The latest on a possible strike on Iran, including the reported presence of U.S. forces on the Persian Gulf, and the possible timeline for such a strike, and what it means for the Middle East region.
00:02:03.040This is from CBS News out of Washington.
00:02:06.300Top national security officials have told President Trump the military is ready for potential strikes on Iran as soon as Saturday.
00:02:13.400But the timeline for any action is likely to extend beyond this weekend, sources familiar with the discussions told CBS News.
00:02:19.320Mr. Trump has not yet made a final decision about whether to strike, said the officials who spoke under condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive national matters.
00:02:28.160The conversations have been described as fluid and ongoing as the White House weighs the risks of escalation and the political and military consequences of restraint.
00:02:39.360I need some cold brew concentrate mixed with urine.
00:02:42.560I think that would be the solution here.
00:02:44.000Over the next three days, the Pentagon is moving some personnel temporarily out of the Middle East region, primarily to Europe or back to the United States, ahead of potential action or counterattacks by Iran.
00:02:54.560If the U.S. were to move ahead with its operation, according to multiple officials, it is standard practice for the Pentagon to shift assets and personnel ahead of a potential U.S. military activity and doesn't necessarily signal an attack on Iran is imminent, said one of the sources.
00:03:09.520After contact by CBS News on Wednesday afternoon, a Pentagon spokesperson said that they had no information to provide.
00:03:16.620Secretary of State Marco Rubio plans to visit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in about two weeks for further discussions, according to one of the sources.
00:03:23.720Carolyn Levitt said at a White House press briefing on Wednesday that there are many reasons and arguments that one could make for a strike against Iran, but diplomacy is always the president's first option.
00:03:31.820And she declined to discuss whether a potential strike would be coordinated with Israel, but she told reporters a very successful operation in June that targeted Iran's nuclear facilities, obviously referring to last summer when we were kind of in a similar situation where all signs were pointing towards a potential war with Iran.
00:03:50.520We saw the strikes, and I think the immediate reaction from everyone was, oh my gosh, we just started another war.
00:03:56.280And then that didn't actually turn out to be the case.
00:03:59.380We conducted an operation which, at best, incapacitated Iran's nuclear program.
00:04:07.300Iran responded with a strike on our base in Qatar, but this was premeditated.
00:04:13.780They actually told us the strike was going to happen so we could evacuate personnel.
00:04:17.740It was more of an attack to save face.
00:04:19.120This is actually quite common on the international scale.
00:04:39.940The Gerald Ford is now in the neighborhood.
00:04:41.240So things are getting hot, and the question really is, you know, what exactly is the goal for the Americans here?
00:04:51.240Well, I actually think Carolyn Leavitt is accurate when she says, of course, the first goal here is democracy.
00:04:56.820I'll start by saying I think President Trump and the Trump administration, by and large, really would not like a war in this situation.
00:05:06.860Again, people will point out that war with Iran has been the goal of the United States and a lot of shadowy figures within the government for quite some time now.
00:05:16.020But I think Trump, the admin, et cetera, has the wherewithal to understand that, look, starting a war right before the midterms is not a very good idea.
00:05:27.380There's also something that's worth considering, and people don't actually consider this, but something that is worth considering is that this sounds crazy, but this is true.
00:05:36.480This is actually reflected in geopolitics, and it's not being reported about in the media.
00:05:39.500There's been zero questions asked about the Trump administration to the Trump administration on this.
00:05:43.280But this is truly, this does play a role in geopolitics, is the Winter Olympics are currently underway.
00:05:49.120And again, you might roll your eyes at that and say, well, who cares about the Winter Olympics?
00:05:52.540Well, we've actually seen historically that powers do not want to start wars during international events.
00:05:58.780This is just not something that's conventional.
00:06:10.740If you look back at the Ukraine-Russia war when that broke out, Russia actually waited for the Winter Olympics to be wrapped up in China before they actually conducted their military operation, whatever you want to call it.
00:06:24.160So again, these international events do play a role.
00:06:28.360They do play a role in the decision-making process.
00:06:31.200And again, no one's talking about this, but that's something that should be considered as far as timeline goes.
00:06:36.320This is why I actually suspect that that official that told Reuters the buildup won't be complete till mid-March, I think he was basically saying that's the timeline.
00:06:44.780Where right now, as we speak, I'll just go ahead and pull this up because I think this will be useful.
00:07:06.620I don't think this weekend would be the time where we would see an action taken.
00:07:10.880Who knows, I could be eating crow at some point in the next few days.
00:07:14.420But I don't suspect that it's going to happen this weekend because we still have many rounds of negotiations with Iran taking place in Geneva right now.
00:07:22.280So there's, in this piece, Oman is the one that is brokering these talks.
00:07:28.840I'll just read very quickly here from Al Jazeera.
00:07:31.640Iran's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Ar-Gichi.
00:07:37.020People say the name on the news and I always forget how to pronounce it.
00:07:41.940Has said that, quote, good progress has been made in indirect nuclear talks with the United States.
00:07:45.740As Washington warned, that military action remains an option if diplomacy fails.
00:07:49.660The talks mediated by Oman were held in the Swiss city of Geneva on Tuesday against a backdrop of increased military flexing by both sides in the Gulf region.
00:08:00.040And we were told that the talks were still continuing.
00:08:03.280Ultimately, we were able to reach a broad agreement on a set of guiding principles based on which we will move forward and begin working on the text of a potential agreement.
00:10:29.260But she made an interesting statement as she was saying she was on Facebook and one of her, I guess, one of her friends or something had posted that her husband, she was upset because her husband was supposed to be deployed in a few weeks.
00:10:41.640And she was upset because his superiors had told them, actually, you're being deployed right now.
00:10:49.160And it was funny because then Amber caught that and she was making the point that, look, why would he be needing to be deployed suddenly, immediately, when the timeline was set for quite a long time in their anticipation for his deployment?
00:11:03.180So that does indicate that, again, the United States is really ramping up a lot of pressure here on Iran.
00:11:15.340But a good indicator, from my point of view, and then a few other people have shared this sentiment that I've seen, is that the fact that officials are talking to the press, right?
00:11:26.560You're seeing report after report, you know, the Reuters, even CBS has had some reporters saying that officials are speaking to them.
00:11:37.540And that's actually kind of a good sign that we're not going to have a war.
00:11:49.560There was no reporting in the press that we were actually going to conduct an operation like that.
00:11:53.480You know, we had seen that there was a carrier strike group in the region.
00:11:56.880Obviously, we had seen the vessels being struck, the drug boats or whatever.
00:12:01.260But there was no indication that we were actually going to conduct an operation in Venezuela because, again, the Pentagon had completely locked everything down.
00:12:11.220You know, there were zero leaks coming out, zero, certainly zero officials talking to the press about what they think is going to happen or what their assessment is, these sorts of things.
00:12:20.500Now we're seeing that this buildup in Iran, every news outlet in America is getting officials speaking to them.
00:12:26.640That's actually a good sign because that indicates that the Trump administration is actually letting information be released.
00:12:34.420Because these officials, perhaps some of them are just speaking out of line and they're reporting confidential information.
00:12:41.940But, again, we see with Venezuela that the Pentagon has demonstrated that they've gotten everything pretty airtight and that officials will not speak unless they're sort of allowed to or permitted to or at least like encouraged to.
00:12:53.340So the fact that we're seeing senior officials, Reuters are saying they had a senior official talking to them, that indicates that the Pentagon is allowing information to be released on what our plans are in regards to Iran.
00:13:08.200And the reason for that is because as soon as that hits the press, the Iranians are seeing that.
00:13:12.940The Iranians are now seeing that the Trump administration is serious about striking them, and that will give us leverage in negotiations.
00:13:20.280So all this to say, the fact that we're seeing officials talking indicates that the Trump administration is seeking to maximize pressure to get a deal.
00:13:29.900And we are seeing negotiations are happening in Switzerland as we speak.
00:13:42.960I could outline this myself, but I think it'll be useful to use their writing here.
00:13:45.400Iran, for years, sought relief from sweeping sanctions imposed by the U.S., including a Washington Post ban on other countries buying its oil.
00:13:53.280Tehran has said that the ongoing talks to focus its uranium enrichment program, insisting that any deal must deliver tangible economic benefits to Iran while maintaining its sovereignty and national security.
00:14:03.280Meanwhile, Washington has demanded that Iran forego uranium enrichment on its soil and has sought to expand the scope of talks to non-nuclear issues such as Tehran's missile stockpile.
00:14:15.940Iran has said that they will not accept zero uranium enrichment and that its missile capabilities are off the table.
00:14:25.700Where's the brinksmanship here, right?
00:14:26.980I mean, if Iran and if Tehran and Washington are just seeing two completely different situations and what their conditions for a deal would be, I don't really know where the deal is.
00:14:43.240The Ayatollah, Khamenei, he actually came out and he gave a speech where he was saying, you know, under no circumstances are we surrendering our nuclear program.
00:14:51.200If they're not going to surrender their nuclear program, they're certainly not going to surrender their missile stockpile.
00:14:58.800So, again, it's just very unclear what specifically we can actually accomplish here at the negotiating table.
00:15:06.420So, while I said there are encouraging signs that the Trump administration is prioritizing a deal here, the Trump administration, by all accounts, does not want to go to war for a variety of reasons, including the upcoming midterms.
00:15:54.540This was reporting from Reuters over their Dubai outlet.
00:15:58.440Russia warned against, quote, unprecedented escalation of tension around Iran on Thursday and urged restraint amid a U.S. military buildup in the region that a senior American official said should be complete by mid-March.
00:16:10.300That was the reporting that I had seen.
00:16:11.500U.S. threats to bomb Iran with the two sides far apart on talks, and Tehran's nuclear program have pushed up oil prices.
00:16:17.860And a Russian Corvette, and so this is really important here, a Russian Corvette on Thursday joined planned Iranian naval drills in the Gulf of Oman, a vital sea route for global energy.
00:16:27.640About 20% of all energy in the world passes through the Gulf of Oman.
00:16:31.160So that's a very big deal that the Russians are joining the Iranians for joint naval drills in the Gulf of Oman.
00:17:06.320Because, again, they're tied up in Ukraine right now, and that's probably not going to stop anytime soon.
00:17:12.140But the munitions and whatnot that would be required for a defense of Iran or that would be useful for their proxies, those are different munitions.
00:17:21.220And the munitions currently being utilized in the Ukraine operation, the Ukraine war.
00:17:25.460So I wouldn't count necessarily completely count out Russia here.
00:17:30.580Obviously, the Kremlin just would really not like to see a war because this ultimately puts Russia in a really bad situation if the U.S. and Iran go at it because they're going to have to weigh in.
00:17:39.440They're going to have to, again, sort of pick a side here for lack of a better word.
00:17:43.260If they sit on their hands when Iran is going down, how else is any other country supposed to trust Russia as a potential ally, as a potential partner, geopolitical partner?
00:18:07.180The U.S. military is preparing for potentially weeks-long Iran operations.
00:18:12.680So, again, you know, people are suggesting that this could be like last summer where we just conduct a single operation, a single, you know, instance, and then it's over.
00:18:23.300Well, the reporting that we're seeing from Reuters, again, this is officials telling Reuters this,
00:18:29.760indicates that potentially this could be a prolonged conflict.
00:18:34.420I think this would certainly classify as a war.
00:18:36.400The U.S. military is preparing for a possibility of sustained weeks-long operation against Iran if President Donald Trump orders an attack, two senior, sorry, these aren't senior officials, two U.S. officials told Reuters.
00:18:48.580And what could become a more, far more serious conflict than previously seen between the countries.
00:18:54.120The disclosure by the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of planning raises the stakes for diplomacy underway between the United States and Iran.
00:19:02.760And then they go into the discussions in Geneva.
00:19:06.360The reason why a weeks-long conflict is kind of concerning, well, it's very obvious why it's concerning, but another reason why this is concerning is because, again, if this is a we're in, we're out, it's done in four hours operation, that's one thing.
00:19:21.080But a weeks-long Iranian operation, what that does is that has, again, large impacts for the region.
00:19:26.940That activates the Houthis, that activates Hezbollah, that activates Hamas.
00:19:30.780Again, that draws Israel into the conflict.
00:19:33.760So Israel is going to get involved here, and that's where it's going to turn into a regional war.
00:19:39.140We already saw Iran and Israel trade missiles last year.
00:19:44.140Israel has unfinished business in Iran.
00:19:45.900Iran feels like they have the capabilities to destroy Israel, so we would have to see if that's the case.
00:19:54.660Granted, a few of their missiles did penetrate the Iron Dome, which is worth considering.
00:19:58.460If the U.S. military enters a prolonged conflict with Iran, the Israelis will get involved.
00:20:05.080Now, Levitt, a few others have said we aren't really coordinating with them right now, but that's a little difficult to believe for a variety of reasons.
00:20:15.900One thing that was interesting, this was an interesting tidbit that was in the news, and this is what sucks, because anytime you bring up Israel, because the discourse right now is so toxic, immediately everyone just starts reading between the lines.
00:20:27.320I'm just, right now, I'm giving reporting, right?