00:00It is day 11 of the Israeli and American bombing of Iran and the U.S. Secretary of Defense says
00:05it is to be the most intense day of strikes yet. Pete Hegseth making those comments during a
00:11briefing at the Pentagon this Tuesday alongside the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Kane,
00:16who said more than 5,000 targets in Iran have now been hit. Now in response, Iran is continuing to
00:23fire missiles at Israel and at the Gulf states of Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar, although Hegseth
00:30claimed the number of Iranian attacks is now tailing off. Today will be yet again our most intense
00:39day of strikes inside Iran. The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes. Intelligence
00:47more refined and better than ever. So that's on one hand. On the other hand, the last 24
00:53hours have seen Iran fire the lowest number of missiles they've been capable of firing yet.
01:02With me now to talk a bit about Pete Hegseth's comments is Douglas Herbert, our foreign affairs
01:07commentator. And Doug, look, did we get any clearer sense from Pete Hegseth there as to when all of
01:15this might come to an end? No. And the reason being, Nadia, is because he cannot be any clearer
01:21or perhaps unclear than his boss, Donald Trump. Donald Trump, you know, how many times have we
01:26heard in the past few days that Donald Trump has sent, I think the euphemism is, contradictory
01:31signals about how long this war could last, right? Mixed messages in quotes. We say it all the time.
01:38I've said it at least 10 times and it's the 11th day of this war already. The reason, it draws
01:43a
01:43little bit of a chuckle. Why? Because it's not just contradictory signals. The message, if any,
01:49is that there is no message. The messaging from Donald Trump so far has been, if he says it
01:56emphatically enough and often enough, perhaps he could will what he says into actually happening.
02:01And this is not just applying to Iran, but other conflicts as well. You say we're going to hit them
02:06hard. You throw out the threats. You throw everything in the kitchen sink at them and you hope it's going
02:11to
02:11have some impact. The rhetoric and the strikes as well. But the reality is, it's not that it's
02:18falling on deaf ears. People hear what Donald Trump's saying, but they are also factoring in
02:22something else. And that is the defiance from the Iranian side and this sense, a nagging sense that
02:29as much as Trump might be self-convinced, bombastic in his rhetoric, he may have miscalculated. And not
02:35only may, but in the view of many listening to him, he did miscalculate. And we're already in these
02:40very early days of war seeing signs that perhaps the layover and play dead response that this
02:47administration had perhaps, as well as Israel, been counting on in the very opening salvos and
02:52shots of this war has not come to pass. And yes, while we hear the generals in the U.S.
02:57day after
02:57day saying that the intensity perhaps of the strikes is decelerating from Iran, that they're going to
03:04have less weaponry. So far, we're not really seeing that it has affected Iran's ability, at least
03:10strategically and more than just a little symbolically, to continue striking across the region. We have
03:15seen the strikes in Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, in the UAE, so on and so forth. They might not be
03:21as
03:21intense as the opening days, but they're still happening and the uncertainty is still just as much
03:25there. Pete Hegseth today had the same bombastic and chest-thumping and let's just say a jingoistic
03:32patriotic American tone as he did at his last press conferences. The only difference perhaps is
03:36he was perhaps a notch less gung-ho because they don't know the timeline and he offered a prayer
03:42at the end. And look, on Iran and Iran's response to all of this, Tehran has been very clear. It
03:50says
03:51oil is not going to go through the Straits of Hormuz in these tankers, key, of course, to the global
03:57supply of oil. Should we take the Iranian leadership seriously when they say that?
04:02Well, certainly their message is very serious and very direct and unflinching. We heard Iran's
04:09parliament speaker basically dismissing any suggestion whatsoever that Iran might be seeking
04:14right now a ceasefire because Donald Trump has sort of alluded to or perhaps wanted people to
04:20believe that it's just a matter of minutes, if not hours or whatever, that Iran's going to
04:25acquiesce, surrender, that they're all but down and out, that this war is going to be over
04:29in a flash. But Iran's not showing signs of that. In fact, the defiance, if anything,
04:33they're hunkering down even as perhaps they run lower on their ammunition. We heard Ali Larajani,
04:39who is by now the de facto leader of Iran. He's the highest national security official,
04:44basically saying in response to Trump's comments yesterday, Iran doesn't fear your empty threats.
04:51So you could say, OK, he's posturing. He would say that right after all. He's the Iranian top
04:55security official. But there's a sense that Iran knows that while it can't match the US and Israel,
05:01far from it militarily, it knows it's outnumbered, overpowered. It knows that symbolically and its
05:08spirit of resilience, it can more than match it. And it's playing the clock. It is banking on the fact
05:13that it can keep that Gulf of Hormuz closed or at least people uncertain enough about it for a while.
05:19And let's talk then about how Donald Trump is handling this at home. We know that the American
05:24public doesn't really want this war. They do not. And it's not me saying it. It's actually
05:29Gallup, which is perhaps the most respected poll in the United States, showed that in the opening
05:34days, in the earliest days of this war, the approval for this war from Americans, their approval of this
05:40war is lower than any war in America's recent and not so recent past. So after the Pearl Harbor attack
05:46in 1941, when the US went to war, 97% of Americans approved. Later, when George W. Bush went to
05:54war
05:54and put troops in Afghanistan, 92% of Americans approved in the opening days of that conflict.
06:01You want to know what it is right now with the Iran war in its opening days? Remember,
06:05we're not even two weeks in, right? It is 41%. To flip that over, six out of 10 Americans
06:10disapprove of this war. It's true. Most Republicans are generally supportive of the war so far.
06:18But their support tends to waver. If this war drags on, the consequences become more reverberating
06:25and more potentially drastic for the world and the global economy.
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