Pod Save the World - Israel Launches Massive Strike on Iran

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Tommy and Ben discuss Israel’s ongoing military assault on Iran–breaking down who and what got hit, why the timing was a surprise, and what the Trump administration knew ahead of time. They also talk about how the attacks could impact Iran’s nuclear program and current regime, what retaliation could look like, and how Democrats should respond. 

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We're going to cover what we know about this Israeli operation so far, the risks we foresee going forward, the background about how it all came together, and how effective this operation has been, or could be and how Democrats should respond. So we'll do as much as we can, given what we know. So just a quick overview, Ben, of what we know so far. The Guardian says that Israel has bombed about 100 targets in Iran, including about a dozen Iranian nuclear sites, including Natanz, which is Iran's primary nuclear site that is an estimated 14,000 centrifuges that they use to enrich uranium. Importantly, Israel has not yet targeted a site called Fordo. We'll get into why that matters later. But additionally, the Israelis assassinated the chief of staff of Iran's armed

forces, the deputy chief of the Iranian army, the head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, a number of Iranian scientists and military leaders who oversaw Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and even a politician who is overseeing the nuclear talks with the United States that have been ongoing. The Israelis are brief in the press that this operation could last up to 14 days, so this is far from over. In response so far, the Iranians have been pretty muted. I think they launched about a hundred drones at Israel. It seems like all of those were intercepted, but we should assume that's not the end of whatever Iran might do. The timing of this Israeli strike came as a surprise to a lot of people, myself included, because the United States and Iran have their

sixth round of nuclear talks scheduled for Sunday. Ben, I would just would like to point out that if Netanyahu did this to Obama or to Biden or to Bill Clinton or any Democrat, the entire press corps would be talking about it as a humiliation that shows weakness. But, you know, Trump's sycophants are trying to play it as some sort of masterful active deception. We'll get into that too. I personally find the suggestion that Iran wasn't on high alert given that the United States had like ordered back all of its personnel from Iraq and a bunch of bases in the region. Ridiculous. They weren't like saving power by flipping off the radars until Monday, but whatever. It's hard to figure out right now what role the U.S. played. Trump seems to be trying to have it both

ways. He wants distance from the strike and to posture himself as having been for diplomacy. see. But as like the day goes on, he seems to be doing all these interviews and trying to take more and more credit. So again, I guess time will tell. Trump is going to talk to Netanyahu sometime today. Now we get to watch what happens next. Yesterday, Axios reported that Trump's golf buddy turned top diplomat Steve Whitkoff told Republicans in the Senate that Iran could quote, unleash a mass casualty response if Israel bombs their nuclear facilities. So it seems like that warning was unheeded. Last evening, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu released about an eight-minute statement. It was in English, so this was designed for an American audience, not for the Israelis.

Here's a clip. This operation will continue for as many days as it takes. If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year. It could be within a few months, less than a year. 80 years ago, the Jewish people were the victims of a Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime. Today, the Jewish state refuses to be a victim of a nuclear holocaust perpetrated by the Iranian regime. Today, Israel is responding to those genocidal calls with action and with a call of our own.

Long live Israel and long live America. I want to thank President Trump for his leadership in confronting Iran's nuclear weapons program. As the Bible teaches us, when someone comes to kill you, rise and act first. I'm pretty sure the quote is rise and kill first because it became the title of a book about Israel's targeted assassination program. Ben, so I suspect over the next few days we're going to have a bunch of snap judgments about this is either a massive success or a massive failure. The reality is it probably won't be clear how effective the Israelis were or what the impact will be for a very long time. But let's just start with your general reaction to what you seem so far. Well, this has been a long time coming was my first reaction.

I mean, you know, this was a ever-present threat during the Obama administration. So, and ever since, I guess a few different things. First, this is a pretty large-scale action. I mean, the Israelis have clearly, you know, taken the mentality that if you're going to do something, go as big as possible. And so they're not only hitting nuclear facilities, they're taking advantage of the fact that they'd already bombed Iran's air defenses. to, I think, kind of have free reign to go after their target list. That includes not just people associated with the nuclear program, like scientists, but leadership of the Revolutionary Guard, as you said,

leadership of the military. They're essentially trying to decapitate Iran's military or scientific capacity to respond. We can come back to whether that can be effective. The Trump people can't get their story straight on this thing. I refuse to believe, and we can get into this, that they were somehow jiu-jitsuing us for the last, you know, year in which, you know, Trump said he was going to put an end to these kinds of wars, in which Trump said he wanted an Iran deal, in which Trump, like, consulted about in Iran deal with several countries in that

region, had Steve Wittkoff and talks. The idea that that was all a disciplined feign by Trump, not a man exactly known for his discipline, seems kind of absurd to me. to me, the big questions are what comes next. Now, on the nuclear program itself, there was always the analysis that you could essentially set it back by about a year. You know, if you destroyed Natanz, destroyed all these centrifuges, tried to destroy as much of the facility in Gohm, that's Fordo as you could, you know, killed scientists. But at the end of the day, the Iranians have this knowledge in their country, right?

They have a scientific base that understands how to enrich uranium. they have the raw materials. And so the concern is, do they just drive that further and further underground and try to do what we've seen in North Korea or Pakistan, surprise everybody by developing a covert nuclear weapons capability? That's something that you're going to have to watch going forward. But, you know, and we're going to, I know, going to get into different pieces of this, Tommy. I think overall, the concern I have is this was clearly premature, even the Israelis themselves

described it as a preemptive strike. I don't buy the notion that Iran was like days away from a nuclear weapon. There's no evidence of that. They have no capability even to weaponize that. So it's a preemptive strike that is also decapitating the Iranian regime to some extent. We've just seen that that can lead to all kinds of places that you didn't plan for or predict at the outset. We don't know what the Iranian response is or when it might come. We don't know what it means to live in a world in which we're normalizing the decapitation of governments that people don't like. We don't know what is going to happen in the regional dynamic in countries like Iraq, where Iran has some significant amounts of influence. There's just a lot of questions here.

Our politics is going to respond to it as if this is all over today because Israel brought up a bunch of stuff. That is not how this region works. And so it's still early days of what is like a huge escalatory action by Israel. Yeah, so let's just talk about things we're kind of watching over the next coming days, weeks, really months. So there could be, as we saw during the Biden administration, ballistic missile strikes or drone strikes on Israeli cities. Iran or its proxy forces could attack U.S. installations, diplomatic facilities in places like Iraq, military facilities in Syria. We have a big base in Bahrain that could be at risk. You could see Iran going after ships in the Gulf. Now, I don't really know what capacity Hezbollah has at this point after, you know,

their conflict with Israel, but, you know, or if they'd be willing to fight, given how brutalized they got, but I think there's a risk of Hezbollah response. The Houthis in Yemen never stopped firing missiles at Israel, so we'll see what they do. But yeah, Ben, like, you're right. Like, the Israelis are talking about this as a preemptive strike. It does feel more like a regime change operation to me. I mean, they have not killed a bunch of political leaders yet. But you can't kill off like half the military leadership of a country and then kind of assume it will be the status quo. Like what if the IRGC stages a coup? What if there's, I think they're probably hoping for some sort of massive uprising that displaces the current leadership, but those could be replaced by new harder line leader.

So there's a tinderbox element to this that is obviously unknowable, but it should worry everyone. Yeah. I mean, in terms of the Iranian response, the things that you worry about, and I've been in, you know, simulations, thought about this for much longer than I would like. So it's not drone attacks launched at Israeli cities or even necessarily ballistic missile attacks, given that, you know, Israel has sophisticated air defense systems and presumably the United States will help defend Israel. You gave a good list, Tommy. I mean, the only things I'd add to that are, you know, attacks on oil fields in the Gulf. You know, if Iran feels existentially like the regime

is going down, it seems unlikely to me that that would be a quiet end to the regime. And so whether it's lashing out in the ways that you said at different parts of the region, lashing out at the kind of energy infrastructure in the region, launching terrorist attacks, doing it maybe this might not happen in a week. It might not happen in a month, right? This may take a while. You're worried about those kinds of responses and things that just kind of further inflame what is already a tinderbox, not just in that region, but globally. There's also to me the question, Tommy, of if the Iranian regime collapses, we've, you know, we Americans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, that doesn't necessarily mean it gets better. No. You know, and so you could have, like you said,

an IRGC, like a more extreme militant, militarized version of the current regime, you could see a failed state in a giant country with huge resources and lots of, you know, armed people in ways that have unpredictable effects in that region. I just don't see like the, the clear end to this that doesn't involve messiness. I guess what Israel is hoping for is just, they are so weakened and so chastened that they're like a dog that sticks its tail between its legs and just takes all these shots. That's not impossible, but we'll see. I just think history shows that, again, it might take time, but that's not likely to be the permanent new status quo. Yeah, the bottom line is like this is not over when all the Israeli planes land and stop taking off.

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So Ben, Barack Ravid at a reporter at Axios, has a long tick talk about this operation. It says that Israel has been planning this entire operation for about eight months, that they targeted 25 scientists, at least two are confirmed dead. Israel targeted Iran's top military leadership. And then in addition to the airstrikes, the Mossad had operatives on the ground, both in advance, pre-placing drones in certain places and also conducting sabotage operations against missile and air defenses, specifically, I think, hitting them with these kind of kamikaze drones. Axio says the motivation in Israel for doing it now was Iran's weakness, given its air defenses being blown up and its proxy forces like Hezbollah being weakened after the fighting.

They also said that Netanyahu was worried about Iran's growing missile capacity. there was some new intelligence about nuclear weaponization research and some Iranian plan to open a new underground enrichment facility. Not mentioned in the story has been a lot of BB Netanyahu's political weakness and challenges over the last few weeks. I think those are pretty relevant here too. But here's where the story gets weird, Ben. Two Israeli officials tell Axios that Trump and his team were, quote, only pretending to oppose an Israeli attack in public and didn't express opposition in private. Quote, we had a clear U.S. greenlight, one claimed. And so they're saying that the goal was to convince Iran that no attack was imminent and to keep Iranian officials from like going to ground or sleeping in new apartments or whatever.

Axios also reported that Netanyahu's aides lied when they said Trump tried to put the brakes on an Israeli attack. Basically that they were briefing reporters things. They knew not to be true. So Ben, I'm just like trying to like you, trying to figure out what to make of this exactly. Like I think Trump tends to say what he believes and he said for years that he didn't want to war with Iran. Now, the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in 2020 is certainly a data point in the other direction that he's willing to attack Iran. However, when the Iranians responded with that massive barrage of ballistic missiles after the Soleimani assassination, Trump chose to de-escalate things, not further escalate and go after Iran.

So, you know, there's also the fact that the administration has invested a ton of time and effort into these nuclear talks with Iran, which they didn't have to do. So I don't know. I read that. And it just, it seemed like bullshit to me. It seemed like trying to have it both ways. But what was your take? I think it's complete and utter bullshit, Tommy. I just don't buy this.

You're telling me that Donald Trump and all these other people around him have been running some like, you know, 3D chess sciop on us for like months. Give me a break. This guy would even have the discipline to do that if you wanted to do it. You know, they clearly wanted a nuclear deal. They've been engaged in talks to them in pursuit of the nuclear deal. They told the Arab states that they were doing that when they were doing that. they went to that region. Trump has said this publicly. He said it privately. So is Steve Wittkoff.

So of all these other people around him. They've been in fights, as we've covered on our podcast, with other elements of their coalition about their pursuit and preference for nuclear deal. So that's clearly not what they, the play they were running. I think Bibi decided he was going to do this anyway, in part, to scuttle the nuclear talks. I mean, extraordinary to bomb a country two days before, you know, there's supposed to be meeting an Obama with Steve Wutkoff and the Iranians. And the idea that this was somehow going to strengthen that capacity to get a deal, the Israelis that killed the people that are in charge of those negotiations.

It's so absurd. Trump coming out and saying, oh, now I really hope they get to a deal. Like, that is just so patently absurd. You can't repeatedly kill the people you're negotiating with and think you're going to get a deal. Yeah. So, I mean, I just think this is, I think what happened is BBs, you know, decided to go ahead and do this, scuttle the deal, take what he thought was an opportunity to take this shot. And Trump is like, I better get on board.

this train because I'm not going to be out of step with an Israeli military action against Iran. Oh, by the way, we woke up this morning. It looks like they're blowing some stuff up. And so I want to take credit for that because I want to look strong while I'm sitting on the dais in my military parade. Now, another thing about this, though, we've talked about trade on the show. We've talked about USAID on the show. This is yet another thing that is going to drive the rest of the world away from the United States because this is a deeply unpredictable world order in which, I mean, let's say that if this is their version, then what the United States and Israel are telling the world is, we will lie to your face while conducting diplomacy

by preparing to break every rule in the international rule book, I mean, around decapitation of foreign governments, whenever we so choose to do it. The Chinese don't do that. Like, the, so I think what you're going to see is that we are now kind of this gigantic rogue superpower actor if this is what we're embracing in terms of the basis for relations between states. And that's where people need to understand that the negative impacts of this are not just what might come in the region or what might come from the reigning response. It's what kind of world we are endorsing by saying that this is how you solve problems. And that's the part that I think is going to take a little longer to play out. But we're either going to be a world with total law

the jungle, which is a scary place to be, and we already are there, I guess, and or a world in which just people are just going to be building a world order in opposition to us, because this is scary shit. Yeah, I think you're right. It's a complicated kind of multi-layered conversation about efficacy. Like, I think the traditional estimates you hear about how long a military strike would set back a run to nuclear program are mostly about how long it would take to rebuild the infrastructure involved. But if we're probably going to have to revisit those timelines, if Israel kills like all of Iran's nuclear scientists and all these military leaders. So just scrambles things.

As of this recording, though, as we mentioned at the top, the Israelis have not yet targeted the Fordo facility, which is the facility that is like half a mile underground. It's heavily fortified. And the conventional wisdom has always been that the Israelis do not have the capacity to take out Fordow themselves because it would require these massive bunker buster bombs and only the United States has the kind of planes you need to actually fly and carry. and drop them. Now, like, so again, as I mentioned, like I was talking to an Israeli, or an Iran expert today, who was like, what would be the point of bombing just part of Iran's nuclear infrastructure,

but leaving Fordo untouched because that is the biggest risk. They've got like 3,000 or so centrifuges, including advanced ones. If you're worried about a breakout and enrichment to weapons grade uranium, Fordo is the place you do it. And this is happening, right, Ben, there's like 130 inspectors from the atomic energy agency, the IA, who are currently in Iran, who I assume are now going to get kicked out. So our like kind of eyes into what's happening there are about to be pretty limited, I would imagine. Now, maybe this is just, maybe we're just, it's a category error to talk about this is a one-time thing. And what Israel is envisioning here is just a constant bombing of whatever infrastructure they view as a risk. But to your sense, like, again, that gets me to a, to the non-nuclear risk, which is,

this new era of like militaristic impunity where countries like Israel are involved in these low-grade wars at all times and it just gets normalized. Yeah. And I mean, on Fordo specifically, you know, the other thing that Israel could do is a ground operation, right, is to try to bust in there, you know, with guys on the ground, which is obviously more risk for them and more risk of other types of escalation. Or they could just keep pounding away. And to your point, you know, just kind of keep coming back and bombing things that they don't like that they see, which is what they do in Lebanon, which is what they do in Syria.

I mean, Israel, you know, Gaza we've obviously talked about where they're just bombing everything, civilian mainly. But they're doing this now across the region. That is not normal, right? Yeah. It's not a normal way. Let's highlight that. And I should have said on Fordo, like, we don't know what we don't know.

Maybe the Israelis have some new weapon. Or cyber weapon. We don't know. Maybe they have a capacity. And you're right. A ground operation that happened. But, like, your point about the, the metastasizing nature of this Israeli militarism, like, yes, we've all talked about Gaza. We're talking about what's happening in Iran right now.

But there are these Israeli historians who are trying to find, like, ancient burial sites in both Lebanon and Syria to begin to create a pretext for taking more territory there. Like, there's some weird shit going on that goes beyond just Gaza. Yeah. Because there's a, you know, well, there's a lot of different things converging here. in terms of you're rationalizing the violence, you're perpetrating in place at Gaza, you're, rationalizing and justifying, basically bombing, you know, and going to war in all these countries at the same time. And to your point about the kind of repetition of this kind of militarized approach to security, it also bears saying, Tommy, that Trump said he was going to end these wars,

end the chaos in the world, said that he was going to end the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. We are five months into the Trump administration. The war in Gaza is much worse than it has ever been in terms of, you know, there's all the total cutoff of aid and starvation of the people of Gaza happened after Trump took office. The war in Ukraine escalated. Putin escalated that war in response to Trump's, quote-unquote, peace efforts. And now Israel has bombed Iran in response to Trump's nuclear diplomacy. So, like, how is Trump doing measured against his own promises?

He has escalated all three of these conflicts. or his actions, either through his own weakness, people ignoring him, or from him flip-flopping, we've basically seen escalation everywhere, more chaos, more violence around the world. And that's what should unsettle people. And in Chippurban militarism, and I've been thinking about this a lot, this feels connected to what's happening in Los Angeles, where we're from, you know. You've got troops in the streets in, and I'm not saying directly connected, but I'm just saying the kind of normalization of the idea that if you are strong, if you control violence,

you can get away with it and you can do whatever you want. That mentality is the same mentality that leads you to do a preemptive strike on Iran or that leads you to deploy the Marines on Los Angeles. I don't want to live in a world in which people in uniforms with the biggest guns or the people who are most willing to break the rules and using force just kind of have their way. That never ends well. And that's the kind of unsettling feeling I have seeing these events happen at the same time. Yeah, it's also unsettling to know that Pete Hexath is in charge of the Pentagon. Tulsi Gabbard is in charge of the intelligence community. I wonder how this folds into her weird no nuclear war video. I mean, I guess you could argue she's for it, but historically, she's

been against regime change wars. Marco Rubio has like five jobs. So not exactly the A team here. So, Ben, last thing, like I suspect a lot of Democrats will flail around trying to figure out how to respond to this. My recommendation for them would be to say things like, we believed Trump when he said he didn't want another war in the Middle East, especially a war with Iran. We believed him when he said he wanted a diplomatic deal with the Iranians in particular. And we were fully in support of his diplomatic efforts. So either he lied and did want a war with Iran or he was too weak to prevent Bebenatenyahu from doing something against his wishes. And just to back this up with some data,

then. I looked at some polling. The University of Maryland has a critical issues poll from May that found that 69% of Americans, including 64% of Republicans, viewed a negotiated agreement to limit Iran's nuclear program with monitoring as the best way to prevent Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon. And then with regard to like sort of U.S. views towards Israel generally, there was a Quinnipiac poll that found Americans are increasingly questioning their support for Israel as the war in Gaza drags on. 37% of respondents said they were sympathetic to the Israeli side. 32% said the Palestinian side, 31% were unsure, which was an all-time low for sympathy for Israel, an all-time high for the Palestinians in this Quinnipiac polling since 2001. So I'm not arguing with that data that the U.S.

shouldn't support the Israeli people if there is some sort of Iranian retaliation or something awful happens. But it's just an indication, I think, that Americans don't want another war in the Middle East and that they are done with the United States reflexively supporting Bibi Netanyahu's policies when we all can see with our own two eyes that they are disastrous. If the Democratic Party does not have enough principles to say it is a bad idea for Israel to launch this kind of preemptive military strike that is blowing up apartment buildings in Tehran that is targeting with assassination, the leadership of government, that I fucking hate, right? Like, I've no sympathy for them. But are we, we're okay with preemptive wars

over blowing up U.S. diplomatic efforts? If you can't be against that, then you're for, I don't know who you are in this party. And let me do a couple of things we haven't touched on. There was a nuclear deal. I mean, we even talked about the JCPOA, the Obama-A-Rondale, because it's so clearly something we've repeated again and again. Yep. That deal in place, you don't need to do this. Right? You don't need to start and risk a new war, risk a new war if you have that deal in place. Trump pulled out of that deal. His pulling out of that deal led directly to this. And that's

another point that it takes time sometimes. It's not like he pulled out of a deal and Israel bombed the next day. But him pulling out of that deal created the conditions that could lead to this kind of violence, this kind of risk, right? If I'm the Democrats, I'm saying this was not necessary. Trump said he was going to get us out of these wars. Trump said there's going to be less chaos. everything has gotten worse. Gaza's gotten worse. Now you've got a new war in the Middle East. Ukraine's gotten worse.

There's more violence. There's more chaos. He's not putting an end to these things. And I would make this argument that we cannot, like, this is connected to the kind of leadership Trump wants at home. It's a world with no rules. It's a world where violence and those who control it are inherently right. That is a scary fucking world, not the world that I want to live in.

I think people who are not foreign policy experts kind of get that, that there's just something that feels this kind of normalization of militarism. And by the way, not a hard argument to make that there's a normalization of militarism globally happening when Trump is going to be having a parade for his birthday with tanks and helicopters. Wake up people like this is happening. And what is happening in Iran is a part of it. And so Democrats need to be able, because what you don't want to see is Democrats be like,

Well, I'm really mad about what happened to, like, our colleague in California and what's happening in the streets of California. But I've always said the Iranian nuclear program is bad, and I'm glad Israel took it out. It's not 2003. Okay. We're all, it should be full-throatedly in favor of diplomatic solutions to these problems. Donald Trump was the MAGA basis. Tucker Carlson was loudly against us. Like, there is a coalition that involves an overwhelming majority.

of the country that is in favor of diplomatic solutions to international problems. They don't want these fucking wars because everyone knows they end in disaster. We saw Iraq. We saw Libya. We watched Syria for 15 years. Like this, no one wants this. Yeah, Democrats get super, you know, intimidate. Look, there's going to be a lot of premature triumphalism on this one. There was a lot triumphalism when Saddam Hussein's statue got pulled out in Baghdad. Shit, when Obama was present, we had premature triumphalism when Gaddafi got pulled out of a drain pipe. Like, these things don't end in the news cycle after they begin. And Democrats need to realize that their credibility is going to depend on what they say now. It's easy to come out and be like, oh, you know, I was against

the thing that went bad, you know, like, no, you have to have a consistent worldview here. And if your worldview can't say, as you said, Tommy, like, we believe in resolving these problems through diplomacy and with alliances and with the strength of our convictions, we're just, you know, hitching our wagon to like BB Netanyahu? No. Then what you're not offering any alternative? We watched Joe Biden do that and it ended in disaster both for the people of Gaza and also for the Democratic Party and also for the rest of the fucking country because now Donald Trump

is in charge. So let's not run that one, guys. All right, that's it for us. Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of Pod Save the World. Hopefully, we don't have to do any more over the weekend. Hopefully things stand under control, but we appreciate you guys listening and we'll see you next week. PodZEGELMANNMENTOCHOXOR

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