MS NOW's live breaking coverage with Rachel Maddow of U.S. attacks on Iran

Good afternoon. I'm Rachel Maddow. It is 1 p.m. Eastern time and you are joining MSNOW's ongoing coverage of the United States having apparently started a war with Iran for some reason. Your guess, your personal guess, sitting at home watching me right now, your personal guess is as good as any as to why the President of the United States has just started this war. In terms of pure rational deduction about what he is doing here, we can basically rule out all the reasons he has said he's doing it. Is Iran on the precipice of having ballistic missiles that can reach the United States? Absolutely not. The United States is very far from Iran. One might even say it's a whole continent away, which means a ballistic missile that can reach the United States is very far from Iran. One might even say a ballistic missile launched from Iran to hit us here would have to be an intercontinental ballistic missile. Does Iran have ICBMs? Does Iran have intercontinental ballistic missiles? No, it does not. And there is no known evidence or even serious allegation that Iran is anywhere near developing that technology anytime soon. Even Trump's Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has recently admitted that, admitting that the threat is only that maybe, quote, one day, Iran might have that kind of capability, one day, just like you or I might one day learn to fly or to time travel. Is Iran a week away from industrial-grade uranium enrichment? As the President's diminutive real estate friend, Steve Witkoff, asserted this week when he was asked about the Iran talks he is inexplicably part of on behalf of the United States government and the relevant experience and training being that he is an old real estate friend of President Donald Trump. Is Iran, as Steve Witkoff says, a week away from achieving industrial-grade uranium enrichment for their nuclear program? No, they are not. No, they are not. Not only has there been no American or international evidence or intelligence made public that suggests even that they are doing that, but even the Trump administration says explicitly that that is not happening. Marco Rubio on Wednesday at a press conference in St. Kitts and Nevis told reporters, quote, they are not enriching right now. So why is this happening? Have we just started a war with Iran because they have got some advanced nuclear program that's rushing toward a bomb? Ask President Donald Trump, who insists that the last time he ordered the bombing of Iran in June, that, quote, totally obliterated their nuclear program. It's hard to say that anything totally obliterated, gone, pulverized, erased from the earth might now suddenly be back again. And so, therefore, a war must urgently start today. So what are we doing here? It's not that they're about to get us with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It's not that they are enriching uranium to such a which Trump says he obliterated, has somehow unobliterated itself and is now a pressing danger again. Why did we just go to war with Iran? The president has said a couple of times in recent days that he just wants the Iranian government to say the words that they are not pursuing a nuclear bomb, suggesting that if they would just say that, that would be enough to stop the United States from starting a war with them. Well, the Iranian government actually over and over again keeps saying that they are not developing a nuclear bomb. They will say it whenever you like. They say it whenever they are asked. So that does not appear to be the reason either. So why do you think President Donald Trump has just done this? Why do you think he has just started a war with Iran? Is it because his heart bleeds empathetically on a human level for the protesters in Iran who have been killed by their own government? In such huge numbers in January and February of this year? Is it because Donald Trump really feels for the Iranian people? Is it because his heart throbs with a passionate support for the right of free speech and the right of people everywhere to protest against their own government and not face violence because of it? Is that what you think? If so, good morning. I hope you have slept well for this past decade in which you've been dead to the world. But I'm not going to lie. I mean, just suspend disbelief for a moment. Just suppose that the reason the United States of America has just started this war with Iran is because, as the president said today in his weird pre-recorded video message in a baseball hat and a suit jacket that the White House released at 2.30 in the morning, the president said in that stilted, strange statement, squinting at the president. He said that he's doing this because he wants the people of Iran to rise up and overthrow their despotic government at his instruction. And maybe they will. Maybe they will try. But Iran is a huge, complex country. It is 92 million people. That is more than triple the population of Iraq or Afghanistan when we started our disastrous regime change wars in those two decades ago. Iran has considerable regular military forces, but it also has a huge revolutionary guard force, which has effectively its own army, its own navy, its own intelligence service, its own special forces. It also plays a huge role in the massive, suffocating, brutal domestic security services that are happy to terrorize the Iranian people in the best of times and to massacre the Iranian people in the worst of times, which they have done in the last eight weeks. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has massive economic interests. They have a huge hold on multiple sectors of the Iranian economy. And to state the obvious, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is not the kind of force that's going to go poof if a Donald Trump airstrike manages to kill Iran's supreme leader. If they do kill the supreme leader, which appears maybe to be what they tried to do earlier today, then what will happen? I mean, this isn't Venezuela. There's no Vice Ayatollah who's going to step in and take over the top job, except she'll take calls from Marco Rubio. What will happen then? If you voted for Donald Trump for president because you believed the hype that he was America first, that he was against foreign wars, that he was definitely against regime change wars in foreign country, well, again, good morning. I hope you slept well. But the president in this case says explicitly that this is not the case. This is a war we are waging for regime change. And the existing leader, Khamenei, who has been in place since 1989, there is no other person of that stature to just pop in place and say, OK, it's done. We've made that change. And so if you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government, then you're going to have to do something. And so if you really did want the government, if you wanted the beleaguered and oppressed Iranian people to organize very quickly into a new populist political force to rise up against, among other things, the security services there that have been massacring them by the thousands this month and last, if you wanted that to happen, you probably could have taken some steps to help that happening, to make sure they can organize and can communicate. Right? Maybe you would have turned the internet back on. And when you, Donald Trump, in your baseball hat, proclaimed on that weird taped message today that the Iranian police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender, they must lay down their weapons, as Donald Trump said this morning at 2.30, if that was what you wanted to happen, because you wanted the domestic security situation to become less dangerous for the Iranian people. So if you really wanted to make that happen, instead of just saying it, you, as the U.S. government, maybe you, as the U.S. government in coalition with other allies that you might have bothered to bring on board, you might have given the Iranian police and Revolutionary Guard and security services some instructions on how to surrender and lay down their weapons, some path to do that, which Trump did not. As I say, you might have taken steps to turn the internet back on in Iran. So the people there, the people, the Iranian people could reach each other and the world, and so the world could reach them too. If you actually wanted the Iranian people to have a chance rising up against the regime that has oppressed them for so many decades, you might not have gutted the crucial Farsi language Voice of America communications platform and put it in the hands of a soft-focus election denier, local news anchor, who is most famous for proclaiming the fraudulence of American elections. If this is a regime change war, as Trump says it is, because Trump is seriously hoping the Iranian people will complete the job for him. It is worth knowing that there has been no serious or even unserious effort by the United States to make it possible, let alone plausible, for any uprising by the Iranian people to succeed. And so why did Donald Trump just start this war? Why is this happening? Cui bono, right? Who benefits? It's always useful to start that question in any country. Who benefits? Who wants Iran bombed off the map and for their own reasons? Who are Iran's rivals and enemies? Perennially, it's the Gulf Arab states, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. You know, Qatar, the country that just gave Donald Trump a really, really nice $400 million. And it's a country that just gave Donald Trump a really, really nice $400 million plane, really a gilded flying palace for his own use, both during the presidency, during his presidency and after Trump plans to take that plane with him and keep using it after he leaves office, if he ever leaves office. And you remember the United Arab Emirates, famous for recently structuring a totally pointless crypto financial transaction so that $2 billion of it would be stuffed into the Trump family's otherwise worthless brand new crypto financial firm. And of course, you remember the Saudis who stuffed another $2 billion into the pockets of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, just as Trump's first term in office came to a close. You might remember enough people were alarmed about that when it happened that the Trump folks actually sort of bothered to come up with an excuse for what made that okay. They said, don't worry, Jared will never again work for the U.S. government. He's never coming back to Washington. So it's okay that he's taken all this money. We will never have to worry about having somebody involved in U.S. policy who has also just been given billions of dollars by Saudi Arabia, apparently for no reason. Well, that was the explanation when he took all that money from the Saudis at the end of Trump's first term. And now today, who has been leading the negotiations on behalf of the United States government with Iran before we just started this war with them today? I mean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in St. Kitts this week. It wasn't him. No, it was Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, recently paid billions of dollars by Iran's chief rival and nevertheless sitting there alongside Trump's tiny real estate friend, Steve Witkoff, who has sought recently to improve his considerable family fortunes by going to Qatar to seek money from its sovereign wealth fund. Weird that those talks didn't work, right? It's like if you were having a backyard dispute with your neighbor, you know, hey, your new fence crosses the property line, comes over into my yard. That tree you just cut down, that hedge you just cut down, hey, that was mine. You're having a neighborly dispute with your neighbor on your block. And the cops break down your door with a battering ram. They arrest you and your whole family. They ransack your house and then they light it afire and bulldoze it. And they tell your neighbor, hey, it's all done. You can take his whole backyard and you can take his house now, too. And as you're trying to figure out why this has just happened, you come to learn that your neighbor has been paying massive bribes to the police in your town. Oh, that's what's going on. I mean, there's there's a lot of attention on Israel and indeed Israel and the United States have worked together in the bombing campaign, not only the one that started today, but the campaign against Iran in June. But it is the Gulf Arab states who are arrayed against Iran, who want Iran removed as their regional rival. It is those countries that have been assiduously buying up members of the Trump family and the Trump administration with just astonishing amounts of cash in recent years and particularly in recent months. And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not. And that our American government hasn't bothered to internally consistent, let alone rational or sound. Why did Donald Trump today just start a war with Iran? You tell me. The New York Times editorial board writes today that in this second term, Trump's, quote, appetite for military intervention grows with the eating. And that seems observably true. Iran doesn't have ballistic missiles that can reach us. Iran has not achieved some kind of breakthrough in nuclear enrichment that is a new sudden emergency. Iran isn't about to have a nuclear bomb. And I think it's fair to say this is not about Donald Trump's emotional desire to provide support to the Iranian people. If it were, we might actually be supporting the Iranian people. So why is it? Maybe it's for oil as the president daydreams himself into another 19th century war fantasy of conquering some foreign land he doesn't understand or care about, but he would like to rob them of their natural resources. Maybe he thinks Iran and its proud 92 million people will happily and easily become a new colony in an empire, an empire helmed by an American emperor. Maybe that's what he thinks. But as this now becomes the seventh country Trump has bombed just since being back in office for one year. Cui bono? Who benefits? It seems like a disturbingly easy question to answer. Why has the U.S. government been pushed in this direction? Follow the money. Why is Donald Trump willing to let that happen? Well, with this president, sadly, we keep learning over and over and over again that the easiest answer is almost always the truest one. Does not play four-dimensional chess. There's just him and what we know he's like, right? This president appears to have grown his enormous and excitable new appetite for military intervention in just this one year back in office. Apparently because he just thinks war is easy. It's exciting. It earns him not only close attention, but even occasionally plaudits from the very serious people who are professional, but he's emotionally inclined to believe that there's some rationale, some strategery, some good thinking behind the start of every war, particularly in the Middle East. Starting a war, launching airstrikes, doing this sort of thing, it gets him a ton of attention. He gets to do it unilaterally, he contends. Naturally, there's no question that he would seek a declaration of war from Congress or even an authorization for the use of military force. He sees war as something he gets to do on his own say-so in a baseball hat, from home, that is exciting, that is controversial, that is all about him, and not for nothing, it's the world's greatest change of subject. Today, Saturday, is a weekday, it's a school day in Iran, as we start to get reports of the damages inside not just Tehran, but elsewhere in Iran. The internet is off in Iran. The government in Iran has advised its own people what to do as American airstrikes start bombarding multiple cities. Donald Trump, when he was a private citizen, repeatedly in 2011, 2012, and 2013, said that then-President Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to help his political prospects. He kept saying over and over again that Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to get re-elected, in order to help the Democratic Party's political prospects. Donald Trump was wrong about that. Barack Obama didn't start a war with Iran. But we know why Trump thought Obama should have done it. He said so. He said that was exactly what Obama would need to do in order to get re-elected, in order to put wind in his political sails. We know what Donald Trump thought would be the salutary domestic political effect of a U.S. president starting a war with Iran. And now today, as he is facing domestic political disaster in this year's elections, now today, our wildly unpopular U.S. president has started that war himself. Why do you think he did it? Stay with us. Reporters and analysts standing by on day one of Donald Trump's new war with Iran. We'll be back in 90 seconds. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage here at MSNOW of President Donald Trump's new war with Iran. Let me bring you up to speed on what we understand is happening at this hour. We actually have a new statement from U.S. Military Central Command just in the last few minutes. It says in part, quote, U.S. and partner forces began striking targets at 1.15 a.m. Eastern Time to dismantle the Iranian regime's security apparatus, prioritizing LOCATIONS THAT POSED AN IMMINENT THREAT. TARGETS INCLUDED ISLAM Revolutionary Guard Corps command and control facilities, Iranian air defense capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and military airfields. Quote, following the initial wave of U.S. and partner strikes, CENTCOM forces successfully defended against hundreds of Iranian missile and drone attacks. There have been no reports of U.S. casualties or combat-related injuries. Damage to U.S. installations was minimal and has not impacted operations. The United States and Israel have launched strikes on what Israel says are hundreds of targets in Iran's capital city and across that country. About an hour ago, Israel's military announced that it had begun a second wave of attacks on what they said were Iranian military targets in central Iran. We have very little insight into what's happening on the ground in Iran. We have no clear picture of how much damage has been inflicted, how many casualties have been inflicted at this point. Strikes have been reported near the president's residence. Extensive damage has been reported at the compound of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We should say that Khamenei has not been seen publicly for weeks. His current whereabouts are unknown. Iran's foreign minister told NBC News earlier today that Khamenei is alive, quote, as far as I know. We can also tell you that Iran's state news agency says one strike on a girl's school in the country's south has killed at least 57 people. U.S. Central Command says it is aware of those reports and is looking into them, adding, quote, the protection of civilians is of utmost importance and we will continue to take all precautions available to minimize the risk of unintended harm. Iran has responded to these attacks with a barrage of missiles that it has fired at Israel and at U.S. allies in the region. Iran claims to have fired a number of missiles at U.S. allies who have hit several U.S. military bases in the region. There are reports of Iranian strikes or of interceptions of Iranian missiles and drones in multiple places, in Dubai, in Kuwait, in Qatar, in the United Arab Emirates, in Bahrain, in Jordan. UAE's government says at least one person was killed there by falling debris from an Iranian ballistic missile attack. The Fairmont Palm Hotel in Dubai caught on fire after being hit by a projectile of some sort. Local authorities say the fire is under control. Bahrain's Interior Ministry says several residential buildings in its capital were targeted and that firefighting and rescue operations were underway. Meanwhile, Israel says it has intercepted multiple waves of missiles and drones from Iran after it claims to have struck 500 targets inside Iran today. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to deliver a statement in Israel any moment. Iran says it has closed the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which fully one-fifth of the world's oil is transported. The U.S. government's maritime agency has advised American commercial ships to stay away from the Persian Gulf region. Hundreds of flights have been canceled across the Middle East amid widespread airspace closures. The U.N. Security Council is convening an emergency meeting at 4 p.m. Eastern today. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has condemned the attack on Iran. A State Department official tells MSNOW that the U.S. government is not ready to take action against Iran. The U.S. State Department has set up a task force to assist American citizens in the region, though it's not clear what that consists of. Unlike the last time the Trump administration bombed Iran, this time around there was no order to evacuate non-essential personnel or families from embassies and bases in the region. This is obviously a fast-moving, fast-changing situation. We'll keep you updated as we know more. But joining us now live from Jerusalem is Adam Parsons. He's Middle East correspondent for Sky News. Adam, I really appreciate you being with us. Thank you. Yeah, no problems at all. Evening from Jerusalem. A tense city. As I speak to you now, I can hear the sound of fighter jets going ahead, probably heading in that direction, which is towards Tehran. We've today, tonight, seen Israel launching the biggest aerial assault, around 200 jets that it has ever launched. So this has been a day that has, as you've been outlining there, escalated very, very quickly. Adam, what can you tell us about the scale of these strikes? We obviously have very limited visibility on the ground in Iran in terms of the impact of these strikes. But from what you are understanding of the Israeli government's action, the Israeli military's actions, and what you can compare about what the U.S. has done now, say, compared to what happened back in the summer, how could you characterize for us the scale of this attack? I think when you certainly, when you look at the images that have come out of Iran, there are widespread attacks. And this is not just on Tehran. It's on sites across Iran, going all the way down to the south. So this is a heavy attack. It has involved a really significant military might. Of course, the American buildup here has been enormous, the biggest for decades. But I think also, underlying this is some of the rhetoric. When you look at the words of President Trump a little earlier, it is absolutely clear, what he wants is regime change in Iran. Israel clearly wants regime change, even though the Israelis are talking about three things. They're talking about nuclear, talking about ballistic missiles. And they're also talking about ending Iranian support for proxies, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and, of course, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. But those are three things we've heard a lot before. Now, I think what we have is an American president saying to the Iranian people, this is the chance for regime change and saying this is a once in a generation opportunity. And what that means is that for the Iranian regime, they will see this, as a truly existential threat, as a fight for their survival. Now, what we do know is that Iran has said for a while that if it is attacked, then it will respond in such a way to turn an attack on Iran into a regional conflict. And that is what they appear to be trying to do by attacking not just here in Israel, but also in countries throughout the region. So far, really, it is ones who are allies of the United States and attacking, for instance, space in Bahrain. But this is about Iran flexing its muscles. At the moment, I have to say, Israeli sources are saying they think that the Iranian response has actually been lesser than they anticipated. But they also expect it to be stepped up. And some of the rhetoric coming through on Iranian telegram channels echoes that. So, I think there is a feeling that this is the start. We're nowhere near the middle of this. This is the way it has kicked off. This has been large-scale. But we are simply seeing the first act of what is going to be a long drama. Adam Parsons, Sky News Middle East correspondent, joining us from Jerusalem late, where it is late there tonight. Adam, I really appreciate you being here with us. Please stay safe. Thank you. Joining us next is going to be Ben Rhodes, who is deputy national security advisor under President Obama. We've got a lot to get to this hour. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is from Senator Tim Kaine, who is a senior Democrat who is on the Armed Services Committee. Senator Kaine writing today, quote, Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East? Is he too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check until he ripped it up during his first term? Senator Kaine saying today that these strikes, on Iran, are, quote, a colossal mistake and, quote, a dangerous, unnecessary and idiotic action. An idiotic action, Senator Tim Kaine calls it. Here's Congressman Jim Himes, who's a member of the Gang of Eight, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. He says, quote, Everything I have heard from the administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame. It does not appear that Donald Trump has learned the lessons of history. Joining us now is former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. Ben, thank you very much for being with us today for this fast-developing story. I really appreciate you making time. Yeah, good to see you, Rachel. Let me just ask your reaction in general. For me, I would put to you specifically the point that the president is explicitly saying this is a regime change war. This is intended to change out the government of Iran. And I think that's a very good point. I think that's a very good point. I think the nation of Iran, what's your reaction to what he's done and why he's saying he's doing it? Well, you're exactly right, Rachel. I mean, you and I have been talking about Iran for over 15 years, I think. And this was always a scenario that people were concerned about in terms of where conflict between the United States and Iran could go. This is not a limited strike on nuclear targets. This is not intended to kind of coerce the Iranian government into some negotiation. Trump made a very good point about the fact that the United States is not a nuclear target. Trump made a very good point about the fact that the United States is not a nuclear but it's totally unnecessary. The Iranian regime posed no greater threat to the United States yesterday than it did two years ago or four years ago or five years ago. If anything, it posed less of a threat and was involved in negotiations on the issue that the United States has always seen as the most important security interest that we have, which is the nuclear program. And absent from that bizarre statement last night in which he kind of casually referenced the potential deaths of U.S. service members was any notion of what comes after the regime change. You know, he made a call for the Iranian people to rise up. And then what? Because we've seen that even if you decapitate the regime, even if you remove the regime, that often in the case of Iraq, in the case of Libya, in the case of Afghanistan, leads to civil war. They can drag on and have all manner of unintended consequences, human and geopolitical, and with the cost being borne by the American taxpayer. So we are in a deeply, deeply uncertain point here right now, and we don't need to be here. In terms of what might happen next, and if we take the Trump administration, I can't believe I'm saying this, if we take them at their word that they are trying for regime change, I mean, if they were trying to make possible, make plausible some sort of populist uprising of the Iranian people to take over their government, to throw out the regime, to confront and defeat the domestic security services, and to displace the Ayatollah and his regime, and to install something totally new, presumably there would have been things that the U.S. and its allies could have done to try to build up the capability of that kind of a domestic populist force. Is there any sign that we've done anything like that to actually support the Iranian people toward the type of regime change they seem to be fantasizing about? I really can't see it, Rachel, because, look, this isn't like in Venezuela where you took out the leader and essentially left the regime in place, and Delcy Rodriguez, the vice president, becomes president. They are targeting not just the supreme leader. They seem to be targeting all manner of regime targets. So it's not even decapitation. They seem to be trying to kind of destroy some of the key edifice of the regime itself. And that leads a vacuum in place in Iran. Now, inside of Iran, the people that are most heavily armed and therefore prepared to seize some vacuum, are the more hardline revolutionary guard corps. If you look at the only potential play that has been made about some future government, it was outside of the country with some of the engagement with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former Shah of Iran, who has some support outside the country. But if you talk to analysts inside of Iran, the idea that you're just going to reimport the son of the Shah into a country of 93 million people with a deeply ideological and entrenched regime, that's not going to happen. It's going to happen. It's going to regime, heavily armed factions, and have some transition to democracy. By the way, with probably no foreign forces on the ground, it doesn't seem like Trump has a lot of appetite for that. I just don't see the plausible scenario where this leads. I mean, I could see a situation where Iran is fighting back, their leaders getting taken out. There's some kind of capitulation. But even in that scenario, you still have the elements of a broken regime and power vacuums in Iran and the potential for violence and civil conflict. There are separatist regions in Iran with ethnic minorities. The country itself could fracture. If you talk to people in the region, one of the things that you hear in terms of concerns is what we're seeing, is that Iran will create chaos in the region and its responses as they've done. But you also hear a concern about a potential fracturing of Iran that leads to significant refugee flows into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, up into Europe. So there are lots of things that could go wrong here. And it's not clear what the best case scenario is that they're even pointing towards. All right. And when people talk about this blossoming into some sort of region-wide conflict, it's not necessarily that it is a region-wide war. It may be region-wide instability and chaos. And that's part of the reason why. Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor. Ben, I know we're going to be calling on you over the course of the day and into tonight for further advice and analysis on this. It's really helpful to have you here. Thank you. Thanks, Rachel. All right. When we come back, we're going to be talking with the Iran Project Director for the International Crisis Group, who's a real expert in Iranian-American relations. That particular question that Ben Rhodes was just zooming in on there, which was, even in the case of a successful regime-toppling effort, what would happen next? What in particular happens to the largest, best-organized and best-capitalized armed group in the country, which, of course, is the Revolutionary Guard Corps? That's really key in terms of what happens here. What happens next and what might happen very soon. That's all ahead. Stay with us. This is the Fairmont Palm Hotel in downtown Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. This is it on fire after that very fancy hotel appears to have been hit by either a drone or by debris from an interception of a drone or missile today. That's just one of several of the things that we're going to be talking about. One of several strikes or interceptions across the whole region as Iran has started retaliating against what it sees as U.S. targets or Israeli targets or U.S. or Israeli allies in the region. Joining us now is Ali Vaez. He's the Iran Project Director and Senior Advisor to the President at the International Crisis Group. Mr. Vaez, thank you very much for being with us. I appreciate your time. It's great to see you, Rachel. We've been trying as best we can to keep track of not just the damage inside Iran as U.S. and Israeli strikes there continue, but also the way that Iran has tried to retaliate across the region. What should we understand about Iran's military capability to inflict damage in other countries? Look, for sure, Iran is significantly weaker than the United States and Israel in terms of conventional military capabilities. It can only engage in an asymmetric kind of warfare. It can spread the pain. It can try to affect the global energy prices by closing the Strait of Hormuz, by putting pressure on energy exports out of the region. It can spread the pain by targeting the Gulf countries as it has already done in the hope that they would then in turn put pressure on President Trump to back off and basically signal that if they don't have security, nobody else in the region has security. And they can target Israel and U.S. bases in the region as they have already done. But all of this, one has to remember, a huge part of Iranian strategy is not to win necessarily, Rachel, it is to survive. And so for them, this is a game of endurance. In terms of the survival of what we, I think, sort of blithely call the regime here, we've all seen those dramatic images of the compound of Iran's supreme leader, which is apparently, you know, the regime of the United States. And so I think it's a game of endurance. Targeted and hit badly in the initial strikes of this attack. The survival of the regime, the survival of the supreme leader himself, the survival of the rest of the government, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. What should we understand in terms of what regime, what toppling the Iranian regime, if that's the aim here, might look like and who would be most likely to carry on there in terms of continuity of government and continuity of control? Several points. One is that this is a deeply entrenched regime, just like in the case of Venezuela. And there, the Trump administration decided to decapitate the regime, but work with the rest of the structure. This is also a very deeply benched regime. In the 12-day war last year, Israel managed to eliminate a few dozen senior Iranian commanders in the opening hours of that conflict. And yet most of those leaders, they're not going to be able to do that. And so, you know, most of those commanders were quickly replaced and Iran managed to get back on its feet and start punching back. In order to get the kind of regime change that President Trump wants, so that the Iranian people can come to the streets and finish the job from below, you would have to completely dismantle the repressive capacities of this regime. And there we're talking about 200,000 strong revolutionary guards, which has a million strong militia, in addition to hundreds of thousands of security forces and police. And remember, Rachel, that the regime committed a bloody massacre last month against Iranian protesters, not like in the case of Syria, using fighter jets and tanks and battle bombs and chemical weapons, but with small arms. So to destroy all of that force and the limited capacities that they have to contain and repress a population that is unarmed, unorganized, and unprotected, that is not going to be able to unorganized and fragmented, requires weeks and weeks, if not months, of military engagement, which would have an enormous civilian cost for Iran and disastrous regional implications. Inviting the Iranian people to rise up and do it now without having done anything to suppress what you described as that repressive capacity against its own people is just a harrowing prospect. Thank you for helping us understand. Ali Vaez, Iran Project Director and Senior Advisor to the President at the International Crisis Group, thank you. All right, Congressman Jason Crowe is going to join us next. Stay with us. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the brand new U.S. war in Iran. Congressman Jason Crow said today in response to this new these new actions by the president that President Trump has, quote, learned nothing from decades of endless war. Congressman Crow says, quote, I went to war three times for this country. Quote, working class folks will pay the price of his military adventurism. Americans are sick of it. And I'm sick of it. Joining us now is Colorado Congressman Jason Crow. He is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He serves on the House Armed Services Committee. Congressman, thank you for your time. Thanks, Rachel. Let me ask you to just expand on that statement. How did you learn about this and what what's your take on what the president is trying to achieve with this war? Yeah, well, here we go again. Yeah. As you just pointed out. Yeah. I learned about this when I woke up and opened up my phone and looked at Twitter, right, which has its own set of problems. The fact that Congress wasn't engaged and involved. But listen, my statement, I think, captures the sentiment of tens of millions of working class Americans who have seen 20 years of endless conflict, trillions of dollars spent, thousands of American lives. And you know who wins? The defense companies win. The oil companies win. The elites and the billionaires win. And the working class folks that I grew up with, that I went to war with, were left holding the bag. And this is the same thing, right, over and over again. And how magnanimous of Donald Trump to get up there last night and say, you know, tough stuff happens in war and maybe there are going to be some Americans that will die. But that's a cost I'm willing to take. Really? That's a cost he's willing to take? Because last time I checked, it wasn't him or his kids or his. Donors, kids or the other elites in the White House that are having to jump into planes or pick up rifles or are sitting here in military bases around the Middle East being bombed right now, they shift that burden onto the rest of us. Strategically, the question that emerged from the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan war, the most potent questions that were never able to be answered by any U.S. government, by any U.S. president. It was, how does this end? Strategically, do you understand how this ends, what the United States is both trying to do and whether what they're doing gets us anywhere closer to those aims? Of course I don't, right? I mean, the rationale for this changes by the hour, right? And sometimes in the same speech, they give different rationale. It's going to prevent them from having a nuclear weapon. It's regime change. It's to protect Americans against some unnamed, undefined imminence. And threat that, you know, by the way, as a member of the Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, I'm not aware of and they haven't briefed us on. So will the real rationale for this please stand up? But we can talk all we want about notification and debating and war powers and resolutions. And I think a lot of Americans just kind of get, you know, glazed eyes when they talk about the procedure. Here's why the procedure and that stuff is important to me as somebody who went and had to fight these wars in the past. It's about accountability. There has to be an accountability loop here. And the reason why we went to war, I think, for 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan is because we stopped taking votes on it. We stopped debating it. The trillions of dollars that we spent was largely debt financing. Nobody was held accountable. And less than 2% of Americans had to actually go off and fight the war. So for me, it's important that we actually have these debates and Congress step up so that I have to go to a high school gymnasium. I got to go to a rotary club. I got to stand in front of my. Distituents in a war in Colorado and around this state. And I had to explain specifically why working class folks should send their sons and daughters and their money to fight this war and the other war for that matter. It's exactly what you're describing is exactly the reason the founders structured the division of labor in our government so that it was Congress that had to declare wars, thus forcing the decision to be a difficult one. And one that had to be. Had to have multiple levels of accountability for everybody taking part in it. Colorado Congressman Jason Crow, combat veteran. Sir, thank you for your time. I really appreciate you being here tonight and for your insight. Our coverage of the U.S. attacks on Iran continues live right after this. Do stay with us here on MSNOW.