Special - Iran War: Strait of Hormuz, Regional Escalation, Casualty Figures (Preview)

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Hello Prestige, and welcome to American Prestige.

I'm Danny Bessner.

Here, as always, with my friend and comrade Derek Davison, and we're here to give you a news special on Iran.

But before we do, very quickly, for those who haven't yet, please consider becoming annual subscribers.

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All right, Derek, let's jump in.

And watch Go Watch The Yergan Habermost.

Oh, yeah.

I did a really interesting video with Samuel Moin examining the legacy of Yergan Habermost.

And particularly how we talked a lot about how Habermost wound up and really embracing the unipolar moment of the 1990s.

So if you're interested in Habermost, why he is well known, we go through that and also Moin's criticisms of him, please check that out.

And I also did, for people who haven't seen, subscribe to the YouTube channel.

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Yes, please subscribe to the YouTube channel.

And I also did, I'm researching a new piece for Harper's Magazine on the sort of future of the entertainment industry,

and particularly the role of streaming content on YouTube, Twitch, and other platforms.

And I interviewed the well known, it looks max or clavicular.

So if you want to, Derek had no idea who he was, which was impressive.

So if you want to check that out, that I wish I still didn't have any idea who he was.

I'm very research for this new piece that I hope to have coming out soon on the political economy of streaming.

All right, now that we've gotten that more than we intended out of the way, Derek,

let's jump into it. And let's talk about, first, let's just talk about the general state of the war and around.

It's not much changed.

I mean, you know, there have been incidents that we need to talk about, like the bombing of the South Park's gas field.

But that turns out not to have, at least not so far, sent the war into a permanent escalation in terms of energy attacks.

That seems to have been more of an isolated incident.

But in general, I mean, you know, the US and Israel are continuing to pound Iran.

The Israelis are continuing to kill as many Iranian leaders as they can find.

They took out a couple of, a couple more military senior military figures, I believe, overnight or into Friday.

The Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

The Iranians are allowing some ships to leave, certainly their own oil tankers are getting out.

Ships from certain other countries who seem to have made arrangements with the Iranians.

Those ships are able to get out, but it's closed to pretty much everybody else.

This continues to be the focal point in a, I would say, Kafka-esque way.

The focal point of the war is now the thing that wasn't a problem before the war started.

This has become now the major issue for the US.

At least Israel, I don't think.

The Israelis, I don't think, care that much about opening the strait, but the US has made it its primary war aim, even though this was not a problem before.

We started the war.

So that continues to be an issue.

In terms of casualties, I haven't seen any updating in the number of people killed in Iran in several days.

And I would assume that simply because of a lack of information coming out from Iran.

The latest figure from, I'm going by Al Jazeera, they have 1,444 people killed.

18,551 wounded in Iran, where the deaths always really started as spike.

As we talked about in the news update with the Israeli invasion of ground invasion starting in southern Lebanon.

The death toll on Lebanon, Israeli spike.

It's now over 1,000, over 2,500 people wounded.

That's in about two and a half weeks since that phase of the war started.

We're approaching week three here at the end of week three for the main conflict between the US and Israel and Iran.