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Professor Tarek Masoud joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the Iran War With Israel and the United States.
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00:00The victor in a war is not determined by the side that has the longest list of kills.
00:05It's determined by the side that achieves its strategic objectives.
00:09I'm Professor Tarek Masood from Harvard University.
00:11Let's answer your questions from the internet.
00:13This is Tech Support Iran.
00:20Iceberg.com asks, what are the chances that Iran already has nuclear weapons?
00:26I think that the chances are fairly low.
00:28First of all, there's no public information that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon.
00:32The United States government hasn't alleged that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon.
00:36Israel hasn't said that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon.
00:39And critically, the Iranians themselves haven't said they have a nuclear weapon.
00:43And if they had one, you might expect them to say they had one because the main use of nuclear
00:48weapons is to deter precisely the kind of attack that the Iranians are suffering now.
00:53Are they close to getting a nuclear weapon?
00:55Iran?
00:55You often hear people say that Iran is two weeks away.
00:59What are they talking about when they say that?
01:01They don't mean that Iran is two weeks away from having a missile that could deliver a nuclear
01:06warhead to Tel Aviv or to New York.
01:09What they mean is that Iran is two weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for them
01:16to actually be able to build a nuclear bomb.
01:20Uranium basically exists in nature in two forms.
01:24One form is uranium-238, which is not good for building bombs.
01:29But there's another form, which is a kind of unstable form, called uranium-235.
01:34And that's what you want to use to make a nuclear weapon.
01:37But it exists in nature in very small quantities.
01:41So the process of enriching uranium is basically increasing the concentration of uranium-235.
01:49And if you just want to run nuclear power plants, you only need to get to about 3% of
01:54uranium-235.
01:56If you want to build a nuclear bomb, you need to get to 90% enrichment.
02:00The Iranians right now are at 60% enrichment, and it's estimated that if they wanted to
02:06go to 90%, it would take another couple of weeks.
02:09Even then, once they have enough enriched uranium to build a bomb, there's still a lot of steps
02:15between that and actually having a deliverable weapon.
02:18They have to develop an explosive core.
02:20They have to figure out a way to trigger it.
02:22They have to put it on a delivery system.
02:25And all of those steps are ones that we can detect and potentially interrupt.
02:32And so, Iranians are close to having enough nuclear material for a bomb, but they're further
02:38away from having the bomb itself.
02:41Here's a question from Binny21.
02:44Was the Iran nuclear deal a good thing?
02:47What Binny21 is referring to was something called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,
02:52or the JCPOA, which was a deal that was signed by Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom,
02:59France, China, Russia, and Germany in 2015.
03:04And this was basically a deal in which the Iranians agreed to essentially give up or postpone
03:10their nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
03:14They weren't going to enrich uranium to the much higher level needed to build nuclear bombs.
03:18They were going to limit the amount of that uranium that they stockpiled.
03:22And on top of all of that, they agreed to a very serious regime of inspections by the
03:28IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
03:32Now, was it a good thing?
03:34It depends on who you ask.
03:35People who think it was a good thing say, of course it was a good thing.
03:38We got the Iranians to put their nuclear program on ice, and we didn't have to go to war.
03:42People who think it was a bad thing point out that, first of all, many of the provisions
03:46of the JCPOA were set to sunset or to expire after about 15 years.
03:53So people felt, well, this is just putting a pause on the Iranian nuclear program, and
03:57after 15 years, they're going to race to a bomb.
03:59The other reason that some people thought that this was not a very good deal was they
04:02felt the inspections were not strong enough, particularly with respect to some of Iran's
04:08military sites.
04:09And then they also were concerned that the sanctions relief that we gave to the Iranians
04:14just put a lot of money in their pocket that they could spend on their proxies like Hezbollah
04:20and like Hamas and like the Houthis in Yemen.
04:23And so when President Trump got elected, he said he was going to undo the deal, and he did
04:27undo the deal, and opted instead for something called the maximum pressure campaign, which
04:32was really intended to squeeze the Iranians, to deprive them of money, and also to make sure
04:37that they did not get to develop a nuclear program.
04:39How did the Iranians respond?
04:40They responded by basically enriching uranium, and so now they've got about 1,000 pounds of
04:45uranium that are enriched to about 60 percent, and they stopped all of the inspections.
04:51When President Biden came back into office, he tried to get the JCPOA back, but the Iranians
04:57didn't want to go back to the deal of 2015, and they insisted that any deal that they made,
05:02they wanted guarantees that no future president could renege on it the same way that President
05:08Trump had reneged on the 2015 deal.
05:10That was obviously something that President Biden couldn't promise.
05:14So was the Iranian deal a good thing?
05:16My answer would be it was good, but it probably wasn't good enough.
05:21Here's the problem.
05:22Iran and the United States have many deep disagreements about a whole range of things.
05:27So it seems kind of inevitable that a limited deal on just Iran's nuclear program was destined
05:34to collapse under the weight of all of the other things we disagree on.
05:38Here's a question from Quora.
05:40Is Iran really that much of a threat to the United States of America?
05:43There's really two views here.
05:45One view, which is the view held by the president of the United States, is that absolutely Iran
05:50is a threat to the US.
05:51First of all, the Iranians have made no secret since 1979 about their very strong enmity to
05:58the United States.
05:59They constantly chant, the regime at least, Marbar Amerika, death to America.
06:04It's almost like a national anthem.
06:06When that regime came into being, one of the first acts with which it announced itself was
06:11the taking of hostages at the American embassy in Tehran.
06:16These hostages, about 50 of them, were held for more than a year.
06:20Since then, Iran has invested in proxies like Hezbollah, which killed almost 250 Americans
06:27in a suicide bombing at an American military base in Beirut.
06:31And then, of course, there is the fact that the Iranians have been developing a nuclear
06:35program and, some people say, also developing a missile program that was intended to enable
06:42them to deliver whatever nuclear weapons they develop to the American homeland.
06:46So, that's the argument of those who say Iran is a threat.
06:49Other people say, look, Iran was aspiring regional power at best.
06:55If it represents a threat, it's mainly to Israel and to the other countries in the Persian Gulf,
07:01and it's eminently manageable.
07:04And then they also point to the fact that Iran is riven by a lot of internal conflicts.
07:09There are lots of people who are upset with the Iranian regime.
07:12And if we would just stop rattling the Iranian cage, maybe some of those people within the
07:17Iranian regime who want to change it would have a chance of success, as opposed to us
07:23constantly causing people to rally around the flag in that country.
07:26Today, now that we're at open war with the Iranians, you've got to say they absolutely
07:31are a threat.
07:32The aptly named DangerousCost6367 asks, why are people talking about the Strait of Hormuz,
07:39and why does it matter so much?
07:40Here is the Strait of Hormuz, this very narrow waterway, it's about 20 miles wide, that is
07:48in the territorial waters of Iran and the Sultanate of Oman.
07:53Iran has about 12% of the world's proven oil reserves.
07:56That's a lot of oil.
07:58And through the Strait of Hormuz passes about 20% of the world's oil.
08:04If you want to get oil out of what's called the Persian Arabian Gulf, it mainly has to
08:09go through the Strait of Hormuz.
08:10Now Saudi Arabia has a pipeline that lets it send some of its oil across to the Red
08:16Sea.
08:17The Emiratis have a pipeline that also allows them to bypass some of the Strait of Hormuz,
08:22but it's not enough.
08:23And when there is risk here, when it looks like there's going to be a supply disruption,
08:28that gets priced into energy markets, and you and I pay higher prices at the pump.
08:34Now in addition to the Strait of Hormuz, there are two other places that you might have heard
08:38people talk about.
08:40One is Karg Island, which is right there.
08:43And that's a major Iranian facility for loading tankers and for storing oil.
08:49And there is now a proposal on the table for the United States to actually seize Karg Island.
08:56And that would deal a really crippling blow to the Iranians.
08:59The second is actually on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, and that's right here.
09:04That's called the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
09:06And that separates Yemen from Africa on the Red Sea.
09:10Practically everything that goes through the Suez Canal has to ultimately go through Bab al-Mandeb.
09:16We're talking there about 10% to 15% of world trade.
09:20And guess who operates right here in Bab al-Mandeb?
09:23An organization called Ansar Allah, known popularly as the Houthis.
09:28They are an Iranian client and they have the capacity to really disrupt and interdict shipping
09:34through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.
09:36And so, between the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb, the Iranians have the ability
09:41to put a major hurt on the global economy.
09:44Newt 8991 asks,
09:47What would a realistic win for the U.S. even look like in the Iran War?
09:50Well, if you listen to President Trump, we've already won.
09:53In fact, we've won more than anyone's ever won in the history of winning.
09:58He often points to the tremendous battlefield achievements of the American and Israeli military,
10:05that we are taking out their air force, that we're taking out missile sites.
10:08And all of those things are true.
10:10But here's the thing.
10:11The victor in a war is not determined by the side that has the longest list of kills.
10:16It's determined by the side that achieves its strategic objectives.
10:21If our objective is just to end the Iranian nuclear program, well, first of all,
10:26the president said we'd ended the Iranian nuclear program last summer,
10:29so there's a question as to what we need to do this time around to really, really end the Iranian
10:34nuclear program.
10:35That's still a pretty high bar because we will never be assured that Iran's nuclear program is completely obliterated
10:43until we have figured out where that thousand pounds of enriched uranium is gone.
10:49And so that might indeed require some ground presence to try to find it.
10:53Other people say that we will have achieved victory when we've replaced the Islamic Republic with a democratic,
11:00or at least America-friendly regime.
11:03That's a very high bar that might require a very sustained military engagement.
11:08The really interesting thing here, though, is that though the bar for victory for us might be high,
11:14it's pretty low for the Iranians.
11:16All they need to do is survive.
11:19Mike Torson asks,
11:21Why is Iran bombing seemingly completely unrelated countries?
11:25It definitely looks that way, right?
11:27Let's look at a map here.
11:28So the Iranians have been launching missiles and drones obviously at Israel,
11:32but they've also been launching at Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE.
11:39They even launched an attack on Oman and Saudi Arabia.
11:43Now, the Iranians say, we're not hitting random countries.
11:47We're not even hitting those countries.
11:49We're targeting American facilities in those countries, like American bases,
11:54or as they did in Saudi Arabia, the American embassy.
11:57And the reason that the Iranians are doing that is because what they want to do is they want to
12:03raise the cost of this war
12:05in the hope of getting the Americans to conclude it's not worth it to continue,
12:10and we need to make a deal with the Iranians.
12:13One interesting fact is that the United Arab Emirates has taken more fire than Israel.
12:19In fact, it may have taken more fire than all of the other countries combined.
12:23And part of the reason for that is because the UAE is such an important economic hub.
12:29So far, those countries have been calling for restraint.
12:33They've wanted an end to the war, and they haven't joined the U.S. and Israeli war effort,
12:39although that might change.
12:41But regardless of whether they join the war or they just sit it out and root for the U.S.
12:47and Israel from the sidelines,
12:48when the history of this war is written, people are going to ask why the Iranians turned the Gulf countries,
12:56forced them from neutrality into open hostility.
13:00It's almost like they were reading from a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
13:07Tidewatcher7819 asks,
13:09If President Trump ordered a ground invasion of Iran, would it be a long war or an easy victory?
13:15If the United States has a more limited aim, like seizing the enriched uranium or taking Karg Island,
13:24those things would be hard, but there's no reason to expect that they would create multi-year commitments
13:32if the U.S. remained focused on task and mission creep didn't take place.
13:37But if the ground invasion took place with the aim of replacing the regime with one that's more friendly to
13:45us,
13:45then there's lots of reasons to expect that that would be a very long war of the kind that we
13:52experience in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
13:55The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is very adept at war fighting,
14:00and they would absolutely put up a major fight should we try to invade the Iranian homeland.
14:08And these are the people, after all, who train Hezbollah and who train the Houthis so they know what they're
14:13doing.
14:13Another big question is, how would the Iranian people themselves greet us?
14:18Would they support us or would they see us as replaying a century-long script of foreign intervention and domination?
14:28There's definitely those who say that we could go into Iran and make short work of this regime.
14:34My sense, though, is that the people who say that, who say that this would be an easy victory, aren't
14:39thinking hard enough.
14:40Here's a question from Quora.
14:42Do Saudi Arabia and Iran hate each other?
14:44Prior to this conflict, Saudi Arabia and Iran had a pretty decent relationship.
14:47They'd kind of buried the hatchet with Chinese mediation in 2023 and restored full diplomatic relations.
14:55That said, there absolutely are tensions beneath the surface for these countries, and they're long-standing.
15:01On one level, it's just they both happen to be two big countries that want to have hegemony in this
15:08part of the world.
15:08One thing you'll often find is that Saudis and Iranians often argue about what to call the body of water
15:14that separates them.
15:15Saudis like to call it the Arabian Gulf.
15:17Iranians get really upset when you call it that, and they like to call it the Persian Gulf.
15:21So that speaks to the degree to which both of these countries want to be seen as the leaders of
15:26the region.
15:27There's also a kind of economic competition.
15:29They're both major oil producers, and they don't always see eye to eye on prices.
15:34And then there's ideological differences.
15:36On the one hand, Saudi Arabia adheres to a brand of Sunni Islam that sees the Shia Islam that Iranians
15:44practice as a form of heresy.
15:46And that has absolutely been a source of conflict.
15:50And by the way, Saudi Arabia has a population of Shiites in its eastern province, and it's always worried that
15:57Iran is going to instigate them and turn them into a fifth column against the Saudi state.
16:02The Iranian state is based on a revolutionary ideology.
16:07After all, in 1979, they came to power, and they promised to export an Islamic revolution.
16:12While Saudi Arabia is a conservative monarchy, they're not so interested in Islamic revolution.
16:18And then finally, the Saudis are typically pro-American.
16:21They've had a good relationship with the United States ever since the World War II era.
16:27And obviously, Iran sees itself as the leader of an axis of resistance against the United States.
16:33And so it's inclined to see Saudi Arabia as kind of an American puppet.
16:38Now that the war has commenced and that the Iranians have hit targets in Saudi Arabia,
16:44the reporting is that the Saudis are urging the United States to finish the job
16:48and to finally rid the region of this irritant that has caused so much damage.
16:56This one is from the Explain Like I'm Five subreddit.
16:58Explain Like I'm Five.
17:00Who is Hezbollah?
17:01Hezbollah is a militia and political party that operates in Lebanon.
17:07Hezbollah means Party of God.
17:09And it was established in 1982 with serious Iranian support for two reasons.
17:17The first was to protect Lebanon's Shiites.
17:20They are about 30% of the population, and they weren't always treated so well.
17:25But the second purpose was to push Israel out after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
17:32Hezbollah has developed into probably one of the most capable military forces in the Middle East.
17:39They have waged war against Israel.
17:42They were a major part of Iran's attempt to shore up the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria after
17:51a popular uprising in 2011.
17:54There are reports that they trained Hamas and helped Hamas prepare for the October 7 attacks against Israel that killed
18:03more than 700 civilians.
18:05One of the things that Hezbollah did after October 7th is they would launch rockets into northern Israel, resulting in
18:13a serious evacuation of Israelis from that part of the territory.
18:17And with the war with Iran, Hezbollah started launching rockets again at Israeli targets.
18:24They really are the key organization that people talk about when they talk about Iran's proxies around the world.
18:32Now, today, Hezbollah has suffered some serious blows.
18:37September of 2024, the Israelis basically decapitated the organization.
18:43First, they planted a bunch of exploding pagers that killed and maimed several hundred Hezbollah leaders.
18:50And then that same month, they actually killed the secretary general of Hezbollah, a cleric named Hassan Nasrallah, in an
18:57airstrike.
18:58And so Hezbollah today is a much diminished organization.
19:02The Israelis are now saying that they need to finish the job and eliminate Hezbollah entirely.
19:09And so they have actually invaded Lebanon and moved all the way up to the Latani River with the express
19:15aim of completely ending Hezbollah.
19:18Here's a question from Quora.
19:19Why does Iran hate the USA and Israel?
19:22One of the big reasons that Iran hates the United States is that they still hold a grudge against the
19:27U.S.
19:28for supporting the Shah and for helping orchestrate a coup against a more or less democratic prime minister in 1953,
19:37whose only sin was trying to nationalize Iran's oil assets.
19:41Another reason they hate us, though, is because we support Israel.
19:44And they hate Israel because they see it as having stolen Muslim land and oppressing Palestinians.
19:51In fact, this is something that really matters to the Iranian regime.
19:54They named the special forces of the IRGC the Quds Force, which means the Jerusalem Force.
20:01On the last day of Ramadan, they hold a rally called Quds Day, which means Jerusalem Day.
20:07You might be asking, why would the Iranians care so much about Israel?
20:11It's so far away.
20:12And there's really two explanations.
20:14One explanation is that Iran is based on a pan-Islamic ideology.
20:20And so naturally they're going to have deep sympathy with Muslims around the world.
20:26And Muslims do care about the fact that Jerusalem is no longer under Muslim control
20:32and that Palestinians are oppressed by the Israelis.
20:36Another argument is that it's totally cynical, that what the Iranians want to do is they want to appeal to
20:42the Arab street
20:43in their campaign for gaining influence around the region.
20:46And they know that playing the anti-Israeli card is a sure way of doing that.
20:52So those are all the questions we have for today.
20:56Tech support Iran.
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