US and Israel launch an attack on Iran
The Israel Defense Forces says retaliatory strikes have been launched by Iran towards the country - and explosions have been heard in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait
this war is a war that is going to be defined by the availability of munitions on the part of the United States. When the United States runs out of ammunition, it runs out of the ability to, you know, project power in a meaningful fashion. We knew based upon the warnings of American generals and admirals that the military believed there was insufficient resources to carry out this task that they weren't going to be able to succeed. And I think their worst nightmares are coming true because in military operations especially, it's a resource intensive war.
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this war is just stupid, stupid, stupid. It's all about Israel. It has nothing to do with the security interest of the United States. And uh Israel is going to be perhaps fatally hurt by this this president has has seen his presidency fatally wounded by his own actions. And you know we're going to see a desperate man going forward. You already see movement in Congress now to you know change the law and empower the president to take control of the midterm elections so that he can steal them because he's not going to win them. What he has to do is avoid the kind of landslide that results in not just the House going Democratic but the Senate getting sufficient anti-Trump sentiment to convict if he's impeached because he will be impeached. But what we saw was the end of the Trump presidency.
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Missile defenses don't work. This might be one of those rare silver linings in a cloud. Nobody wanted this war. But if we can get out of this war with nothing greater than the humiliation of the United States, it could be a wakeup call to future administrations that arms control actually works and we should give it a shot and not pursue Golden Dome and you know all the things the Trump administration is doing.
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apparently there are American military casualties in Bahrain and we can expect more casualties from this. The the military has failed the American people. It's supposed to defend, it's supposed to be able to do things and it hasn't been able to do it. And our political leadership has failed the American people because they allowed a war to take place. It's a war of choice, not a war of necessity. Iran poses no threat whatsoever to the United States. So, this is a war of choice. It's an illegal war of aggression. It's the highest war crime imaginable. It destroys the credibility of the United States. Who will ever negotiate with us again? Because once again, we were in the midst of negotiations with the Iranians who were putting real real solutions on the table.
the attack was agreed December 29th at Mara Lago. which stresses the conclusion that the negotiations conducted by Witkoff and Kushner with the Iranians were another deception intended to string things out. Israel's objective is clear and President Trump has obviously embraced it. That is to remove Iran from the geopolitical chess board in West Asia. And to do that by eliminating the Islamic Republic, the regime, if you will, starting by murdering the leaders of it. The Israelis are now claiming that they have confirmation that they killed, the Ayatollah, that his body was found in the rubble of his compound. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I suspect it's very plausible. Then this has all sorts of implications. If I may just jump ahead to those because there's a lot of other implications to this. For one thing, Iran has a very well established constitutional succession mechanisms. Presumably that will now go into effect. The Ayatollah Khomeini has been a vociferous opponent apparently of building a nuclear weapon for Iran. His removal will strengthen the hands of the many in Iran who see that following North Korea as an example is the only effective way to assure the integrity of the state.
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protests were fueled by the smuggling in of 50,000 Starlink sets for Iranian discontented Iranians. This the protests themselves were set off by in or at least Scott Bessant, the American Secretary of Treasury claims that he and the Treasury destroyed the Iranian currency which and therefore were able to initiate the protests. Once the protests began, the people with the Starlink links began to agitate to move them from peaceful protests into violent riots. We've had a huge propaganda campaign greatly exaggerating the number of deaths in Iran on the part of protesters or maybe an agents of foreign interests who were exploiting the protest. We know that those claims are exaggerated. We don't have an exact reliable figure from Iran itself. And so this is yet another case where it's right out of the playbook that you emiserate people. You make them so wretched that they feel obliged to protest and and demand change from their own government some kind of response to the misery that you're causing. And then you say to them, as which is what we did say apparently in these negotiations, look, you got to give up your ability to defend yourselves, get rid of your missiles or we'll bomb you. And of course, if you get rid of your missiles, we'll probably bomb you, too.
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You know there's a wonderful uh thing circulating on the internet which is a steel in written in pun form from 3000 BC which says Iran is only a few days away from a bomb. And you know I mean they have been only a few days away or a few years or a few months or something for as long as I can remember. I was being told in 1991 to go to the then crown prince Abdullah when I was ambassador in Saudi Arabia and warn him that Iran was two years away from a bomb. That was 1991. You know here we are. I think it's a more than two years have passed since then. So we have these continual warnings about something that the intelligence agencies that look at these things say is not true.
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It's not going to be over in a few days. So at what point the oil prices will become ridiculously high as a matter of conjecture at this point but it seems likely. And let me just say one thing about shutting the straight of Hormuz. The minute you um you you declare a blockade of some sort, as the Huti government in Yemen did in the Red Sea, insurance companies don't provide insurance to ships. So, the shippers can't use that route. And it's not a matter of shooting, you know, sinking ships. You just um get Lloyds of London to be unwilling to underwrite insurance on ships. Um and that is exactly what will happen. So you won't have anyone other than a military vessel daring to brave the blockade.
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many people believe rightly or wrongly that Iran is actually better equipped to manage a war of attrition than Israel and the United States. Um the United States, as I mentioned, has depleted a great deal of its arsenal in other adventures elsewhere. And in the earlier defense of Israel basically was wasn't able to continue defending itself during the June so-called 12-day war at the end of it. You know, it was vulnerable uh to Iranian attack.
what we have right now is a situation that we cannot sustain an attack, a naval attack from the south with just the one aircraft carrier. There's no nearby port they can sail to, to get reloaded. So, three days out, three days back, that's a week. How sustained is the American attack? Is it regular, consistent, systematic without a break or does it go for a couple of hours and they stop and then they come back? Well, they can't sustain it continuously because they're using the landbased is from planes that are flying out and dropping air-guided missiles, air-to-ground missiles. And again, the same applies to the ships that are those destroyers that are firing off Tom Hawk cruise missiles. Once they fire, they're done. They'll have to wait till they can go reload. I do understand that Iran has fired some missiles and drones at at the ship at the carrier strike force. We don't know what the effect has been. We do know that in Bahrain they hit the facility that housed US naval officers. It's on fire. So the possibility that they have killed some US naval personnel. You got Bahrainis cheering as Iranian missiles are slamming in to this US naval facility. But at the same time what you have is the other countries. You know Saudi Arabia has now declared war on Iran. I'm sure that Qatar and United Arab Emirates are going to follow suit and fine. Up to this point, Iran has targeted only the military targets, the US military targets in these countries. But if those countries want to start getting into it with Iran will take out their oil. And Iran very well can do that. And that will be especially true if the West tries to attack Iranian oil facilities and oil fields. They will then in turn light up the entire Persian Gulf and say goodbye to 25% of the world's petroleum.
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they have more faith in the accuracy of their weapon systems that don't always work. And this is you know killing children. You know, you remember judge, the kind of reaction we had in in the United States on 9/11 2001. Sure. And on on 9/12 2001 the political differences that had existed in the country on September 10th disappeared largely disappeared overnight. All of a sudden we were all Americans. We weren't Republican or Democrat or independent. We were Americans. We had been attacked and we were by God going to make those who attacked us pay. Well, guess what? That's exactly what's going on today in Iran. And they've got the bodies of 105 little girls to stand there and look at and they were in the midst. They had trusted us again, right? We said we were having peace talks. They were willing to make concessions on Thursday. They said, "Oh, hey, we made progress. We look forward to Monday." And then Trump, he's worse than Adolf Hitler. He did exactly what Hitler did on September 1, 1939. To attack a country that had not attacked us.
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what does the fact that this is the second time that Trump has lulled Iran into a false sense of security and attacked Iran in the midst of negotiations literally when negotiation a negotiation session was scheduled in the next 24 or 48 hours. What does this do to the Russia US negotiations? I think it kills it.
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this regime change, it had nothing to do with Iran's so-called quest for a nuclear weapon that they weren't trying to build or trying to get. And that's, you know, that's a point that Rey, our friend Rey has made over and over and over, and he is exactly right. This is about regime change. And the reason we want to change this regime is to stop BRICS, to stop the development of this alternative financial future that does not include the United States, or at least doesn't give the United States the control where it can tell everybody what to do and then if you don't do what we tell you: we seize your money, we threaten, we make it impossible for you to do international trade. You know, those days are over and Iran now is seeing a way to break free of that. And so that's where this is, you know, this is to destroy Iran and ultimately destroy Russia and China. That's the US goal.
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What Iran has is this enormous ballistic missile capability that I believe is largely untapped because they've kept so much of it underground and we've not really had a good measure of what was there. But we're going to see within two weeks Israel is going to be pleading for help and they may resort to trying to use a nuke on what they think is a missile site. And then you know that adds a whole new layer of danger because at that point you could see not only Russia and China getting involved but also North Korea coming to the aid of Iran and they have nukes.
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Donald Trump who ran on what? We're tired of these needless senseless wars in the Middle East and we're not going to do it. And now he's done it. And you know he tries to trot out this lie that Iran was desperate to build a nuke. They're not. at least weren't and hadn't, and they had offered a deal. Come inspect and Trump rejected it because as you said he's he's controlled by Bibi Netanyahu and other wealthy Zionists and he's unwilling to challenge him, and so what he's done is he has now put America in genuine danger. Our economy will suffer from this and our standing in the world is going to suffer dramatically
In 2015, Khamenei supported the deal between the government of President Hassan Rouhani and world powers that curbed Iran's nuclear programme in return for fewer sanctions on Iran's oil and shipping industries.
In 2018, two years into Trump's first occupation of the White House, the US withdrew from the nuclear agreement and reimposed sanctions.
Saturday's wave of strikes came, like the attacks in June 2025, as negotiators attempted to cut a deal between Iran and the US over the nuclear programme.
www.rfi.fr - Ali Khamenei's voyage: from boy cleric to Iran's man with the final word
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he has accepted a request from the US to use his country’s military bases for defensive strikes against Iran.
the Shia Islam and the Iranian people in particular that they are they have a culture almost of sacrifice. So the idea that they were going to collapse and bend over and roll over is was never going to be very likely.
it should be clear, it should have been clear years ago that simply you cannot make, and I hate to say this as an American, you cannot make an agreement with the United States that the United States will honor.
Everything hinges for the United States right now on destroying the will to resist for the Iranian people. You have to believe that if with with more of this punishing missile flows and we can with things above ground, we can just pummel them to the ground in many areas in in in Tehran for example or we can select a handful of cities. But what happens if you don't bring them to their knees? Look at look at the Palestinian people. Look at Hamas. For two and a half years, Israel has literally turned it into a moonscape in Gaza City, in Rafa, in most of the places, in the entire Gaza Strip. It is it is reduced to absolute rubble. And yet, they still have not defeated Hamas. They still have not brought the Palestinian people to their knees. Look what happened in the straits in the in the Red Sea with the Huties. We tried for seven weeks to to bring them to their knees. You remember that statement by Hegseth who was just as confident at the beginning of that talking about how he's going to kill everybody and uh you know we're going to shut down what they're doing and nobody's going to tell us we can't go into the Red Sea and all that. You remember how confident he was at the beginning of that? You never saw him come back in when they announced it's over. The only thing we ever saw was President Trump saying, "Oh, well, they begged us to stop, so we did. Okay, moving on." No, they they did. Sure, they may have said, "Yeah, why don't you stop shooting us? we're not going to stop our mission. So, your objective was never met. You just said, "Hey, you don't shoot us, we won't shoot you. We're going to move on and just move on somewhere else." But you never brought them to their knees. You never ended the strikes. So if you can't destroy the Hamas in this tiny little area where you literally bomb them to the stone age and they still didn't surrender and if you couldn't bring the Huties after seven weeks of non-stop fighting when you had I think at one point one and then I think a second aircraft carrier there at some point. If you can't bring them to their knees upon what basis do you think the country of 90 million people is going to be brought to its knees in four weeks? two and a half years for Hamas did not succeed. So far, still going on. Hezbollah in Lebanon and in Beirut have been bombed mercilessly. They've had their leaders assassinated. They're still viable. That's why there's still activity going on between the IDF and the Hezbollah. The Huties are still viable. You haven't shut them down. So if you haven't shut down a single one of those, then why are you risking everything and already have sacrificed American lives to accomplish something that rationally is not going to be accomplished? And and you are putting us all at risk here because there's so many things going on here. All of these shots I've showed you in the oil infrastructure, all that has the risk. And it's already we've seen at least to some degree, it's not a whole lot, but the oil price of oil hasn't gone up since this started. the straight of Hormuz uh is partially shut down and so far I think there's been if I'm not mistaken at least earlier today I saw there had been four tankers that have been hit in one degree or another just the oil infrastructure and platforms like I showed you at the beginning but the actual oil tankers a lot of the ships have just stopped where they just laid anchor where they're at so no one's going anywhere because they're afraid they don't want to be the next ones hit but that means traffic is not going now whether they get to a full-on shutdown whether they like mine it so that nobody's going to come in or where they literally start destroying ships, you know, a bunch of them so that nobody gets through. That apparently hasn't happened yet, but that that could happen. And and you see all these countries already, some of our allies, most of them are our allies that now then their oil infrastructure has been hit. You couldn't protect them. See, that's also the an-sequence that's already we don't know how far that's going to go. However this comes out, it's clear that we were not able to protect our allies. It's clear that our allies were hit because we chose to go into a conflict here. This was not forced upon us.
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as the Palestinian people have shown, as the Huties have shown, as nearly everybody has shown, as the Israelis have shown, as the Ukrainians have shown, you can just bomb the hell out of these people and you're not going to compel compel them to surrender when you especially when you don't have an army to comp to force them to do so. Just bombing doesn't break people's will.
