00:00Okay, so your question is, I guess, about who is going to succeed to the Ayatollah Khemre.
00:04And actually, what we're seeing now is procedures kicking into place.
00:08I mean, you've got to think as well, they had been preparing for this,
00:12for the possibility of him being eliminated or even dying by natural death.
00:16He was 86 years old.
00:18And so what happens from here onwards is they've established this temporary leadership council
00:23that is made up of the president himself, President Pazeshkian,
00:26who is alive, according to the Iranian officials, the head of the judiciary,
00:32and then this senior cleric from the Guardian Council, the individual that you just mentioned.
00:38And their goal is just to steer the leadership through the coming months,
00:44because at the same time, what's going to happen is, according to the constitution,
00:49an assembly of experts, this is a member of, well, it's a clerical body,
00:55essentially comprised of 88 members.
00:57They will be getting together and will be assessing who should be the successor to Khemre.
01:02Many different names are being thrown out there.
01:04Unclear at this point who it's going to be.
01:07Some of the names include his son, so Mujtaba Khemre,
01:12some of his close aides, Ali Larijani, Sadiq Larijani.
01:16And then there's also the possibility of the grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic.
01:21And his name is Ruhala Khomeini as well.
01:24But at this point, we don't really know.
01:26We know also that the prior sort of, quote, unquote, reformist president,
01:31Rouhani, who was the president who actually inked the JCPOA deal with Obama back then,
01:38he was one of the names that was in the mix.
01:41But again, unlikely at this point that we're going to get any clarity.
01:44So in the interim, this temporary leadership council is going to take over.
01:47Christina, we've heard such a chorus of complaint from Congress about the fact that they weren't briefed
01:52before these strikes were launched.
01:53And there was a demand from the Iranians to have a meeting of the U.N. Security Council yesterday here
01:58in New York.
01:58In fact, that meeting did happen.
01:59And we heard from the U.S. representative to the U.N., Mike Waltz.
02:02Let's take a listen to what he had to say about the diplomatic track that the U.S. was purportedly
02:05pursuing here
02:06before these strikes took place.
02:09American diplomacy was attempted repeatedly and in good faith.
02:13President Trump, Secretary Rubio, our special envoys,
02:18Whitcoff and Kushner were relentlessly dedicated to diplomacy.
02:23But diplomacy cannot succeed where there is no genuine willingness to cease aggression,
02:29where there is no genuine partner for peace.
02:33Again, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
02:35I want to turn to Nancy Youssef, staff writer at The Atlantic Magazine.
02:38On this point, Nancy, as you look at that balance and the debate over how much that balance was really
02:42held even
02:43in the run up to all of this, what are we learning about the integrity of those conversations
02:47between the U.S. and the Iranians being mediated by the Omanis
02:50and the degree to which perhaps they were proceeding in a way that could have forestalled
02:53what we saw happen here over the last 24, 36 hours?
02:57Well, it depends on who you ask.
02:59If you talk to the Omani foreign minister who gave an interview to face the nation
03:02hours before these strikes began, he suggested that there was real progress that had happened
03:07in those talks and the Iranians believed that there was progress according to him.
03:11But the United States felt that the Iranians were not serious about talks
03:15and were interested really in buying time to avert the very strikes that we saw yesterday.
03:20And so these kind of talks are really complicated.
03:23They're technical.
03:24And so I think the question becomes the degree to which there was a detailed discussion of
03:30these talks and what the expectations were in terms of the outcome.
03:33Did this have to have something that went beyond the 2015 agreement?
03:38Did it have to include limitations on Iran's ballistic missile capability as the United States
03:44had asked for and the Iranians rejected?
03:46Did it have to deal with Iran's proxies, which again, the United States asked to be a part
03:50of the discussions and the Iranians said they didn't want it to be a part of the conversations.
03:54They wanted it to focus strictly on their nuclear program.
03:57And Ethan Brunner, Bloomberg's Israel bureau chief, I want to ask you out today, other than
04:04that eight minute statement that the president dropped on social media in the middle of the
04:08night, the White House did not have any other comments.
04:11And so far, we're being told they're not putting anybody else out for the near future.
04:14But the president did speak to Barack Ravid over at Axios.
04:18One of the things he said is, I can go long and take over the whole thing or end it
04:23in
04:23two or three days and tell the Iranians, see you again in a few years if you start rebuilding
04:28and the, you know, the inferences there is your nuclear missile program.
04:31I'm wondering what the appetite for another prolonged conflict is in Israel, given the events of
04:38last year, the events following October 6th, the war with Gaza.
04:43Do you think the Israelis want a protracted campaign or do you think they would like to
04:49finish this faster than that?
04:52Look, I think nobody has an appetite for an expanded campaign if you can avoid it.
04:58So I think it would be fair to say that if they could, you know, sort of eliminate this regime
05:04and the new people coming into power would do what the U.S. and Israel wants it to do,
05:09people here would be thrilled.
05:11That said, I think there is a gap between the U.S.'s view of Iran and Israel.
05:17For Israel, Israel is considered a somewhat existential battle.
05:22The United States, it's, I think, fair to say a war of choice that occurred.
05:25So how long President Trump and his administration will want to keep going, I think will likely
05:31to be shorter than what Israel is willing to do.
05:33Of course, the Israelis are suffering in a way that Americans are not.
05:37I mean, everyone who lives here, including me, has almost every hour been forced to go
05:42into a bomb shelter of some kind, asleep in bomb shelters.
05:46You see bleary-eyed kids with their blankets.
05:47You're in your secure room now, right, Ethan?
05:49Isn't that your secure room?
05:50I am in my secure room.
05:51Absolutely right.
05:52Yeah.
05:52It's got a metal door.
05:54It's got a metal shutter for the window.
05:57And the room is also built with something between 18 and 30 inches of reinforced concrete and
06:03has a kind of an aeration system.
06:05So, yes, it's designed for this.
06:07And but I mean, many, many people in Israel don't have one in their own apartment and
06:12they're forced into into public shelters.
06:14So it's not fun at all.
06:17But I think on the other hand, you know, the people in Israel have been talking for so long
06:21about the need to eliminate the Iranian regime because Iran does say death to Israel.
06:27It does fund and arm militias around the region.
06:31It really is an enemy in a genuine sense that people, I think, have a tolerance, which is going
06:38to go on for a while.
06:39Well, we'll see for how long it's been a very rough day, by the way, a lot, a lot of
06:44attacks
06:44here, a lot of attacks there, a lot of attacks across the region.
06:46And I want to go to Jumana on that point, because we've seen an attack on the Dubai airport,
06:50I believe there.
06:51This is, of course, a major area of transit for a lot of international place that usually
06:55takes fire in these incidents.
06:56Absolutely.
06:57So, Jumana, I wonder if you could just speak to the way that this is widened and the degree
07:00to which folks are alert on alert rather well beyond Israel and Iran.
07:05Look, I think it's difficult to overstate how unprecedented this is and how shocking it
07:09is for specifically the UAE.
07:12You know, this is a part of the region that has prided itself on its stability, on political
07:17stability, on economic stability.
07:19This is not a jurisdiction in the region where you'd expect something like this to happen.
07:25So it's shaken everyone who lives here.
07:29And yesterday and throughout our reporting, we were talking about, you know, many people rushing
07:33to supermarkets to load up on food.
07:35That is not a situation that I think UAE officials ever anticipated would occur within the UAE.
07:41And while it started off, the retaliation initially started off with Iran sending missiles and
07:47drones across and directed at U.S. assets and U.S. bases in the region.
07:52Actually, what happened yesterday is civilian infrastructure started to get damaged as well.
07:56And it could be from the debris of intercepted missiles and rockets.
08:01But at the same time, it sustained damage.
08:03We are seeing, you heard about that fire probably in one of those high-end hotels in a very fancy
08:09part of town called Palm Jumeirah.
08:12You would have seen the images online of Dubai Airport also sustaining damage.
08:17And it's not just Dubai Airport.
08:18Abu Dhabi Airport also was the recipient of some damage.
08:22Similar themes emerging in Bahrain as well.
08:26And so what's happened here is this has become a lot more dangerous for the countries in the region
08:34than what we thought was going to happen in the early hours.
08:37And just a short while ago, very, very strong remarks have come through from one of the senior
08:42president's advisors, Dr. Anwar Gargash.
08:44He's an advisor to President MBZ.
08:46And he actually put out a statement to the Iranians saying, get your senses together.
08:52This is not how you're supposed to be treating your neighbors.
08:56And I think, you know, implicit to that is the threat that, you know, so far the UAE have
09:01said that they're not going to let the U.S. use their bases to launch attacks on Iran.
09:05But there's the question mark of whether that may change and whether the calculus for these
09:08GCC countries has changed.
09:10So, let's look at this.
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