What’s Going On in the Middle East? Why Israel attacked Iran?

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00:00What's going on in the Middle East? Israel attacked Iran. Iran has attacked Israel. I'm

00:05going to call Patrick, my colleague, who's been covering the region for many years. So Patrick,

00:09what happened? Israel launched its most public, its most brazen, its broadest attack on Iran

00:16in its history. It struck several nuclear and military sites. It assassinated top military

00:23commanders. It killed nuclear scientists, all in a collected effort to substantially damage

00:31Iran's nuclear program. This operation will continue for as many days as it takes

00:37to remove this threat. And what is Israel's and Netanyahu's goal here? They want to take out the

00:44Iranian nuclear program. They want to destabilize the Iranian regime. This is something that Netanyahu

00:51has wanted to do for years. He has a president in the US, in President Trump, who is maybe slightly

00:57more amenable to Israeli aggression towards Iran than President Biden was. He sees an Iran that is

01:05much weaker militarily than it has been in previous years. And he sees an Iranian-led alliance across

01:11the Middle East that is no longer the threat that it once was to Israel. So is it fair to say that

01:18Iran is the weakest it's been for decades? I think it's definitely fair to say that even before this

01:23latest attack ruined its air defense system, Israel decimated Iran's regional axis during exchanges of

01:32fire last year. Hezbollah, Hamas, they are no longer what they were two years ago.

01:38You and I talked about the possibility of Israel striking Iran's nuclear sites before the US election

01:46last year. I remember you were explaining to me that a lot of this nuclear program is very deep

01:52underground and actually very difficult to hit. You need some serious sort of bunker-busting bombs.

01:59Does Israel have the capability on its own to destroy Iran's nuclear program?

02:04So that's the thing. While this attack is huge in its ambition, we don't think it is enough to destroy

02:11Iran's nuclear program. That program is set across many different sites. It's not just Natanz, which

02:17seems to have been the focus of this particular attack. While this is an astonishingly fierce and

02:24broad attack on Iran, it's not thought to have landed a killer blow on the Iranian nuclear program.

02:32That would take some material support from the American government.

02:37Trump is in the process of trying to negotiate a new nuclear agreement with Iran. So what do these

02:43strikes mean for those talks?

02:44Trump's statement on social media on Friday was quite interesting. He seemed to suggest that Israel

02:50had been forced into this attack because Iran had not been negotiating in good faith. But he opened up

02:57the possibility that Iran could now go back to the negotiating table, make more compromises, and that

03:03that in turn would convince Israel to stop its attack, or at least give Trump greater leverage to

03:09say to Israel that it should stop its attack.

03:11At a very basic level, given how many wars there already are in the world, including in that region,

03:17are we seeing the beginning of yet another war?

03:20I think we're seeing the escalation of a war that was already going on. Israel, since October 2023,

03:26has been fighting a multi-front war, not only against Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, but also Iran.

03:34Over those 20 months, the Iranian Israeli component of that multi-front war has gradually become more

03:42and more out in the open, more and more public, more and more direct. And this latest attack by Israel

03:49is in a way just the culmination. There could be several rounds of Iranian responses. So it's not really

03:55like there's a new war that's breaking out. It's an old war that's now reached some kind of climax,

04:01and we're about to see how that climax unfolds in the coming days and weeks.