Hi folks, as I’m sure you’ve already ascertained by now the US and Israel started another war with Iran overnight. I have been on the road today and so I have no time to write about this, but I was able to record a 30-ish minute special for American Prestige this afternoon. You can listen to the show if you prefer or read the transcript below, plus a couple of updates that I’ve interspersed based on information that’s been reported since the recording. More tomorrow for sure.
TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS
00:01.34
Danny
Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to American Prestige. I’m Danny Bessner here, as always, with my friend and comrade Derek Davison, and we are not excited to bring you terrible news about the United States and Israel bombing Iran. Just so everyone knows, Derek is on the road, so the audio quality is going to be a little different, but producer Jake will make it excellent, but we obviously felt that we needed to talk about this. So Derek, let’s just start with the brass tacks. I mean, there’s a lot of things I want to say, but what do we know so far, even though it’s obviously early days in a campaign that might last a while, might not, you never know Trump.
00:34.07
Derek Davison
Yeah, it was somewhat of a surprise. Well, I don’t want to say it was a surprise because, yeah, it’s Trump and he just decides things on a whim. He got on Truth social media
00:49.24
Derek Davison
in the middle of the night basically and released a statement saying that the U.S. had, the middle of the night U.S. time, Eastern time, announcing that the U.S. and Israel were attacking Iran. He suggested that this was the start of a regime change operation. We’ve seen reports about, the administration’s considering a small scale,
01:12.31
Derek Davison
low level, one and not one-off attack to try and give some leverage to the US in negotiating process with Iran versus an expanded war to take out the Islamic Republic, take out Ali Khamenei and company. From his comments, it certainly sounds like that’s the goal, that this is a regime change war. Now, it’s not about negotiations. It’s not about leverage. It’s about eliminating the Iranian government altogether.
01:42.42
Derek Davison
We’ve seen a number of attacks across Iran. I think at this point, something like 24 provinces of Iran have been hit to some degree.
01:56.66
Derek Davison
The Red Crescent, I saw, this was reported by Iranian media, but the Red Crescent is reporting at least 201 people killed in Iran so far. That includes dozens of children killed in an elementary school.
02:09.67
Derek Davison
This is by far the most heinous atrocity that’s happened so far.
02:13.82
Danny
Absolutely terrible.
02:13.41
Derek Davison
It probably won’t be the last.
02:14.54
Danny
Some of the videos, I just have to say, some of the videos are absolutely terrible.
02:18.10
Danny
Like it’s really, really disturbing.
02:18.26
Derek Davison
A girls’ elementary school in southern Iran, which was hit, I think, by an Israeli attack. I don’t know if that’s 100% confirmed. over 80 people killed, most of them I assume children, 85 was the last figure I saw, but that number keeps going up. So you that could continue to rise. That is, yeah, that’s the most heinous of these attacks. The Iranians have conducted limited retaliatory strikes. What’s notable about this is that they’ve attacked
02:53.83
Derek Davison
primarily targets in the Gulf. And they started out, it sounded like with U.S. or U.S. related military facilities in the GCC states, the Gulf Cooperation Council states, but they have moved on to I think a wider targeting package, some civilian sites in those countries. They’ve also attacked Israel.
03:18.14
Derek Davison
There’ve been a number of reports of air raid sirens going off in several Israeli cities, parts of the country. I don’t know of any casualties in any of these strikes so far. So the U.S. military is saying there haven’t been any casualties at all. I don’t think that’s credible, but it may just be that there’s not enough information yet to assess what’s been done here.
03:43.61
Derek Davison
It hasn’t been full-blown kind of all-out, shoot-everything-we-have type of response that that some people may have expected from the Iranians, and I’m not clear what it is they’re trying to calibrate at this point. They’ve clearly gone past any response they’ve had to previous Israeli and U.S. attacks, but they still seem to be holding things in reserve, whether that’s because they envision this going on for days or weeks to come and they want to reserve missiles, reserve the ability to kind of stretch this out.
04:18.36
Derek Davison
That’s a possibility. I’ve also seen it reported that they’re still trying to negotiate a quick ceasefire and are offering to go back into negotiations, which just I don’t know how you could negotiate with Donald Trump at this point if you’re the Iranians. But that may be a possibility.
04:35.61
Derek Davison
There there was another report, and I got a lot of this stuff off of social media, so take it for what it’s worth, but another report I saw that the U.S.
04:45.58
Danny
That’s where we are.
04:46.56
Derek Davison
might be calibrating things a bit, that this might be instead of—-this is contradictory to what Trump said, but supposedly came from inside the administration——that they’re going to do this in like 48-hour chunks, where they’re going to bomb Iran for a couple of days, take a pause, see if the Iranians want to stop and negotiate and or or capitulate, as Steve Witkoff puts it, and then resume the bombing again.
05:09.07
Derek Davison
That’s not--you can’t make sense of that in light of what Trump said, which is this is a regime change operation. It’s either they’re trying to do regime change or they’re not, basically. But these guys are so incoherent, they may be really trying to do both. But it seems like those things are not compatible with each other. But yeah, so there’s some question as to the scope, on the U.S. s side there’s some question as to the scope.
05:36.98
Derek Davison
On the Iranian side, there are reports of the Iranians closing The Strait of Hormuz, which is a threat that they have made in the past, if they felt like they were under existential threat, they could close the Strait of Hormuz. They haven’t done anything militarily on this as far as I know, but the reportedly they’ve been sending burst transmissions to ships in the region, advising them to stay away from the Strait of Hormuz, so effectively closing it. I think there are a couple of ships. Nobody’s tried it. I mean, you could say nobody’s tried to traverse the strait since this started, as far as I know.
06:15.00
Derek Davison
Whether that’s just out of an abundance of caution or because they’re responding to this Iranian threat is hard to say, but we may see... A tanker at some point, an oil tanker, try to make that trip and we’ll see how the Iranians respond. If they attack it, if they do something to really physically interdict it, then we’ll know they’re serious about closing the strait. If not, then this is just an idle threat. But yeah, as you said, there’s a lot, of a lot still up in the air. We should get into questions here.
