What’s Next for Iran?

It's almost three days into the U.S. and Israel's massive military action against Iran.

With 2,000 targets hit since the strikes began.

So far, more than 550 Iranians have been killed, according to the humanitarian organization

the Red Crescent.

And Iran has hit back with force.

Here's our colleague, Soonerasmusin.

Almost immediately after the attacks started over the weekend, we saw Iran responding by

attacking Arab countries in the Gulf.

In fact, they've attacked every single country in the Gulf.

Only in many others in Israel took cover as air raid sirens rang out after Tehran

vowed revenge for the killing of its Supreme Leader.

Explosions have so far been reported across several U.S. air bases in the region, including

in Bahrain, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates.

Several deaths have been reported after those Iranian strikes, including in Israel and

the United Arab Emirates.

And I think that's to show both the U.S., Israel, the world, and to show the neighbors in

the Middle East that if Iran is attacked, they want to show the countries in the region

that they can't attack Iran without ramifications.

If there's a long-term, full-blown war in Iran, that's obviously very dangerous for the

Iranian people.

And if things escalate and Iranians rise up, and then there is an increased risk for the

Islamic Republic of being toppled.

Well, right now the Iranian regime is fighting for its survival.

The U.S., and Israel just killed the Supreme Leader and dozens of his military commanders,

and the regime is genuinely at risk of falling.

So for them, this is an existential fight for his life.

Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business, and power.

I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's Monday, March 2nd.

Coming up on the show, war in the Middle East with Iran at the center.

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Why did the US and Israel choose this specific moment to strike?

What was the catalyst that triggered this weekend's operation?

The US wanted Iran to seize all enrichment of uranium.

Iran says, as a sovereign nation, it has the right to develop a nuclear power for civilian

purposes.

But the nuclear program has always been a subject of controversy internationally, which is

why they've been negotiating over it.

The official reason Trump gave for attacking Iran was that he had lost patience with the

ongoing negotiations, and he didn't believe that Iran was moving or moving fast enough

to give the concessions that the US wanted.

According to Wall Street Journal reporting, Saturday in particular presented US and Israeli

intelligence with a rare opportunity.

Iranian military and political leaders were holding a meeting, one that included Iran's

supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Hamine.

The US and Israel struck in full daylight, with Israeli jets dropping a host of munitions

on Hamine's compound.

Hamine was killed in that strike, along with several top government and military advisers

According to Iranian state media, the strikes also damaged residential buildings, medical

facilities, and also hit an elementary school in southern Iran, with a death toll of at least

148.

With Hamine's death, Iran has found itself in a moment of transition.

Ali Hamine was in power for 37 years, and Iran was the longest sitting Middle Eastern

ruler by quite a distance.

And he leaves behind an Iran that is much stronger than when he took over.

Like when he took over in 1989, Iran was emerging from a devastating eight-year war with Iraq

and a revolution that preceded it.

So it was close to bankruptcy, and it was recovering from a lot of violence.

Through the 90s, he and his government managed to spur economic growth, and over the decades

he turned Iran into a military power in the Middle East, that his enemies really had

to contend with.

But Hamine also leaves a regime that's under unprecedented pressure from its population.

This vision of an Islamic society in Islamic Republic that Hamine and his peers had after

the 1979 revolution, that is a vision that has increasingly alienated Iranians, both

because they think it's out of touch with modern times, but also because of, frankly,

the violence that the Islamic Republic has imposed on its own population and people who

didn't support that vision in order to keep them in check.

So he leaves behind an Islamic Republic under pressure.

That pressure was on display in December, when a financial crisis led to huge protests

throughout the country.

Hamine's security forces responded with a brutal crackdown, killing thousands of Iranian

citizens.

At the time, President Trump threatened to take action against the government.

Then I've canceled all meetings with the Iranian officials until the senseless killing of

protesters' stops.

And all I say to them is help is on its way.

You saw that I put...

After this weekend, strikes began.

Trump posted videos telling the Iranian people that this moment is their once-in-a-generation

chance to take down the regime.

And we are finished.

Take over your government.

It will be yours to take.

This will be probably your only chance for generations.

Soona, is there a sense that Iranians are gearing up for a popular uprising against

the regime?

No, not yet.

I don't think we should expect that as long as bombs keep raining from the skies over

to Iran.

We shouldn't expect Iranians to take matters into their own hands and immediately topple

the Islamic system that has been in place for nearly 50 years.

To have a successful revolution, you need several things, but two things that you historically

have needed is on the one side you need a regime that's fracturing and weakening with defections,

things like that.

We haven't seen that in Iran, even during the worst protest or the worst crackdown on protesters

here in January.

And then on the other side you need an opposition that is organized behind a common goal, which

they have in this case, but also with a leader.

And in the case of Iran, they might also need weapons.

And we haven't seen any signs of those two things coming to bear yet in Iran.

I'm not aware of any historical president where a regime has been toppled by airstrikes

alone.

But if regime changes it likely, what does Iran's government look like right now?

Like who's in charge?

So when we talk about the Iranian regime or the system, the Islamic system is important

to understand that that's both the Supreme Leader, its government, its parliament, its military,

and in the military you have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC.

So there's a lot of different power centers in what we call the regime.

Like the entire Islamic system remains still.

The Iranian leadership has always known that if too much power and authority was concentrated

in one person or even a dozen people, that would make it vulnerable to decapitation.

And that's what we see now.

Already the Iranian government has begun the succession process to find a new leader to

replace harmony.

When these American Israeli strikes, dozens of important and high ranking military commanders

have been killed, political officials as well.

And decision-making in Iran doesn't really seem to have slowed down.

Like I'm not suggesting here that the killing of Hamine is not going to change Iran.

It definitely will.

But as we can see in the way that Iran immediately retaliated to these attacks and continues

to do so.

There are a lot of people who know what to do in a situation like this and are involved

in decision-making.

What Iran's response could mean for the rest of the Middle East is up next.

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In its efforts to retaliate, Iran has targeted hotels, ports and airports in the Gulf Arab

States.

It struck oil and gas facilities in Saudi Arabia and in the UAE, it killed three people

and injured dozens.

So Iran's response so far has been to go after countries in the Middle East that it

perceives to be allied or helping the U.S.

So now, what is Iran's strategy here?

I think from an Iranian perspective, they also want to make it as costly and politically

untenable for President Trump as possible to continue this war.

And President Trump has insisted always that he is not going to drag the U.S. into another

forever war in the Middle East or anywhere else.

So the question is how many American casualties will he accept or will the American people

accept before he is forced to pull back?

Iran has also hit U.S. military facilities in Kuwait and the U.S. Navy's fifth fleet headquarters

in Bahrain.

Six American service members have been killed as of Monday afternoon.

In addition, Iran has closed off the Strait of Hormuz, which is a key transit line for

global fuel.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it would set fire to any ship coming through

and shutting the Strait down could have a significant impact on the world economy.

What impact has Iran's strategy had so far?

So the Iranian attacks are not only imposing a cost on the reputation and the economies

of the Gulf States that are also creating confusion and panic and fear in countries that

are not used to being directly involved in war.

In Kuwait today, we saw Kuwaiti anti-air defenses mistakenly shoot down three American

fighter jets.

No American soldiers were killed.

But this is the kind of incidents that we could definitely see more of in a war like

this.

I think the Iranians will hope that the governments of the Gulf States will also have a limited

patience with this kind of damage.

We don't know.

In the UAE, the United Arab Emirates have said that the Iranian attacks are only hardening

their resolve to fight back.

So far that's rhetoric and I think the Iranians will hope that they will pull their support

for this for this war sooner rather than later.

So it sounds like it's not clear yet whether this sort of pressure tactic is necessarily

working at the moment.

No, I think we're still waiting to see how things shake out, but we're only what, less

than 72 hours into this fighting and a lot can happen in the next couple of days.

How likely is a regional war?

What does that mean?

A regional war.

Right now we have Israel attacking Iran and Iran fighting back and drawing in close to

10 Arab Gulf states.

The question is of course if countries in the Gulf decide to get properly involved in

this war to retaliate against Iran.

There would definitely be an escalation that we haven't seen before because the Gulf

countries have traditionally stood outside armed conflict in the region.

We could also see violence flare up in Iraq, Lebanon could flare up, we also have a very

fragile new government in Syria.

So a violence flare is up there and then all of a sudden we have a whole sort of belt

of violence stretching from Tehran to the Mediterranean.

So there's definitely space for things to escalate.

In remarks at the White House today, Trump said that the U.S. operation in Iran is projected

to last four to five weeks, adding quote, we have capability to go far longer than that.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the U.S. was adding forces in the Middle

East to support U.S. operations in Iran.

When you talk about the ultimate objective of this campaign, I mean, is it ending Iran's

nuclear program?

Is it regime change?

Is it something else?

What is the U.S. waiting for?

In be a little bit difficult to pass exactly what President Trump's goals here are because

he's sending mixed messages.

He said that he wants to ensure that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon and he also

wants to take out Iran's missile arsenal.

And then sometimes he also says that he wants Iranians to rise up and take over their

own government.

And he's even indicated that he's willing to resume negotiations with the Iranian government.

So it's a little unclear for me what the objectives here are and that, of course, also there's

also why some people are worried that the U.S. is going to get dragged into another Middle

East and quagmire.

Iran's chief of security said Tehran won't resume nuclear talks.

Depending on social media, quote, we will not negotiate with the United States.

Trump also said today the U.S. has four goals in Iran to destroy Iran's missile capabilities,

to take out its navy, to prevent the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and to stop

Iran from supporting terrorist groups outside its borders.

How long can Iran actually withstand this kind of bombing campaign?

That's a good question.

Iran's anti-air defenses were damaged last year and the year before in Israeli attacks

and in American attacks.

But Iran still has a significant missile arsenal.

It still has large armed forces.

It's got a lot of drones and you can fight for a long time with drones so they can send

these drones in swarms over the Gulf States and continue to exact the price from them if

they want to.

And I think they can do that for a long time.

Iran is, this is in a sense asymmetrical warfare and this is something that Iran and its

militia allies are very experienced then.

What does this moment represent in Iran's history?

How much of a turning point is this for the country?

This weekend has been the most significant turning point in Iran in history since the end

of the brutal war with Iraq in the late 80s and maybe since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

This is the first time we've seen the US attack the Islamic Republic militarily like this

and this is the greatest danger to the Islamic Republic since the war with Iraq ended and

possibly since it was founded.

And once the dust settles, if the regime survives, it'll have a huge task on its hands, both

in terms of rebuilding the country, reasserting authority but also figuring out what this governance

looked like in the Islamic Republic without Ayatollah Ali Hominay, who had been in power

over 37 years and is only the second supreme leader that the country has had.

For the Iranian people, which has grown increasingly dissolutioned with the Islamic Republic

over the decades, this is the most tangible moment they have seen during the existence

of the Islamic Republic where they have some hope of fundamental change.

So this is a huge moment for Iran.

That's all for today, Monday, March 2nd.

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