US and Israel Attack Iran

This is Russell Moore inviting you to join me on the Russell Moore Show, where we look for signposts in a strange land standing fast to what really matters. Every week I talk with thinkers, artists and leaders about faith, culture, and living a life of integrity, kingdom over culture wars, truth over tribalism, pilgrimage over partisanship, witness over winning, and Christ over everything. Join us on Apple Podcasts Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. From Christianity to Day, you're listening to The Bulletin, a podcast about the people, events, and issues that are shaping our world. I'm Clarissa Mall. Over the weekend, US and Israeli forces attacked Iran, killing supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Kamani and other top Iranian officials. Mike Cosburn, I joined today with Yosey Klein-Halevi to break down the global and domestic implications. Welcome to the show. Early Saturday morning, the United States and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran at the direction of President Donald Trump. In the last three days of Operation Epic Fury, attacks on Iran have expanded to conflict across the larger region. A year-long stalemate between Israel and Hezbollah has erupted again into fighting and Iranian missiles striking US military bases within other Gulf states, have resulted in the bombings of a hotel, a handful of deaths, and the damage to a major Dubai airport. Soon after the attack began, Mike Cosburn sat down with Yosey Klein-Halevi, a journalist senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and host of the Four Heavens' Sake podcast. To understand what this military action means, not only for the US, Israel, and Iran, but for peace in the broader Middle East. We begin our coverage here with their conversation. Yosey Klein-Halevi, welcome back once again. Great to be back with you, Mike. Thank you. It's been an eventful weekend. How is the mood in Israel? How are people feeling, even if they're running to bomb shelters and getting alerts from time to time as well? The mood here, first of all, is extreme disorientation. We're just emerging from two and a half years after October 7. On the one hand, there's no question people are ready to make lots of sacrifices to bring this region down. On the other hand, there's fatigue. This is still a society that's quietly grieving. And now we're back in the trauma. And there's virtual unanimity among Israeli, certainly in the political system. There's no opposition at this moment. Everyone understands this is an existential need for Israel and for the future of the Middle East. It doesn't make it easier on the home front. Last night, we had our first ever missile falling in Jerusalem. The conventional wisdom during all of Israel's wars, whether against hisbalar Hamas or Iran, was that no one will dare fire missiles into Jerusalem because they wouldn't want to risk destroying Al-Aqsa or the tomb of the rock, the two main Muslims, holy sites in Jerusalem. And last night, Iran changed the ground rules and fired a missile into East Jerusalem. All bets are off right now. You know, we've been through this since Saddam Hussein and the first goal for 1991. We've been in and out of shelters for 35 years. I raised my kids going in and out of shelters. There were certain ground rules. Even to the non-conventional war. And there aren't anymore. And it's clear that the regime is fighting for its life. It's desperate. You've sought pretty energetically a number of your works to understand your neighbors, your Christian neighbors, your Muslim neighbors. At the same time, you were one of the first people to talk about 20 years ago. We can't let this regime just sit there and build nuclear weapons. What is your trajectory on this conversation, Ben-like, over the decades? Being an advocate for reconciliation between Israeli-sid Palestinians, between Muslims and Jews, looks and works differently in the Middle East than it does say at Columbia University. When you're sitting here in ground zero of radical Islamism, you very quickly understand there can be no peace without confronting the enemies of peace. Now, I'm also a fierce opponent of my own government. But this is a democratically elected government that I have the option to do everything I can to bring this terrible government down. But when I call this a terrible government, I'm still going to draw a very firm red line between us and even this government. There are elements in this government that are uncomfortably Jewish echoes of radical Islamism. But that's not true for most of this government. And again, I'd love this government. I have spent much of my last three years actively opposing this government. But when you're facing radical Islamism, there's no recourse but to go to war. And that's something a lot of people in the West forgot. The cumulative impact of the forever wars have undermined the resolve of Americans. But not to stand up to the Iranian regime when it's at its weakest point would be to compound the mistake of going to war when you shouldn't have. In Israel, we argue about everything. But we're not arguing about this. This is virtually wall to wall unanimity. And it's an extraordinary thing to see in Israel because we never see this. And especially for something that's so controversial around the world, there is virtually no echo of that disagreement within Israeli politics. So what do you expect comes next for Iran, especially as the bombs keep dropping as the IRGC is continually defanged? I don't think this is going to be easy or straightforward. You have probably 15, 20% of the public that supports the regime. Now that's a recipe for regime collapse. And I believe the regime will collapse. But it still has enough of its hard core support to put up a very credible fight. This is a regime that's had half a century to entrench itself in all parts of the Iranian infrastructure, a regime that has of course suppressed opposition from the very beginning. And it's also, and this is even more importantly, a regime or at least elements within the regime that are imbued with an apocalyptic fervor. And that really believe that this is the last battle before the return of the Mahdi, the Shiite Messiah. And the secular West tends to downplay the significance of the theological strain in the regime calculations. Because the secular West doesn't understand religion, you can't really have the kind of militant secularism that you have in other parts of the West because the lines between religion, and the national experience are never clear-cut. So for example, it's Purim tonight. The holiday of Purim is about the victory of the ancient Jews of Persia over Hamin who wanted to destroy them. Now every Israeli understands the residents of a war against modern Persia led by a modern Hamin. That's the given language of discourse here. The politicians speak about it. The army, the chief of staff speaks about it. When he addressed the nation yesterday, the commander of the IDF, Al-Zamiar, spoke about the story of Purim. Ancient Persia is modern Iran. It's certainly this. So here we are, 25 hundred years after the Purim story. It's like Groundhog Day except with much more lethal consequences. But there's also something very powerful. And for me, as a religious Jew, these recurring themes in Jewish history, and sometimes not just themes, but literal reenactments, gives me pause. And I don't presume to know God's will, and I'm not sitting looking at the newspaper as if it's the word of God. And I can interpret what's happening. I think that there's a real problem when religious people do that. But at the same time, I think that as a religious person, I notice certain patterns that happen in the Islamic world. Israeli story, even if I don't know exactly what it means. But that also gives Israelis generally a sense of purpose. And more than that, a framework of meaning to this story, it's not just about survival. There seems to be something else at work here in this very strange Jewish story. This is a story that belongs to us and we're playing it out. And so, there's a sense in Israel today as we're entering pouring of a sense of somewhere between irony and wonder. You know, like I'm about here we are back with the Persians again, and at the other hand, wow, here we are, wow, you know, frequent Persians. That's the book of Esther itself. I think it never mentions the name of God once in the entire book. And it's all about the hiddenness of God in Providence. There's a word play, a rabbinic word play of the name Astar, which also means in Hebrew. Hiddenness, Astar, the Hebrew phrase for God's hiddenness is Astar Panim. God's face is hidden. And the divine is literally hidden in the book of Astar, because as you say, God's name is never mentioned. And yet, what one can discern in the book of Esther is this uncanny series of coincidences that lead to a reductive trajectory. It is this myth story of a princess. And there's another thing that I'd wanted to say about the interaction between Mordechaya and Esther. Yes, on the one hand, Mordechaya warns her that God is going to do this, whether you're part of it or not. And yes, who knows what your fate will be if you opt out. So in that sense, he's not giving her a choice. But he also says something very touching to her. He says a phrase which has become one of the best known aphorisms in Jewish discourse. And it's been absorbed into modern Israeli discourse, which is who knows if you didn't rise to your status for a time like this, for such a time as this, that sense of destiny in a way you can sum up Jewish history with everything that Mordechaya has told Esther. On the one hand, it's going to be really bad for you. On the other hand, what a wonderful opportunity Mordechaya is hitting Esther with a combination of fate and destiny. Fate is what's imposed on you and destinies what you choose for yourself. And those are really recurring themes, both in the story of Porum and in Jewish history. And what we're experiencing now is this convergence of these themes at this moment. If it had been up to the Israeli public to decide, do we go to war or not? The decision to go to war would have won by a landslide. Even though we along with the Iranian people are the ones who are the most endangered by that decision. And yet we just take it for granted that we need to do this for survival and that's fate. But we also need it to do this for the purpose of the Jewish people, which is to stand against evil. And that's destiny. And so there is this convergence of fate and destiny at this moment in Israel's history. I'm curious what that might mean for religious minorities across the Middle East. What will it mean to have not just a radical Islamist regime fall, but the heart in the sense of radical Islamism? This has been a very bad period, especially the last decades. I've been a disastrous period for religious minorities around the Middle East. And it's hard to say whether this is really going to turn things around in other countries. But think of the countries where the Iranian regime has had such a strong hold in Iraq, in Yemen, in Lebanon. Now in Yemen, for example, it's too late to have any revival of the Jewish community there. You know, you're out of 2500 year Jewish community, which was destroyed. No one is left. The Iraqi Jewry goes back to Babylon. It was literally 25, 100 years old. And that community has been completely erased. Back then, in the 1930s, was one third Jewish. It was the New York of the Arab world. It was the trauma of mass uprooting of the longest lasting Jewish communities in the world, which were in the Middle East. And those were destroyed in a single generation, sometimes within a year. Look, there is such rage against shinsum in Iran. During the popular uprising in January, there were something like 350 mosques that were burned by outraged mobs. And they see shinsum as the reason for their repression. So I think that religiously Iran is going to be going through major convulsions. My sense is, first of all, within Iran, whether they reading themselves literally or reinvent themselves culturally and religiously, I think that Persia is re-emerching. My sense is there's going to be a very strong resurgence of Zorasteranism, the Baha'i faith. These are two indigenous Persian faiths. And I think Christianity is going to have a tremendous flowering in Iran as well, to convert, to leave Islam and convert to another faith, carries with it a death sentence. And so you're really looking at a heroic nucleus of a Christian resurgence there. I think there's going to be a resurgence of the Jewish community. There's a large Persian community in Israel in the US. I suspect there'll be a reawakening and people will go back certainly on pilgrimages. So I think we're going to see a tremendous flowering of other religions. As hosts of the Bulletin, we are passionate about featuring voices you know and love as we share breaking news and discuss issues that are shaping our world. If you'd like to contribute to the production of the Bulletin, consider subscribing to Christianity today using our special link, orderct.com/thebulletin. Bulletin listeners like you get 25% off your subscription and unlimited access to the platform that elevates the stories and the ideas of the Kingdom of God. That's orderct.com forward slash the Bulletin. All one word. We look forward to having you join us. As President Trump seeks to reshape the political contours of the Middle East, those here at home have mixed feelings about his ambitions and tactics. Arroyders Ipsos Paul from Sunday reports that 56% of Americans, including one in four Republicans, believe the President is too willing to use military force. Mike and I now sit down to talk about the domestic dimensions of the conflict. Mike, as you reflect on your conversation this morning with Yosey Klein-Holevy, where do you see the disconnect for Americans between what Yosey has described as the need and purpose here and Americans understanding or desire to be engaged? The call to depose the IOTO overturn the regime. That's been going on for a very long time here in the States. The motivations for that are tied to sort of geopolitics. They're tied to economics. The fact that Iran can control the state of Hormuz, which is where a lot of oil trafficking takes place. And then in terms of what Iran has done, sponsoring terror that has killed the American troops, American citizens throughout the Middle East, what it means to Israelis is existential. What Iran has promised to do is to build a military and a ballistic missile capacity and a nuclear program that could wipe Israel itself off the map. When people chant from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. For Iran, that means we want to kill every Jew in Israel and take it back. They see Israel itself as a stain on the Holy Land and a stain on the legacy of Islam, which had once conquered this entire region. So one of the things Yosi said in the conversation that I think is important for us to really grasp is that the people of Israel are not divided about whether or not this has been a good thing for their military to be a part of. This is something they've wanted to do for a long time. The reason they haven't done it is not because of a lack of will from Israeli prime ministers. It's been from a lack of a permission structure from the Americans because to pull it off, they need American logistical support. They need our tankers in the air refueling their planes, they need munitions, they need our intelligence support. So I think it's important that we do some differentiation between how did Israel enter this process versus how did the Americans enter this process. In President Trump's speech on Truth Social announcing the war, he said this. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime. Is this really the crux of it for Americans that they need to be convinced of imminent threats? Are threats really imminent for Americans? This is one of the things that I think gets confused in the media a little bit. As you know, Clarissa, I have no problem criticizing President Donald Trump. I think he's exercised a lack of judgment in many places. However, when we talk about imminent threats from Iran, remember, there are multiple Middle East countries where we have air bases, where we have troops. Iran is the world's foremost sponsor of terror. There are terror cells that our government probably knows about, and we don't, there are imminent threats to Americans, who end their parliamentary meetings with chance of death to the great Satan and death to the little Satan. The little Satan's Israel, the great Satan's us. So while they don't necessarily have a nuclear capacity or a rocket capacity to hit the domestic United States, I think that there is a reasonable case to be made that Americans have been under imminent threat from this regime. The issue with the way this has gone about is that there seems to be no indication that Trump has an interest in coming to Congress to make the case for why this is necessary now. And there seems to be no indication that Trump has a willingness to go to Congress, according to the Constitution, which is something he should do, and get it authorized, and then to move forward in a way where it says the country is behind us. Instead, it seems to be kind of similar to the Venezuela actions, not just the Maduro thing, but even just the blowing of the boats. It's this use of lethal military force, unilaterally from the executive. I want to say like it's tricky, because you need that element of surprise if the Israelis call and they say, listen, the Supreme Leader and all of his lieutenants are going to be under one roof. This is our moment. You don't do a giant congressional gathering and broadcast that. Hey, we know this. We're going to go in. So to some extent, I have some sympathy for the President and the administration for saying now's the moment. Let's act, particularly because there's been a buildup around this. But the same time one could also say, he could have gotten this authorization last summer. He could have done four now and then gone to Congress and said, I don't know what's going to happen here. We're going to try and negotiate our way out of this. But I need authorization that if they don't comply, we're ready to go. He could have done this anytime in the last six months and it hasn't taken place. And I think in particular, since the war is very obviously happening now, and we're destroying so much infrastructure of theirs, he should go to Congress and get the next phase of whatever comes authorized by them. So is the issue now that we are not just running into complexities with domestic law, but now with international law as well? So international law is only as good as the willingness of a sovereign nation to submit to it. And one of the things that we have seen time and time again, both in the US and in other nations around the globe, is that international law is kind of a paper tiger. It's rare that it can be invoked in a way that compels any pressure on a sovereign state. It's certainly not going to compel any pressure on this administration. What have you heard from Republicans and Democrats since the attacks began? We have the midterms coming soon. A lot of folks seem to be concerned about major moves from the Trump administration and the possibility of those things having a threat to their success at the polls in November. What we've seen so far is just tribalism all the way down. Both of the Republicans, you know, with a handful of exceptions, people like Thomas Massey, Rand Paul, these more libertarian isolationist-minded folks have voiced objections and said, you know, come get congressional authorization. I mean, Lindsey Graham was on, we had to press over the weekend and couldn't have been happier about what was happening here, because frankly, he joined the call of people like the Ostechland-Olevi and Michael Orrin, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, John McCain, Joseph Lieberman, going back 20-something years, these guys have been saying we need to do something to topple the Iranian regime, because it's the key destabilizing force in the Middle East. So there's a lot of excitement from that sort of hawkish corner of the Republicans. There's some excitement from a handful of Democrats who share that hawkish perspective and that pro-Israel perspective. But the reason I say it's tribalism all the way down is that the vast majority of Republicans are either quiet about it or supportive of it, because you stick with your team, and the vast majority of Democrats are saying, you know, this is an illegal action, you should have gotten congressional approval to declare a state of war. And frankly, that was a mistake of Trump's. Trump didn't need to say that we were at war. If he had said this is a limited military action to accomplish these handful of goals, and it's going to be done within the period of 60 days, it's arguable, but he has a certain sense of freedom as a commander in chief that he could have done that. He called it war, which provoked a lot of the comments that we've heard since then. In a press conference on Monday morning, General Dan Kane, who is the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said that we will be sending more troops to the Middle East for the war effort. And as of this recording, four American troops have already been killed, three fighter jets accidentally shot down by Kuwait in friendly fire, leaving American troops injured, but alive. A Sunday morning, Reuters' Ipsos poll says 43% of Americans don't approve of what they're seeing playing out in the headlines right now. Is there a tipping point where American casualties are going to press in on the president's desire to see this wrapped up quickly? Certainly. I mean, look, this president commands the bully pulpit with his base in a way that is unlike anything we've seen in my lifetime. And so I think he'll be able to keep his base with him longer than the average president who's been in that place. At the same time, he campaigned on the idea of no more forever wars. I don't think there's any intention of us actually putting boots on the ground here. I think the reason that you're sending troops to the Middle East is Iran has a very big army and the idea that they might start trying to provoke action by rolling into other places is significant. The more presence we have in the region, the more deterrence, I think there is. And I really think that's the reason that the troops are coming in. I also think one of the things that we have seen in the war against Iran, it's different than the fighting that we did against ISIS in Iraq or Akheda in Iraq or what we saw in Syria or what we've seen with the fighting in Gaza against Hamas. This is not a terrorist insurgency. This is a country of something like 90 million people and a very complex military infrastructure that we're trying to dismantle. And the goal is that by dismantling the military infrastructure, by undermining the leadership of the IRGC, it will create the opportunity for Iranians themselves to reclaim their country. One of the things that's less discussed in all of this and listen, I don't have any sourcing on this beyond the general discussion that has happened around this in reform policy, think tanks and various things. I'm sure that behind the scenes, one of the things that's happening is the Americans, the Israelis, the Saudis who very much want to see this regime collapse. They're working behind the scenes with resistance groups to see this thing get toppled. Will it require American troops? I don't think it's going to be necessary. It's only about 15% of the Iranian population that actually supports the regime. Well, when Americans see a military action like this, they're worried about their people and they're worried about their pocketbooks. The Dow Jones futures dropped 500 points just after the market opened on Monday and oil and European natural gas prices have jumped the Wall Street Journal reports. So we're seeing a lot of movement in the markets. What are the concerns for Americans right now when it comes to the economics of this? I keep hearing people say, "Hey, I thought Trump was supposed to be America first." I too am curious what the markets are going to look like. I mean, the flip side of this conversation is to say, "If the regime topples over the next few weeks and we have a more friendly to the West regime in Iran that we can actually trade with, that could actually be very good for the markets, both for our goods flooding in their direction and their oil flooding in ours." We're able to make negotiations in which they are no longer primarily focused on trade with Russia, particularly when it comes to things like munitions and drones that have fueled Russia's fight against the Ukraine. So there's opportunity as well. We don't know what comes next. We don't know how rash the remnants of the regime are going to be. We don't know how aggressive the Americans are going to be. These railways are being far more aggressive than us. Our military action has been focused on infrastructure, munitions, supplies, IRGC infrastructure in particular, the sort of radical military core of the Iranian military. The Israelis have the intelligence to know where the Iranian military leaders are and they're literally sending planes in to take them out one by one. Elliott Cohen, who has joined us on the bulletin before, wrote in the Atlantic this week that the US Israel cooperation is really a testimony to the power of allies. Help me understand Elliott Cohen's comment within the context of President Trump's dismantling of other European friendships. It's difficult to answer that question because President Trump doesn't necessarily have a clear political ideology. What motivates him is often more about image, loyalty. I do think that Donald Trump has a certain weird sense of moral imperative when it comes to this conflict. I actually think he looks at this as a conflict between good and evil. And that's odd for Trump. The way he reacts to Kim Jong-un, the way he reacts to Xi Jinping in China, the way he reacts to Putin. He hasn't necessarily been able to recognize the radical evils that those guys represent and they've inflicted on their people and their neighbors. Somehow or other, I think it's true that here in the Middle East, he's gotten a sense of it much more quickly. I'm not going to speculate now as to why this one stands out as different. He's had advisors in the past like John Bolton, advisors in the present like Marco Rubio, who definitely had a very clear sense about good and evil in all of this. If this regime topples and if the 85% of Iranians who are much more friendly to the West, get their country back. You know what I think about more than anything else? I think about a 15-year-old girl who is going to be able to walk out her front door and not have to cover her hair and not be afraid that morality police are going to come and literally beat her to death. Look, I'm going to evangelical, I believe in traditional marriage and all the rest. Do I think that homosexuals should be hung up by their necks, by cranes, in front of a town? No, I don't. And you can go on and on and on. This regime, the cruelty to its own people, is so profoundly evil. I would just say to Christians who are uncomfortable with this war, yes, I agree with you. There are constitutional issues here. I wish it was done differently. But at the same time, there's that old Puritan line that sometimes God draws straight lines with crooked sticks. And if the result of this is liberation for the Iranian people from one of the most murderous and repressive regimes in our lifetime, then praise the Lord. Listeners, as you're trying to figure out how to pray for this situation, I want to direct you to a piece that marked Tuley, the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, wrote for us here at CT this week on how to pray for Iran. We'll put a link to it in our show notes so that it can help guide your own personal prayer time. Thank you for joining us today and be sure to subscribe to our Wednesday news digest at the bulletin podcast.substac.com. To get your midweek update from us here at the show, this week we're featuring more important news from Iran to help you discern the headlines and understand where God is calling you to be present. We'll see you next time. The bulletin is a production of Christianity today. It's produced by Clarissa Mall. The associate producer is Alexa Burke. This episode was mixed by Kevin Morris, theme music by Dan Phelps. Eric Petrick is the executive producer of the bulletin and Matt Stevens is our senior producer. 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