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00:00Well, as the conflict spirals, Iran and its allies are hitting back against Israel,
00:05neighbouring Gulf states, US regional bases and targets critical to the world's production of oil and natural gas.
00:12Well, for more, we're joined now by Simon Mabon,
00:15Professor of International Politics and Middle East Studies at Lancaster University.
00:20Simon, thanks so much for being with us on the programme.
00:23A very worrying moment. Let's talk firstly about how Iran retaliated over the weekend.
00:31How prepared was the regime?
00:33And were you surprised by how widespread these strikes have been and how quickly they came?
00:39And how do you think the Gulf states are going to respond in the longer term?
00:44Well, I think Iran has learned a lot from the so-called 12-day war from last June.
00:49It's done a lot of strategic planning.
00:50And it's been very, very clear with its message in terms of what it would do if this huge armada
00:57that Donald Trump had amassed in the Persian Gulf and in the sort of surrounding areas,
01:02if they struck Iran, then the Iranian leadership was very, very clear that it would target US bases,
01:10US military targets in the region.
01:12That includes bases in Qatar, in Kuwait, in the UAE and elsewhere.
01:18So they were perfectly clear in this.
01:21They telegraphed it and they'd obviously set out a very strategic plan in the aftermath of the 12-day war,
01:27which did take them by surprise last June.
01:29So I think it's been pretty much as expected,
01:34although the scale and the speed of this escalation from the United States, from Israel,
01:40and indeed from Iran has perhaps surprised quite a few people.
01:44We knew that this was likely to happen by virtue of the number of combustible moving parts,
01:50but it's just happened so very, very quickly.
01:54And Simon, do you think then that the US and Israel,
01:56they may have actually underestimated Iranian firepower?
02:01Well, I guess it's difficult to know exactly what those military calculations were.
02:05We don't know exactly how many of Iran's ballistic missiles were destroyed during that 12-day war.
02:12We don't know what is left in its arsenal.
02:16Israeli intelligence, US intelligence, of course, is far better than me to speculate,
02:21and I'm sure that they've done their various calculations and got all of this figured out in quite some detail.
02:27But we also don't know the extent to which Iran has been able to resupply itself, to rearm itself.
02:33We've heard rumors that the former defense minister, Mr. Nazir Zadeh, visited China cultivating new arms deals with the Chinese.
02:43There was talk of similar types of things with Russia.
02:45We don't know to what extent they have come to fruition yet.
02:49So we just don't know the size and the scale of Iran's military arsenal.
02:53But what we do know is that they have a large number of Shaheed drones,
02:57which are cheap and relatively efficient at doing what Iran has been using them for,
03:03which is to cause mischief to try and hit targets across the Gulf.
03:07Whether the US and Israel have underestimated that, I'm not sure.
03:12But Donald Trump seems to think that their military plan is ahead of schedule.
03:17And do you think that perhaps Israel may have made an error last year
03:20in not targeting the kind of short-range missile launchers that are allowing Iran to target these closer Gulf states?
03:30Well, possibly.
03:32But again, I think there was a sense that in that 12-day war,
03:36there was a lot of pressure being put on Israel from the United States not to cross certain lines.
03:42We're led to believe that Donald Trump put a bit of pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to say,
03:46OK, that's enough to really stop the conflict as and when it reached a certain point.
03:52And perhaps Israel's goals were not fully reached in accordance with that idea of destroying fully this missile capability.
04:00And perhaps that is also why we hear Israeli voices were trying to put the ballistic missile program on the
04:08agenda for nuclear talks,
04:10which is one of the reasons why a deal wasn't finally reached.
04:15There wasn't able to be a fully comprehensive agreement on the nuclear program and the ballistic missiles program.
04:22So it could be that we put those two together and perhaps that's what you get.
04:26But yeah, there was very little chance of Iran agreeing to an agreement that would curtail its ballistic missiles program.
04:34And is there any incentive at this point for it to make any kind of concessions if we do eventually
04:40go back to the situation that diplomatic efforts can again resume?
04:46I think the bigger problem right now is that how can you trust the United States?
04:50How can you trust the US to act in good faith when for the past two rounds of diplomatic talks,
04:55both last June and last month, it has engaged seemingly in good faith with the Iranians thinking that the US
05:05was operating in good faith,
05:06only to renege on those processes, to stop the diplomatic initiatives and to strike militarily against targets in Iran.
05:14So that would be two separate occasions where diplomacy has seemingly been used as a fig leaf to prepare for
05:22military strikes.
05:22So that does not fill me with confidence.
05:25That really creates a situation whereby the trust that is so essential to diplomacy seems to have been hollowed out
05:33right now.
05:34And you know when we hear today the UK, France, Germany saying that they're going to work with the US
05:39to help these attacks that Iran has been waging,
05:42what exactly do they mean by that?
05:45That's a good question because I think the UK is changing its tune on what it means by that.
05:50There's been a lot of calculations around what type of support, what type of help can be provided,
05:57what type of support, what type of help can be provided that would be legal.
06:01And Keir Starmer, of course, a former lawyer himself, has been very careful to say that the UK will be
06:07involved defensively
06:08in providing support, defensive support to allies.
06:11But at first there was a reluctance to let the US use UK bases.
06:16Then I believe it was Sunday afternoon, Sunday early evening, the decision was taken to allow US forces to use
06:24UK bases.
06:25But that has opened up all manner of different political and legal questions now about the types of support,
06:31types of provision and types of involvement the UK is engaged in in this struggle against Iran and this war
06:38against Iran.
06:39And when the UK has said clearly it is only engaging in a defensive posturing.
06:43So I think there's a lot of questions that need to be answered right now.
06:47And questions as well about what the US is actually willing to do.
06:51You know, Donald Trump earlier refusing to rule out, potentially putting boots on the ground.
06:54But then Marco Rubio seeming to row back on that and saying that's not part of the plan.
06:59What is the actual plan for Donald Trump and for the White House?
07:04That's the billion dollar question as well, I guess, because earlier on today,
07:07the secretary of war, Pete Heggs, had said that that there wasn't a desire for regime change,
07:12but that the regime has changed, which didn't quite sit sit clearly with a lot of people.
07:18And then he he was also suggesting that if necessary, there could be the possibility of boots on the ground,
07:23something that Donald Trump has also been suggesting.
07:26So there's a lot of confusion.
07:28I think there's a lot of mixed messages and that doesn't instill a great deal of confidence that there is
07:32a longer term plan here,
07:34that the Trump administration knows what it is actually working towards in the medium to long term.
07:41There's certainly been no real discussion of what a quote unquote day after might look like in Iran,
07:47what it might look like if the the Islamic Republic were to fall.
07:51There were suggestions that Donald Trump was asking members of the IRGC,
07:55the elite military units to lay down their arms and surrender.
07:59But who would they be surrendering to?
08:01There are no U.S. boots on the ground at present.
08:03So there's a lot of confusion.
08:05There's a lot of strategic confusion.
08:08And that doesn't bode well when you've got such a complex military mission.
08:11And it doesn't bode well for the Iranian people who are suffering at the hands of both their own government,
08:17the Islamic Republic, and indeed now under the anxiety and the devastation of U.S. and Israeli bombs.
08:24And how much support do the clerics still have, do you think?
08:27Is regime change inevitable at this point, Simon?
08:31It's hard to tell.
08:32And I'm sorry for the noncommittal answers right now, but we just don't know.
08:36We know that there were huge protests in early January of this year that were then repressed by the regime,
08:45violently repressed by the Islamic Republic, with some suggesting that tens of thousands of people were killed.
08:51And that being said, in response to the killing of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader,
08:56there were crowds across Tehran and other cities in Iran that had thousands of people there,
09:03expressing their sorrow and anger at the death of Ali Khamenei.
09:08So I think it's really difficult to tell.
09:10We don't have polling data.
09:11We don't exactly know how many people are in favor of X or Y.
09:15We know that the crown prince, the son of the former Shah, is cultivating a lot of popular support in
09:21the diasporas.
09:23And they're very noisy, very vocal in their support for a desire for a constitutional monarchy with the return of
09:29the Shah.
09:29But whether that translates on the ground amongst Iranians in Iran, we just don't know.
09:36And we heard Donald Trump earlier as well, insisting that he's not going to get bored here.
09:41Questions were put to him about whether or not the U.S. is going to stay the course in this
09:46war,
09:47even though Donald Trump isn't describing it as a war.
09:49Do the outside powers, the likes of Washington, do they have the will, do you think, Simon,
09:54or even the ability to implement an alternative system to the regime that is currently in Iran and has been
10:01for four decades?
10:04I think there's a couple of things here.
10:06The first is that Donald Trump has got to speak to the American voters and to his own support base.
10:11And at present, he's not really made the strong case to justify military action in Iran.
10:17And he's certainly not made the case to justify boots on the ground in Iran.
10:21They're trying to make that case now.
10:23They're trying to present a narrative that Iran is this nefarious actor that is responsible for all of the Middle
10:29East's ills
10:29and documenting antagonistic encounters with the United States.
10:35And of course, a lot of that is true, but I don't think that is a narrative that is landing
10:39in the United States.
10:40And there was a poll over the weekend that said that I believe it was one in four Americans was
10:46in favour of military action in Iran.
10:48So only a quarter of the population that were asked.
10:51So that, I think, is a big problem.
10:53And I think when we start to see the casualty numbers rising, as Donald Trump and others have inevitably said
11:01that they will,
11:02then that is going to cause further issues for the American voter.
11:06There will be growing anger.
11:07We've seen that in the past with Vietnam.
11:09We've seen it with the Iraq war in 2003.
11:11Then you've got the question of how much can the US sustain this economically?
11:16Wars are expensive.
11:17Supporting Israel, supporting Gulf allies in their attempts to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones is hugely expensive.
11:25So you've got big problems there.
11:27And then does it have the appetite to do something that Donald Trump said that he would never do?
11:31He would not engage in a, quote unquote, forever war of the sort that we saw after the invasion of
11:37Iraq in 2003.
11:38He said that very clearly.
11:40And yet, if there is this desire to enact regime change in one way, shape or form, Iran is three
11:47times the size of Iraq in terms of its population.
11:49It has deep-seated ethnic, religious, tribal, ideological and political differences.
11:55And it would be far, far harder to reach any type of consensus that would unify that disparate population, a
12:03population of around 90 million people.
12:05So I think there's a lot of different moving parts here that would make it very, very difficult for Donald
12:11Trump to stay the course here.
12:13And do you think, you know, you mentioned Vietnam, you mentioned Iraq.
12:16Do you think, I know it's very early days here, we're only three days into this conflict, but is Iran
12:21something that could become the defining legacy of the Donald Trump presidency, part two?
12:29Well, quite possibly.
12:30I mean, as you say, it's very early days, we're three days into it, but he's been able to secure
12:35the killing, the assassination of Ali Khamenei.
12:38That in itself is a huge, huge achievement for Donald Trump.
12:43It's a huge catastrophe for the Islamic Republic and probably illegal under many forms of international law.
12:50But it's a narrative that Donald Trump can spin.
12:53It's a narrative that Donald Trump can tell his voter base, can use in lots of different situations to say,
12:59I'm the man that oversaw the killing of Ali Khamenei.
13:03And that is a really powerful narrative for him.
13:06Now, what comes next, I think, has the capacity to either really underscore that powerful narrative for Donald Trump.
13:12If he's able to topple the Islamic Republic, then he can be the one that says, I toppled the Islamic
13:19Republic of Iran.
13:20I brought an end to it.
13:22Or if, conversely, it doesn't go that way and American forces are subjected to huge casualty numbers, or indeed it
13:30becomes a political or a geopolitical mess, as is worryingly likely,
13:35then that in turn can also play a pretty devastating impact and have a devastating impact on Donald Trump's legacy
13:43for his second term as well.
13:45So I think it's certainly too early to say, but the scope for it to play a really important role,
13:52I think, is huge.
13:53And we're hearing, of course, just a little earlier that the death toll for the US military has risen to
13:58six.
13:59Simon, we'll have to leave it there for now.
14:01Thanks so much, though, for being with us on the programme.
14:03That is Simon Mabon, Professor of International Politics and Middle East Studies at Lancaster University.
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