A man, no plan, Iran

0:00Noel King:It's Today Explained. This week's big news was supposed to be that Sean Ramos' firm is back from parental leave. But then there was even bigger news, so I texted you on the weekend and I was like, yo, do you want me to do the bigger news? And you were like, my name's Noel King. Step aside. Let's go to the president to see why he's doing war with Iran. Every time you see someone with missing arms and legs or a face that's been absolutely shattered violently, it was almost certainly caused by an Iran roadside bomb. He is not trying to beat the forever war allegations. Somebody said today, they said, oh, well, the president wants to do it really quickly.

0:36After that, he'll get bored. I don't get bored. There's nothing boring about this. The president says he doesn't have the yips about sending in ground troops.

0:44Noel King:He also says we accidentally killed the people who were supposed to take over from the Ayatollah. Oops. Sean, are you glad to be back? I don't miss my beautiful little daughter at all.

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2:00Noel King:We reached Greg Karlstrom, longtime Middle East correspondent for The Economist in Riyadh today. Greg has seen a lot over the years. Has he seen this? It is unprecedented. I think in the run-up to this war, I mean, everyone expected that there was going to be a conflict between the United States and Iran once Donald Trump started this enormous military buildup. And everyone expected that Iran was going to lash out at Arab countries in the region because it had warned that it was going to do that. But the speed with which they have struck the scale of the targets, not just American military bases in Gulf states, but all sorts of civilian infrastructure, we've never seen anything like that in the Gulf, at least since the Gulf War back in 1991.

2:52And it's taken a lot of people by shock in this region.

2:56Noel King:Let's talk about what Iran is doing today. So the U.S. is still bombing. Iran is retaliating. What is Iran hitting? So it's firing at Israel, of course. It's been firing volleys of ballistic missiles there, which have notably been smaller than the ones that we saw during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran back in June. But the bulk of Iran's retaliation has been aimed across the Persian Gulf, at the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman. All six of those countries have been targeted.

3:36When the war began on Saturday morning, at least for the first few hours, Iran was mostly firing at American military targets in those countries. Plumes of smoke seen in an area of Bahrain near the headquarters of the US Navy's 5th Fleet. An airbase in Doha also hit where there was a significant US military presence. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia or Oman, where tankers were struck just off its shores in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global shipping route where one-fifth of the world's oil passes through. The regional headquarters of the US Central Command is in Qatar. The headquarters of the Navy's Fifth Fleet is in Bahrain, and those bases were targeted.

4:18But Iran shifted very quickly to aiming at civilian targets in these countries.

4:24Noel King:In fact, the airport was hit by a second attack in the early hours of this morning, with black billowing smoke rising up above the city. There was the luxury hotel here hit the Burj al-Arab. You can also see the damage that has been wrought to several of these residential homes that were around this small synagogue here in the city of Bet Shemesh on the outskirts of Jerusalem. All of these things have no conceivable military value as a target. These are civilian targets, plain and simple. But Iran has been focusing its fire on those. And then on Monday, signs that it's also beginning to aim at energy infrastructure in the region.

5:10A refinery, an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia was targeted with a drone. Similarly, a natural gas facility in Qatar, both of which have temporarily gone offline in the aftermath of those attempted attacks. Big explosion here at the Rastanura. That's the Aramco factory, Saudi Arabia's biggest oil company there. And of course, this is state-backed. And you see, look at those plumes of smoke. The global ramifications that will be felt by people all over the world when they're fueling their cars, when they're beginning to pay their bills. We can mark this as the moment where that begins. So it looks as if Iran now not just stopping at airports and hotels, but also beginning to go after the energy infrastructure that is critical for the economies in the Gulf and for the economies of the world.

6:00Noel King:Hey, why is Iran going after civilian targets? Why not just keep hitting the U.S. military? The logic of it for the Iranians is that all of these countries in the Gulf, they are close American allies. They have good relations with the Trump administration. And they really do not want to be involved in a war. They have thrived for decades on this reputation for being oases of stability in a very turbulent region. Whatever else is happening in the rest of the Middle East, the Gulf has historically been pretty quiet. So missiles and drones zooming overhead, that's bad for business, that's bad for tourism, that's bad for the economic model of these countries.

6:42And so for Iran, the hope was that they would cave under the pressure of these attacks and then Gulf states would use their relations with Donald Trump to pressure him to try and wrap up the war. They would tell him essentially, we can't endure this any longer. You need to end the war because this is becoming unsustainable for us. That is what Iran has been trying to accomplish with these wanton attacks on civilian targets.

7:07Noel King:Do you think that's going to happen? I mean, the U.S. says it's going to continue its campaign. Do you think Iran will continue retaliating? I don't think it has many other options. It cannot fight the United States directly if there are no American troops on the ground in Iran. Iran cannot shoot down the American jets overhead. It almost certainly cannot do that because its air defenses are so degraded. All it can do is attempt to fire missiles and drones at American ships or continue attacking the Gulf. It's really the only means they have to try and influence how Donald Trump perceives this war to try and impose costs that might push him to end it sooner.

7:50Noel King:You mentioned earlier that the response from Iran is not as strong as it was during the war last June, the very short 12-day war last June. What is that telling you? Right, that's the Israeli assessment. If you think back to what we saw in June with these attacks on Israel, they were enormous barrages of dozens and dozens of ballistic missiles fired at a time. And sometimes there were hundreds of these missiles in a day. But the first few days of this war, we've seen much smaller volleys, sometimes only two or three missiles at a time. And I think what that suggests is that Iran either does not have the capability to fire larger volleys because so many of their missile launchers have been damaged or destroyed, or that they are trying to ration the missiles that they have because they expect that this is going to be a prolonged conflict and they have a finite number of the long-range missiles with the capability to hit Israel.

8:53So they are rationing what they have there. Whereas in the Gulf, it's a different calculus. They've actually fired more missiles and drones at this point at the Gulf than they have at Israel, significantly more. And that's because of geography. It's because the Gulf is so much closer. They're not reliant on a small number of long-range missiles. They can use short-range missiles. They can use drones more effectively to target the Gulf. And so they have a much larger arsenal that they can use, and they are using it.

9:22Noel King:I want to ask you about what President Trump says the objective is here. And the president has been about as coherent on this as he is ordinarily. But he posted this weekend that the bombing is going to continue until the, quote, objective of peace throughout the Middle East and indeed the world, unquote, is met. How do you interpret this statement? At this point, I'm not sure how to interpret any of his statements. No, we don't get bored. I never get bored. Because if you look at all of these interviews that he's given, I mean, it's remarkable. He's in the middle of a war, but he has found a lot of time to call seemingly every journalist whose number is in his phone to chat over the past few days.

10:05And, you know, he tells one outlet this is going to continue until I bring freedom to the people of Iran. All I want is freedom for the people. He tells another one, maybe this will be over in two or three days and I'll cut a deal. I can go long and take over the whole thing or end it in two or three days and tell the Iranians, see you in a few years if you start rebuilding. There was this remarkable pair of interviews where in one of them he said, I have three candidates in mind to replace the supreme leader of Iran. I won't be revealing them now. Let's get the job done first. And then a few hours later, he told another outlet, actually, those three guys were killed in the first round of strikes.

10:45So it turns out we can't rely on them. I asked him about who is going to take over now that the Ayatollah, the supreme leader, is gone. And his answer was interesting. He said the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. He told me it's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. I mean, what is he driving at here? I don't know. It's not clear that he knows. I think really he wants to be able to say Iran has been a problem that bedeviled American presidents since Jimmy Carter. I fixed it. But what that looks like, what I fixed it means, we really have no idea.

11:23Noel King:Is there any suggestion that in order to get what it wants, the U.S. will have to put boots on the ground in Iran? I haven't heard much talk about that, but at the same time, it is very, very difficult to change a regime from the air. There are very few examples in history of that working. And so if the goal here truly is regime change, to rip out the Islamic Republic root and branch and replace it with something else, it's very difficult to see how that happens without ground troops. I think the preference for Trump and for the administration is probably something closer to a Venezuela scenario where you find a pliant regime insider who can take power now and who is willing to deal with America, be more amenable to American interests.

12:13It's not quite regime change. It's changing the figure at the top, but it's leaving the foundations of the regime intact. I think that's the preference. And if that's what they want to do, if they can find that person, it doesn't require troops on the ground. But we don't know.

12:33I mean, the other question I think at this point is how bad do things get in the Gulf? How bad do things get with attacks on energy infrastructure here? You know, there's going to be a point at which some of America's allies start to say, either you need to end this or you need to do whatever it takes to protect us and to make sure that Iran can no longer fire missiles and drones at us. And again, that's something that's perhaps tricky to do just from the air.

13:07Noel King:Greg Karlstrom is the Middle East correspondent for leading magazine The Economist. Coming up next, what is the plan here?

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18:08This is Today Explained. Nahal Tusi, senior foreign affairs correspondent and columnist for Politico. Who is in charge in Iran right now? It's a very good question. Technically, they've said that they've appointed an interim counsel to lead the country for now. It consists of the president, Massoud Pazeshkian. He's something of a moderate in the Iranian system. And then there's a member of the Guardian Council and the chief justice of the Supreme Court. They're considered hardliners of sorts for the most part. But to be honest, it's a little bit unclear in the sense that who is really running the military, who's making the military decisions.

18:51There's a very senior guy named Ali Larjani who has a lot of power as well. It's a little vague, especially when the bombs keep raining down.

19:00Noel King:How did this regime, which right now seems, as you say, to be in complete disarray, how did it survive so many years? Well, everything through repression, diplomatic negotiation, balancing its anti-Americanism by appealing to other world powers such as China and Russia. It has used any number of tricks. I mean, you know, it has had international relations with plenty of countries, if not America, over the years. But increasingly, it has become isolated as well. It was getting weaker and weaker. And my sense is that the Trump administration saw a moment of unusual vulnerability and just went for it.

19:40Noel King:It went for it with the idea, presumably, that if you sort of take out the leaders of the regime, then you get regime change. Is that what is likely to happen here? You know, it's interesting. I've been thinking a lot about this. The thing about a regime is it's not just about the people, right? It's not just who's there. It's also about the process of everything from elections to making decisions. It's also about power and how power is allocated within a system. The Iranian system was never built around a single cult figure, that type of thing, to where you could just take one person out and everything else would change.

20:25And, you know, there'd be rainbows and unicorns or whatever. This is a systematic place, and it was designed, it has been designed to regenerate itself. People step in when other people leave or die. What's different now is that the U.S. and Israel, Israel in particular, because they're really the ones carrying out the assassinations, they have just been going after as many figures as they can get, even ones who aren't really in power, apparently, like people who might be related to someone in power. And it seems like it just depends on how deep they can go to where the whole thing could fall apart.

21:02But then you still have the armed forces. You still have the paramilitaries. There's a certain limit. And there's a certain limit to munitions for that matter.