00:00What they're doing now is saying, OK, we're going to do all this stuff by force, but it only really
00:05works if you get regime change.
00:07And that is really the lesson of what has happened before, you know, that we had a very successful set
00:13of, you know, in military terms, attacks last summer when the Israeli and the U.S.
00:19Air forces, you know, attacked the nuclear sites and other missile launchers, et cetera.
00:27They took out a lot of the air defenses, which has made this this attack much easier.
00:32But, you know, that what that the lesson of that was is that we're back.
00:36We're back here doing it again. And why? Well, that's because we did.
00:41There was no regime change. It is the same regime. They have the same goals.
00:45They have the means in order to rebuild their programs.
00:48They rebuilt the ballistic missile and stuff that was destroyed fairly quickly.
00:54So, you know, that's that's really the key here.
00:57Either it works, in which case you get regime change or not.
01:01Mona, what's your assessment of how other regional allies feel about this idea of regime change?
01:06Because if there is a power vacuum, if there is a civil war, they're the ones who are going to
01:11feel the consequences of that first.
01:13I'm thinking Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Saudi, Oman, the Omanis who were facilitating these negotiations that apparently were for not.
01:20Are you hearing from these nations? Do you have any kind of read about even though they may not be
01:24fans of the Iranian regime, fears they might have around it imploding?
01:29Well, they are absolutely not fans of the Iranian regime.
01:33And you're seeing some fairly sharp statements come out of both Saudi Arabia, the UAE, with respect to strikes that
01:39Iran has already taken, retaliatory strikes on U.S. targets in their countries.
01:44But that said, I think there's no doubt that this is a nightmare scenario for the neighboring Gulf countries.
01:52This is precisely what they had been hoping against and had been working diligently behind the scenes in order for
02:01negotiations and diplomacy to be successful.
02:05I heard early this morning from an Omani contact who said this is the worst scenario that we had feared
02:13playing out.
02:14And look, it's still early days.
02:16It's really hard to say exactly how the various repercussions are going to unfold.
02:22But I think this is going to get a lot more complicated in the coming days and perhaps even weeks.
02:28Mark Champion, let me ask you about the politics of impatience, presidential impatience.
02:33It's become kind of a joke as we try to keep track of or count how many wars the president
02:37says he's solved.
02:38But what draws all of those together is the speed with which he says he's done it.
02:42And I look at Venezuela.
02:44Cristina brought that up just a moment ago.
02:45That was a major event that happened over the course of not even 24 hours, but 12 hours.
02:50And I guess we see in the aftermath of that the difficulty on the ground in Venezuela of plotting a
02:55path forward.
02:56You have an interim president trying to negotiate who she's responsible to, her party, the people in Venezuela, or the
03:03Trump administration.
03:04To what Ambassador Bolton said just a few minutes ago, that this is a president who's going to have to
03:08have some stick-wittedness here in Iran going forward.
03:11Do you have any optimism that he's going to have that in light of what we've seen in these other
03:15adventures he's had around the world?
03:19Well, no, but on the other hand, he may not have a lot of choice.
03:22You know, that's the thing about starting a major war.
03:26This is not a special operation.
03:29What you had in Venezuela was a commando operation.
03:33It could have gone very badly wrong in the way that the operation ordered by President Carter went wrong in
03:401979 in Iran.
03:43That could have gone wrong.
03:44It didn't.
03:45It went very well.
03:45Well, and I think that's part of the reason why this is happening now, that basically the president has had
03:51two, you know, very successful military operations.
03:57You know, the first in Venezuela.
03:59The second was last summer when they bombed the nuclear sites in Iran and, you know, did that, you know,
04:07successfully.
04:07We don't know exactly, you know, that they destroyed everything, but, you know, the planes went home and there was
04:12a lot of damage done.
04:13So, and I think that encouraged him to go ahead and have a go now.
04:18It's just that I am very dubious that he has a full understanding of where, you know, how difficult it
04:25is to control events once you begin a large scale conflict.
04:29And also how difficult it can be to end them on your terms.
04:35No, no, I'm wondering what your assessment was of the impact on Iran's nuclear program after that first round of
04:40strikes.
04:41Because the president came out and said, we destroyed those facilities.
04:44We obliterated them.
04:46Nuclear experts I talked to were less sure.
04:48We're now talking about Iran having been able to build those back very quickly.
04:52Is that assessment accurate?
04:54And we also heard the president say there was an imminent threat.
04:57Was that breakout time that much different than it was two, three, four, five weeks ago?
05:03I don't think so.
05:04I mean, I think surely the president said obliterated for his own political reasons last June.
05:11But by all accounts, the nuclear facilities did sustain some amount, if not significant damage.
05:18And more importantly, there were no intelligence reports suggesting that Iran was imminently going to have a nuclear weapons capability.
05:29On the contrary, the negotiations that were ongoing were, in fact, focused on whether and how Iran might be willing
05:38to compromise its ambitions, potentially even down to zero enrichment.
05:43Now, it's not at all clear that we were there.
05:46And indeed, by many accounts, we were far apart.
05:49But I do think it's very hard to make the case that there was an imminent threat of Iranian nuclear
05:55capabilities.
05:57We have some lines coming in from the State Department.
06:00This is from a U.S. official.
06:01Secretary of the State Rubio laid out the situation and consulted the G8 on that's that gang of eight we
06:06were talking about earlier, those top congressional leaders, in Tuesday in an hour-long briefing.
06:10And Secretary Rubio then made calls to all the members to give them a heads up ahead of time.
06:14They said he successfully connected with seven of eight.
06:17One was unreachable.
06:19We know John Thune, the leader in the Senate, was one of them.
06:22And he praised Secretary Rubio for the information that he got in advance of this.
06:26Mark, let me close by asking you about the gravity of what's happened here.
06:30So we've seen the president go to a podium at Mar-a-Lago wearing no necktie, wearing a white baseball
06:36cap with USA emblazoned on it.
06:38Release a statement not to any press.
06:40Nobody was in the audience.
06:41Post it on social media.
06:42And here we are.
06:43He's not scheduled to speak today as well.
06:46During those remarks, he did talk about the potential gravity here for U.S. troops overseas.
06:51There could be casualties.
06:52How do you think about him in this moment?
06:55He is a president at war now.
06:56He used the term.
06:57He didn't call this a special operation.
06:59As you pointed out a few moments ago, he has characterized this as a war.
07:03How do you contrast that again, the gravity of the moment, with the way that he, yes, at a face
07:07level, is approaching this?
07:10Yeah, I mean, I can't say it was a surprise.
07:13I mean, this is the way that, you know, President Trump has approached these things.
07:19It is extraordinarily different from previous United States presidents.
07:24You know, it's not my taste that that's how I would like to have, you know, my leader announce that
07:33he's taking the country to war.
07:34You know, my preference would be also that he would go first to Congress and get permission for agreement for
07:43a war of choice.
07:45Because, you know, as was said before, there was no imminent threat here, even if the Iranians had been able
07:54to reconstitute their nuclear program.
07:56The program we're talking about, it's a uranium enrichment program.
08:00That's the first step towards building a warhead and putting it on a missile.
08:06You know, it's not – there's a distance between those things.
08:10You know, it's important.
08:11The breakout thing is an important issue.
08:13But it's not an imminent threat.
08:15So, you know, it's Trump.
08:18It's entirely Trump.
08:21And I imagine that his base, you know, likes that, that he thinks that that image will work for him.
08:28Not to my taste, but that's who he is.
08:31It doesn't matter.
08:31The model the word of his wife is trying to conserve him.
08:31Is that a puzzle?
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