack with the pages. They've also mounted an attack on Iran, which was now just under a year ago, where they took out most of the air defense systems. And Iran has been in a very difficult strategic position, trying to work out whether if they keep their head down and keep talking and talking about peace negotiations, sincerely or otherwise, whether the threat will go away or whether what they needed to do is put their foot down and push ahead with their nuclear program because they were under existential threat from Israel.

5:55And now they've been hit back over to you. Yeah, you talk about existential threats. And of course, that is the phrase that Netanyahu used in order to explain to the Israeli people why he was doing this now. An accommodation, really, of what they say is their intelligence that this was that the Iranians were within striking distance of being able to and indeed wanting to use a nuclear weapon against Israel. We have nowhere to know whether that's right or wrong. But secondly, the other thing that happened was that the nuclear authorities, the atomic energy authority, international atomic energy authority.

6:39For the first time in 20 years, said that Iran was operating in breach of its obligations. And that, I think, was what gave Netanyahu, possibly the tipping point in his thinking, to say, right, let's go for this. Now, what's fascinating is the extent to which America is or is not involved because there are very, very mixed signals. And that may be deliberate, or it may just be part of the chaos that we've come to associate with the American administration under Trump. One other thing, which I think may be just before we really dive into it, I find it fascinating that part of the thinking, remember about the episodes that recorded at the time of October 7th, part of the thinking was that Hamas were going for it at that point because they were trying to disrupt progress towards a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

7:38And I wonder if part of the thinking here is disrupting the negotiations that are underway between America and Iran, which would use to resume, I think, on Sunday. And Iran is now saying they won't take part. And I think the other thing that I find interesting in this is, so Donald Trump was signaling yesterday that something may be happening, he sort of signaling that he knew something was coming. Rubio, the Secretary of State, came straight out on the back of this as we were not involved in this. But then there was this rather strange, I mean, it is really weird how it operates. Well, the first things he did was to focus CNN journalists down the bash.

8:22Now, he doesn't really like CNN, he's always going to invite them fake news, but he did have this conversation with her, she then reported, which indicated that actually he was fully behind what was going on. And I wonder whether that sort of, he doesn't want to look like Netanyahu's done this without his authority because that makes him look weak. But I look, and you were point about the effectiveness of the military operation. When this all started, I was up in Paris, and I'm now down in the south, and so I've been breeding and listening. And so, you know, one of the most interesting things I listened to was actually a podcast by our colleagues at the rest is classified David McCloskey and Gordon Carrera recorded some months ago and got landed to Gordon Carrera.

9:15He said that the next few weeks, this is likely to come to her head and it's either going to be a deal or it's going to be Israel taking action against Iran. So what was fascinating, they told him detail this story of an incredible operation to take out a guy who was the head of the nuclear weapons program, who was also doubling up as a physics lecturer in University in Tehran, but he was eventually taken out by a machine gun operated robotically from a long, long, long way away and assisted by AI. So I think what we've seen, the fact that they were able to name so quickly, some of these people that you talked about, the leadership and the nuclear scientists and so forth.

10:00Now, the question now for Iran, they, as you say, have had their defences and their attack substantially weakened in recent time. So that they can whack off missiles all they want, the truth is, Israel's defences are pretty strong and we're able to bring them down. They can't, there are a long way they'd have to go through Iraq, Jordan, Syria, they can't really sort of, you can't think of troops piling in on Israel, that's not going to happen. So I think the two things that are left there left with, one is sort of cyber warfare, but I imagine that Israel is pretty good at that as well. And the worry I have about what's happened today is that what they, the response that they might be tempted to go through, say, right, well, we can't, we did the deal 10 years ago, we did the deal with America and with Britain and France and Germany and and Russia and the European Union, we've did that deal.

10:56You keep saying that we've been breaking the terms of that deal, but we've actually launched, you know, nothing seems to substantially against you guys. Therefore, we're going to pull out of our international nuclear obligations and go hell forever to get a bomb. Well, so, so yeah, let me, let me come in, you're covering a lot of ground there. You've covered about seven, seven different points, but the, let's maybe start with that one, which is what runs response. And I think we've got to get away from just being stuck in the question of the military war. I think one of the problems is that there are two things that nobody are really talking about.

11:34One of them is, is the US context this, but the other is that the bigger question of international law. I mean, there's a tendency amongst commentators and in fact, actually amongst some British diplomats, I've been talking to you today, to just see it as a technical tactical operation, you know, well done, Israel, really cool technology. As you said, remembering the robotics thing, remembering Stuxnet, which was this famous cyber attack that interfered with the machinery of the nuclear system. And to ask yourself what options Iran's got and of course it's true, Iran has to some extent been exposed as a paper tiger.

12:10And there'll be a whole debate taking place there. So there's, there's that framing of it. You know, why did they, why did the timing come then? What was the nature of the surgical strike? What can the Iranian regime do, do back? But there's a much bigger question, which is this was in the middle of a peace negotiation. And the action that Israel has taken is to put it mildly very, very questionable under international law, whether they remotely cross the threshold for a preemptive strike. So the would have been, I guess, if we've been talking about this even three years ago, much more talk about what on earth is going on, how is the world getting into people taking this kind of unilateral action?

12:56But it's very interesting how quickly we now almost take that for granted and are into the question of the tech. On the Iranian response, I think, just, just, just, just, just, just, we leave that point. I mean, you're absolutely right. That is unbelievably significant because we should remind listeners and viewers that Netanyahu is already indicted on allegations of war crimes in relation to Gaza. But the fact of that he, I think we said this at the time, but the fact that he can go to Washington and sit down with Donald Trump and talk about all this without that even being mentioned or raised or even part of the debate underlines this notion that we're kind of are living in an era impunity.

13:39So Netanyahu, if he thinks he can do this, he will do it. And what's more, they're indicating that this is going to go over some time. This is not a sort of one day wonder. Yes. And let maybe just develop that one more point. So I think the important context is to remind people that Trump thought that he was in the middle of a negotiation. He thought that he was going to maybe overly optimistically get a deal out of Iran as we talked about on the podcast before he's chasing a Nobel Peace Prize. And this was meant to be part of the deal of his Middle East trip. And a lot of his post -Sunday social have been directed to a run.

14:21And having, and maybe we'll ask you to talk a little bit more about the old Iran nuclear deal, the JCPO, but having taken people out of that, it looked as though Trump was on track to create a new one. And the idea was going to be that Iran would agree to not build up its nuclear program in return for sanctions being lifted and peace across the region. And Trump had support for this, for example, from other regions in the Gulf Saudi Arabia, much less worried by Iran than it would have been a few years ago, China broke a deal between Saudi and Iran. So there was a direction, possible direction in which Iran was moving to a peace deal.

14:58At which point, Israel seems to have informed the United States that they were considering a strike. But the nature of this strike appears to have been very unclear to the US, and which is extraordinary. Because if you look at the messages that the US State Department was passing to its embassies, which is our best indication on how worried they were and what they were expecting, there were some very, very mixed messages coming out yesterday afternoon. Are this, is this about just not essential staff, is this about all staff, what kind of threat to be faced, which suggests actually even as late as yesterday afternoon, they didn't have a confident detailed view on what Israel was going to do.

15:38Trump almost certainly did not want them to do it. And we can come back to that. But the logic of this is if he did allow them to do it, if Wikof and Trump thought this was a good idea and the negotiation, they're unbelievably naive, because as you pointed out, this is the end of the negotiation. This is the end of any peace deal. The logical move now from Iran is to accelerate its nuclear weapons program and just back out of the whole thing. So my suspicion is they can't Trump can't and Wikof and their system can't be that naive. They must have seen the risk of this doing, which raises the question of what on earth is the world that now exists, that Netanyahu using American weapons, close the ally to the United States, launch as an attack that the US president not only doesn't want, but hadn't been informed about in detail and probably does so because Netanyahu senses that we're in a new world order in which he can get away with these things.

16:36And that's why I think, look, I don't know, I'm inside the guy's head and I, you know, I sense from his, what he said, if you go through the tone of his posts and his comments and the run up, it was indicating, I'm the great deal maker, I've got Steve Wikof on the case, we're going to get somewhere on this, okay? The only way that it can be post facto justified by him now saying to Dana Bash and presumably to others, yeah, I'm totally with them, this was a great hit. The only way you can justify that if he thinks that he can get Iran into a better position, he's not talking about giving them a second chance, by now suggesting that actually he's been part of this all along, but that goes completely contradictory to the noises as you say that were coming out, coming out before.

17:31I do say that. There's a problem, I'll just interrupt some of that because just to push you back on that, I mean, the part of the problem is that how can Iran now believe that he can control this rail? Can I say he went back to Iran and said, okay, you get a second chance, if you sit down on the negotiating table, you won't be hit again. Will Iran not think, what do you mean? You can guarantee we won't be hit again. What's the stop Netanyahu just continued to do it? And of course, Netanyahu has said that this is just the beginning. This is going to go on for days and weeks and probably Netanyahu needs this to go on for days and weeks because he doesn't want to be accused by his own right wing of having mounted one attack which didn't actually eliminate their entire nuclear operations.

18:15A lot of their new corporations are still intact. Netanyahu sees this as a once in a lifetime opportunity to flatten Iran's nuclear program. So he will continue. So, and he probably, if Trump tries to stop him, it'll be like Trump trying to stop Putin. Netanyahu will know perfectly well that he can ignore him and Trump won't follow through with sanctioning Israel. So how can Iran trust the US now in this deal? Well, they can't. And what's more, they're probably sitting there thinking, well, Israel has given us the opportunity to be able to push back on the Americans without really feeling that Trump wants to sort of go back hard on them.

18:56And I think you talk about his obsession with this idea of getting a Nobel Prize. Let's be frank of the three big foreign policy issues that he said he was going to sort out because he's the greatest dealmaker on the planet. Putin is to use his own phrase, been tapping him out. And that is going nowhere. The negotiations there appear to be going nowhere. Middle East, you know, that's what we've seen in the last 24 hours, not really going anywhere. Whether we're talking about Ukraine, about Israel Gaza, or now about Israel Iran, he projects himself as the guy who's got all the power to use his phrase holding all the cards.

19:38But actually, he's the one who's looking a little bit like a paper tiger right now. And so, and I honestly do think, Roy, we've got to go back to this deal. It was almost 10 years ago now. And I think, you know, you may know more about the deal than I do, but I feel that actually it was a pretty amazing piece of diplomat work to get that deal done. To have Donald Trump in the middle of his 2016 election campaign, just come out and say, it's a terrible deal. I'll get a better deal. I'm going to pull the plug on it. And then to do it, I think that is a big part of where we are now today on this issue.

20:16Let's come back to Iran's response for a second. So, sorry, do you disagree with that? No, I don't disagree with you at all. I think that what you put your finger on is a lot of things. One of them is that at best what he tries to do is wait for events to happen and try to take credit for them. So, he tries to cover up the fact that this is not what he wanted, didn't happen in the way that he wanted by claiming it was his idea at all along. But it also suggests that his power is waning. American power is waning. That you don't get to do what he's done, which is say, we're not going to be the global policeman anymore.

20:55We don't really care about the rules based international order. We don't really care about international security. You don't get to do that without going into a situation in which you no longer have the power to determine events. I mean, why would Netanyahu pay any attention to the US? The story. Six months ago would have been, well, of course, he's got to pay attention to the US because he gets all his weapons and support from the US. But, worst we've seen with Putin and Putin is much less close to the United States than Israel is the United States. When Trump threatened Putin with sanctions and said, if you don't, you know, I'm horrified that you made this attack, I'm going to say, you don't.

21:36Putin simply ignore him and just continues. He knows perfectly well that Trump is never going to sanction him. And Netanyahu must know perfectly well that whatever he does, I mean, literally whatever he does, Trump will continue to supply him with weapons. There's also something really interesting there about the history of nuclear proliferation that might be worth just a thought, a thinking about because, of course, you know, my old Bosnian blur was very, very centrally involved in trying to talk Gaddafi down from the nuclear, his nuclear weapons program. And eventually, Gaddafi did give up his nuclear weapons.

22:09And, you know, he's no longer here to tell us whether he thought that was the right thing or the wrong thing because not wrong after he did a dead in a ditch in the middle of a coup. Whereas, he old Kim Jong Un, he sort of heard all the threats and considered all the threats and basically just ignored them. And he's sitting there now. I don't know the extent of his nuclear weapons program, but it's, you know, it's certainly better than Gaddafi's. And so, this is what worries me about what's gone on. And I'm no doubt we'll get the texts and the emails from Netanyahu's office saying this is very disappointing, sort of, you know, Western view to take.

22:53But I can't see any other consequence of this than the Iran thing. It's right. We really have to go for it now because they, there's Israel that sits there saying that we're facing an existential threat from Iran. Now, that is true. In that, Iran has always said, you know, basically, it wants to wipe out Israel. And you can see why they're so obsessed about Iran not being able to develop nuclear weapons. But when they are sitting there, and this attack happens, they having done the deal with international community, they did 10 years ago, you can see why they might just take a very, very, very different approach.

23:30Yeah. And 10 years ago, the world was different in two key ways for the Iranians. The first is that they believed them that they were actually quite well protected by all these proxy militia groups, all the way through the Middle East, who would strike back at Israel if anyone hit them. And they also had much more confidence in their own kit and their own missiles. Secondly, 10 years ago, the regime was already unpopular, but it was nothing like as unpopular as it is today. And a nuclear weapon is an answer to those two problems. A nuclear weapon is the one way that you can guarantee that nobody attacks you without having a proper missile system or proxies.

24:12And a nuclear weapon is also something that you can have without public support. It's not something like a big national army where you need the whole population on your side. You build a nuclear bomb. It's quite suitable for an increasingly unpopular marginalized regime. The question, of course, is can they build it? I think there's no doubt at all they will now build it. Or I mean, maybe a little doubt, I mean, things in geopolitics are very weird and things could change. And there will be a small minority of people within the regime who will say, let's give up this nuclear program. Let's go to Trump.

24:46Let's have peace. Let's have sanctions lifted. It's the better way to go. But I think it'll be a small group. Most of the regime will feel that actually for a whole series of reasons, including their very strange objectives towards Israel, that what they need to do now is get any club on. The problem, though, is that clearly they are very, very deeply infiltrated, as you pointed out, by Israeli intelligence. And Israeli intelligence is demonstrating as they did with Hospolar in Lebanon, their incredible ability to pinpoint so many key figures so quickly. So I don't think Israel can actually kill enough people and bomb up enough to actually delay it that long.

25:30I think in the end, Iran will be able to sort out its internal security. And in the end, it will be able to push. But it may have put it back by one or two years. And I think from the Israeli point of view, they've always had a tendency to think, well, we're not going to worry about the medium -long term. If we can hold people back for one or two years, if we can then this horrible phrase, mothagrass, who knows what will happen in one or two years? I just remind when you were speaking, I just remembered that on the day, I think it was on the day that the deal was done. It was only around that.

26:05This is back in 2015. Fiona and I were out. We were at dinner with Christian Amanpour and your good friend, Jamie Rubin, with whom he has a spirit exchange of podcasts. But the other guest there was John Soarz and his wife, Shelley. And I can remember John being absolutely, he was saying, this is kind of the best news for the world. This deal is just like the best news for the world. The fact that there's been, we've been able to pull this off and really get the Iranians agreement on capping enrichment and lowering down the uranium stuff and actually taking some facilities out. And yes, lifting the sanctions.

26:51Now, it's true that the war at the time, American Republicans saying, this is giving them far too much and they can't be trusted, etc, etc, etc. But the deal did seem to be holding for quite a while. And so I just think that we're now in a place where, as you say, trust broken down, Israel feeling emboldened, although they will still want American, the Americans to be on the side, not just through providing military support, but on side politically as well. And I think, and I think the question the Iranians now have is whether, whether they even need to think about the short term retaliation. We have this assumption, with the 70s hundreds of drones over and it seems the Israelis have sort of taken them down.

27:37Do they really need to think about that? I think they probably just need to sit tight and play a long game. Well, let's take a break there and just come back to some of these issues after the break.