00:00:00.000Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host,
00:00:05.820Firas Maudad, and today we're going to be talking a little bit more about the
00:00:09.680Iran war, how things seem to be going from an American perspective, and then we're going to
00:00:16.300pivot a little bit and talk about Lebanon and the planned Israeli invasion for that country.
00:00:23.700Now, if we look at what's been happening in the war itself, the Americans have been bombing quite heavily the west and southwest of Iran, with the idea being that they want to destroy a significant amount of Iran's missile launch capabilities.
00:00:46.360And we keep hearing that the number of launchers has been massively reduced, and the actual firing rate of the Iranians has reduced quite significantly, but there are two points that I want to make.
00:01:00.140the first point is that the u.s is focusing on attacking this area in the um in the west of the
00:01:09.520country and then moving inwards so that they can target the haran more effectively and target the
00:01:15.720center of the country more effectively and that as a strategy makes sense but there's one thing to
00:01:20.800consider which is that if you're the iranians um once some of your bases are damaged these are
00:01:28.840in a lot of cases, underground bases and the tunnel entrances are being damaged and it takes
00:01:35.380a bit of time to reopen them. So what you might consider doing is delaying reopening these tunnels
00:01:42.660and delaying resuming the use of these bases because they've been exposed and focusing a
00:01:48.880little bit on survivability of your ability to launch weapons so that as the Iranians continue
00:01:57.060to degrade the radars and the air defenses of the United States and Israel, they would then be in a
00:02:03.960position to deliver a large strike near the end of the war. And this isn't unusual. This is exactly
00:02:11.520how Hezbollah fought in 2006. In 2006, Hezbollah made a point of making sure that the last day of
00:02:19.120the war, right before the ceasefire took effect, was the day in which they launched the largest
00:02:26.380number of missiles and delivered therefore the biggest blow and they were able to use that to
00:02:32.320spin a victory narrative so if you're iran and you're fighting kind of as an insurgency which
00:02:37.720is what the iranians are doing then that makes sense and the u.s strategy of detecting the
00:02:42.740entrances of these tunnels trying to damage them and destroy them you reply you respond to that by
00:02:48.180focusing on survival and you fire from inland more and more and you force the americans to go more in
00:02:55.600depth, and therefore that means that they can conduct fewer airstrikes. And then when the war
00:03:02.000is waning, you try to deliver bigger blows in order to say that you're winning. That's kind of
00:03:08.200how the Iranians fight. The second point to make is that the Iranians need to fire less now. They've
00:03:15.940demonstrated that they can cause massive damage to American military bases. We are seeing images
00:05:10.760Iran itself has taken massive damage, enormous damage. The problem has been, from the American
00:05:18.100perspective, is that this has not had the desired effect. One of the objectives of the war was to
00:05:25.680create the conditions through which Iranian protesters would simply rise up and overthrow
00:05:32.000the regime, and then you'd have a government that is friendly to Israel and the United States.
00:05:38.240the exact opposite has happened there has been a rallying around the flag every time a building
00:05:45.240is destroyed after they retrieve the bodies and the injured and so on they plant an iranian flag
00:05:51.380on top of it and anybody who is seen as protesting the regime is seen now as for supporting a foreign
00:06:00.860assault on iran and iran is not only a shia country that values martyrdom quite highly
00:06:07.780It is also an incredibly nationalistic country that really doesn't like the idea of foreign interference, be it from the Russians or from the Americans or from anybody else for that matter.
00:06:21.660Indeed, one of the big failings of Iranian air defense comes from this nationalism
00:06:27.200because the Iranians refused to wholly depend on either China or Russia for their air defense,
00:06:35.320meaning that they had to develop their own domestic alternatives, which arguably weren't as good.
00:06:41.420And the reason for that was because they didn't want to become too dependent.
00:06:47.280Now, how does this in the end play out?
00:06:49.820well, if the regime survives, the first thing that they're going to have to do after a ceasefire
00:06:54.840is pretty much give the Chinese whatever assets they want within Iran
00:06:59.860and use that to acquire defense systems from the Chinese and from the Russians.
00:07:07.080If you remember in, I believe, 2017 or 2018,
00:07:11.800the Russians managed to get briefly basing rights within Iran,
00:07:15.980and they used these basing rights so that they could fly from Iranian airspace all the way to
00:07:24.500Yemen and they had some of their long-range strategic bombers the I think it was the bear
00:07:30.680fly from bases in Iran all the way to the coasts of Yemen and the Russians were sort of sending a
00:07:39.380message by doing that that look we can dominate the airspace over the Gulf if we partner with
00:07:45.320Iran. This itself triggered a backlash from the Iranian parliament, because the Iranian
00:07:51.640constitution doesn't allow for any foreign bases on their territory. But now the Iranians are going
00:07:57.980to have no choice. They're going to have to cede a huge amount of ground to the Chinese and to the
00:08:04.540Russians at the expense of their sovereignty to immunize themselves against the next attack.
00:08:09.760And remember, with Khamenei dead, there is no religious reason for them not to develop a nuclear weapon anymore.
00:08:18.480It was the fatwa of the former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, that prevented them from developing a nuclear weapon.
00:08:25.260Now, with a new supreme leader, they could decide that the threat is sufficiently existential for them to build one.
00:08:35.980But let's see how the Americans feel about the war and what seems to be going on.
00:08:43.560Well, for one thing, now refueling flights that are being used to target Iran are avoiding Iraqi airspace.
00:08:52.020Because a couple of days ago, there was an accident, supposedly, between two American tankers and one of them was lost.
00:09:00.560And six crew members were killed, unfortunately.
00:09:02.600And I say unfortunately about all people who are killed during war, both civilian and combatant, war is a terrible thing.
00:09:10.940You shouldn't rejoice in the death of people in war even.
00:09:17.300But the fact that they're having to use this longer route and avoid Iraqi airspace might suggest something slightly different,
00:09:24.420which is that this tanker was shot down by air defense.
00:09:27.980We're also seeing that the American aircraft carriers are sort of moving away from Iran.
00:09:37.560So the Gerald Ford, which is supposed to go through the Red Sea and then pass through Bab al-Mandeb and exit and join the area of operations here,
00:09:47.780actually has opted to stay in the vicinity of Jeddah, here next to Saudi Arabia,
00:09:52.720so that they would have these mountains in the west of Saudi Arabia
00:09:57.460kind of protect them from the possibility of attack by the Iranians.
00:10:02.460And the other aircraft carrier is supposed to be operating somewhat in this area,
00:10:42.120but the indications from the political arena are even stronger.
00:10:46.520Here we have Bob McNally, who's a former White House energy advisor, saying that there isn't really a solution to what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz, that they don't have any options that would allow the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume the flow of energy.
00:11:06.940And what we've seen the Iranians do is attack the energy facilities in the UAE, in Fujairah, here, which are intended, essentially, to bypass Hormuz.
00:11:22.060So what the Iranians do, they blew up all the fuel tanks and all the oil storage tanks in the port of Fujairah, created a massive fire, meaning that the oil that gets pumped from Abu Dhabi, around about this area where Habshan is located, that oil gets sent by pipeline all the way, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, up there, and goes through here.
00:11:50.200and that export terminal or that export capability has been disabled.
00:11:56.340And the Americans are now saying, look, we don't actually have a policy solution for this.
00:12:02.960Then you kind of see this unhinged press conference from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
00:12:10.120And I want us to listen to this together for a couple of minutes
00:12:13.500to get an impression of how things are really going.
00:12:20.200And because you, and I mean specifically you, the press, specifically you, the press corps, because you cheer against Trump so hard, it's like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump, because you want him not to be successful so bad, you have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes.
00:12:42.060You have to hope maybe they weren't effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration's
00:12:47.140representative isn't true. So let's take half-truths, spun information, leaked information,
00:12:54.340and then spin it, spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the mind,
00:13:02.560the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful. How many stories have
00:13:08.620been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours. Has MSNBC done
00:13:15.320that story? Has Fox? Have we done the story how hard that is? Have we done it two or three times
00:13:20.800so that American people understand how about how difficult it is to shoot a drone from an F-15 or
00:13:25.260F-16 or F-22 or F-35? Or what it's like to man a Patriot battery? Or how hard it is to refuel
00:13:31.260midair? Giving the American people an understanding of how complex and sophisticated this mission
00:13:36.340really was there are so many aspects of what our brave men and women did that by because of the
00:13:42.940hatred of this press corps are undermined because your people are trying to leak and spin that it
00:13:50.120wasn't successful it's irresponsible look i think that um when you see senior officials react in
00:13:58.020this way what tells you is that they are under massive pressure what it tells you is that they
00:14:03.700are under massive pressure and that their narrative simply isn't convincing anyone and as a
00:14:12.320result they lash out in this rather extreme way. But underneath that there's also something
00:14:18.100important. Hexeth is emphasizing the complexity of American operations. Now there is a problem
00:14:24.220here. Highly technical, highly complex operations, things always go wrong in them at some point,
00:14:31.320which is natural. It's not an accusation. But the issue has been that the strategy of the so-called
00:14:38.460resistance axis, which is Iran and its allies, has always been to counter very complex operations
00:14:45.260with very simple solutions. So for example, the Americans are saying that they have fully
00:14:51.240neutralized Iranian command and control. Okay, that's how they define it in military terms.
00:14:57.520But the reality is that we're seeing Hezbollah and Iran conduct coordinated strikes against Israel.
00:15:04.740Meaning that there is still a chain of command that is operating.
00:15:09.100Meaning that there is still communication that is operating.
00:15:12.480Meaning that they're still passing intelligence to each other on target selection.
00:15:18.140And speaking to somebody who was informed about this stuff,
00:15:22.700he was telling me that they could be doing this over something as simple as World of Warcraft
00:15:26.780or signal or telegram or whatever or any kind of simple communications where there is massive
00:15:34.940volume and it's difficult to detect the signal from the noise. So they engage in these highly
00:15:42.500complex operations, but the enemy on the other side just sticks to simple solutions that it
00:15:48.200knows well, such as maintaining missile fire that is enough to cause massive economic disruption
00:15:54.380that creates political pressure and then that political pressure at some point forces the war
00:16:01.500to an end and then the Iranians declare victory regardless of how much damage they've taken.
00:16:08.200So we've seen this playbook in the past and it seems that they've fallen into this playbook
00:16:12.380and they don't have a way out of it. Other reactions that we're seeing from Trump,
00:16:18.360Here he is reacting to a reporter asking him, why is the United States sending the Marines to the Middle East to sort of potentially engage in a ground operation?