How Far Could the US-Israel War on Iran Spread?

0:00Good evening and welcome to Navarro Live. Coming up tonight, the war on Iran continues to expand. We ask the question that all the right wing press is asking are the Brits cowards? We'll look at the role of AI tool Claude in the war on Iran and a US Marine veteran is dragged out of a Senate committee hearing for refusing to go to war for Israel. I'm Stephen Methan and tonight I'm joined in the studio by Dalia Gabrielle. Dalia, how has this week been for you? I mean, I had a little time away last week and the minute I landed back in London, it's like every muscle in my body tightened up and then I saw the news and I thought I need to talk to Stephen about this. Well, and here we are talking about it right now and as we've been talking about it all week. Now, if you'd like to support our work, you can sign up at Navarromedia.com forward slash support. And do as always make sure to let us know your comments in the YouTube chat. Now, for those of you who don't know, we have several newsletters that go

1:03out every week, but every Monday and Friday, Ash and I break down the news with you in our newsletter at the Cortardo. Ash is usually at the helm on Fridays, but tomorrow our very own Harriet Williamson will be writing it. We know the news cycle is like outrageously, spectacularly hectic right now, and we've been putting out a lot of content. Signing up is truly the best way to get extra reporting and analysis plus a roundup of everything we've published during the week delivered straight into your inbox. You can sign up by heading to navarromedia forward slash the Cortardo, and I recommend. The US-Israel war on Iran is only six days old and already it's spread across the Middle East, with at least 11 countries having so far been hit by drones and missiles. Today, a 12th country joined that list. This footage was shot at the airport in Azerbaijan's Nashivan region.

2:08Now, that appears to have been just one of two strikes in the area with the second one near a school. No, you can't have missed the sound of children screaming there. A real reminder that actually when we see these images of bombs and we hear all the chat from politicians, there are actual real people terrified, real children having bombs and missiles and drones

3:12dropping on the ground near to them. Azerbaijan has accused Iran of being the source of the strike, saying the drone you could hear there was Iranian. Iran has denied this with the country's deputy foreign minister saying this. The Islamic Republic of Iran has not targeted the Republic of Azerbaijan. We do not target our neighboring countries. That's not quite true. Iran has admitted to Airstrikes on several Gulf states, so it says it was targeting US bases and assets in the region. Other facilities like a state oil company, Refinery and Saudi Arabia have also been struck, though Iran hasn't claimed responsibility for those. Now, Nashivan isn't in Azerbaijan proper. It's actually the world's largest exclave being completely surrounded by Armenia, Turkey, and Iran, and it's around 350 miles away from Azerbaijan's capital, Baku. The incidents, the two strikes, will have put Azerbaijan as well as its neighbors Armenia and Georgia on higher alert. All three have already proclaimed neutrality in the war precisely because of their proximity to Iran and a fear of being drawn into an increasingly unstable situation. Azerbaijan's president

4:15has now said that his country's military quote, have been put on the highest level of combat readiness and are prepared to carry out any required operations. Daliah, it just seems to be moving like a virus through the region. One country after another being struck either by, well, we don't know who by. We're assuming in the Azerbaijan case, it's Iranian drones because that's what they've said. Iran hasn't claimed responsibility, but we are seeing a lot of missiles, projectiles, drones, rockets falling on a lot of countries. Yes, I mean, I wouldn't want to kind of comment prematurely on what's happened in Azerbaijan specifically, but it is clear, and I think it was always predictable that this kind of regional spillover was an inevitability of Iran being attacked. Unlike for the US and Israel, this is very much existential for the Iranian regime, and it is going to pull on every lever it has. And this is a war game

5:19that it has been planning for for a long time. And it's clear that the strategy is not just to target, I mean, it appears that the strategy is not just to target the kind of US and British military bases that are peppered around the region, but also to target any kind of strategic allies. So you mentioned the Gulf there. You know, this is a place that is in terms of resources, in terms of financial infrastructure, very much embedded with Britain and the US and the West. It's trying to create a cost of allyship with the US. It's trying to make being an ally, or even it seems potentially neutral within, as it pertains to the US, it's trying to make that something costly and dangerous. And in turn, Israel is hoping that by heightening that contradiction in the fear of Iranian missiles is in turn going to consolidate those alliances. And so this is

6:19kind of the game that both sides are playing. And this is also the kind of chaos that imperialism thrives in. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point. And a lot of the British press and the Western press has been saying, why are we repeating the mistakes of Iraq? Why we saw what happened in Iraq? A million killed and chaos in the region. And of course, the war in Iraq was a mistake for ordinary people in Iraq and in the region. It created the as well as costing the lives of people that it cost. It ushered in things like ISIS and these very destabilizing despotic forces. But from the elite perspective, it wasn't really a mistake. The Iraqi oil is now is de facto governed by the US. It is run by a company that is headquartered

7:27by the New York Federal Reserve. It has enabled the US and the West more broadly as well as other interests like China to have a stake and to be able to have access to Iraqi resources. Yes, people died, but they did get what they wanted. So from their perspective, this is not a repeat of a mistake. It is a repeat of a type of engineered chaos that capital, that imperialism is actually very effective at marshalling for their own interests. But again, the cost for the people there and the cost for the whole world, in fact, is very grave, especially because they could see from Iraq that no one wants to jail, no one was held accountable. So it is a repeat of the same pattern which achieved in many ways that strategic goals. Yeah. I mean, there is another cost that is easily raised here as well, which is that for many of these countries, peace is relatively fragile. So, for example, in Bahrain, we have already seen the beginnings of what look like,

8:34sort of rebellion, or at least protests, which the Gulf states don't like, as a Bayjans, similarly, the additional cost of this kind of US-Israel war against an enemy that nobody, nobody, I think, well, there are some, but I would say nobody, none of us, like the Iranian government at all, we're not interested in the IOT, but there is still, in terms of the goals of this war, nothing has been clearly defined, which doesn't suggest that it's going to be chaos afterwards, and not just chaos there, but chaos that will spread as a result, just as it did in Iraq, as you say. Yeah. And I mean, well, the thing with chaos is that when you have this kind of of, you know, when, for example, the ISIS emerged, it becomes again this pretext for endless war. The whole point of the war on terror was that it was an endless war. It doesn't have defined strategic goals that can be reached. It is about securing an ongoing presence, and the problem

9:38with that when you were someone who's interested in actual democracy and, you know, actual freedom, you cannot have that in a state of constant war, in a state of constant occupation. So what ultimately gets strangled here is the possibility of a Middle Eastern region that is actually governed and sovereign by the people who live there. That's the thing that becomes impossible, the more you entrench warfare and occupation and dictatorship in these regions. Yeah, Western powers often use the story of state building when they're doing this kind of intervention, and actually all they ever do is state-breaking. State building is a completely different way, a different kind of practice that requires investment, diplomacy, and so on. Now, if those were Iranian drones in Nakhirvan, even if the hits were accidental, it's not clear what they were doing all the way up there in the sort of far north-west of Iran. But the part of Iran that Nakhirvan borders is also near to where the Iranian Kurdish population is most

10:40concentrated, a group that it's found itself in the spotlight over the last few days. The areas marked here in red show the four provinces of Iran where Kurdish populations are most concentrated, Western Azerbaijan, Kurdistan province, Kermansha, and Ilam. Sanandesh, the capital of the Kurdistan province is also the second largest Kurdish city in the country. Now, it's that Kurdish border region, along with Iraq's Kurdistan region, just west of it. That's in the news. That's after media began reporting on the possible involvement of Iranian Kurds as well as Kurds from Iraqi Kurdistan in the Iranian War. This was CNN's Clarissa Ward reporting from Erbil, the capital of Iraq, semi-autonomous Kurdistan region. We spent some time this evening with a senior Iranian Kurdish politician here in Iraqi Kurdistan who basically told us that he, the expectation among Iraqi Kurdish Iranian opposition forces is that they will be going into Western Iran as part of some kind of a ground operation over the course or at some point

11:47during the next few days that they will have support from the U.S. and from Israel, though he would not be drawn as to what exactly that support will look like. He also told us that President Trump himself had called the leader of the KDPI, which is one of these Iranian Kurdish opposition parties, today, and that they had what he categorized as a, or characterized, I should say, as a positive conversation, though, again, he did not give any details and he said that we should be prepared for some surprises potentially tomorrow. Again, not giving details, but this is all coming at the same time as our colleagues Natasha Bertrand, Elena Trin and Zachary Cohen are learning that the CIA has been working to arm Iranian Kurdish opposition forces with the goal of fomenting civil unrest in Iran. And they spoke to a number of different officials who characterized it in different

12:50ways. Some talked about sort of basically trying to pin down Iranian forces to create buffer zones where ordinary Iranians who are unarmed would have more freedom to go out on the streets and protests. Certainly, our source that we spoke to said that the focus is very much on establishing control of a sort of semi-autonomous Kurdish-run area of Iran, sort of like what you see here in Iraqi Kurdistan. So there were two claims there, one that Iraqi Kurdish forces will move into Western Iran as part of a ground operation of some kind. And two, that the CIA has been arming Kurdish groups in Iran's Kurdish provinces for a while now. Now, officials in Erbil in Iraq say that the city has come under drone and rocket attack for five consecutive days amid the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran. They say the strikes have repeatedly targeted areas near the city's airport and the US consulate where US forces are stationed. And they say that those are Iranian strikes. Meanwhile, in Western Iran, intense waves of air strikes have hit dozens of military

13:55positions, frontier posts and police stations along northern parts of Iran's border with Iraq. And this was Sanandar, that second largest Kurdish city in the early hours of this morning. So as you saw there, multiple and fairly horrific explosions in the city. Now, that looks like what could be preparation by the US and Israel for a new front in their war. And the Israelis have been quite open about their activities in the region, with a spokesperson for the military saying they've been quote, heavily operating in Western Iran to degrade Iranian capabilities there, and to open up a way to Tehran and create freedom of operations there. Kariyat Pawazi is a member of the Leadership Council of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan,

14:58the PDKI, one of several Iranian Kurdish political groups. Sky News spoke to him in a town along the Iran-Iran border. Obviously, a lot has happened in the last few days. There is a sense that the Kurds may get involved in Iran. Is that you're planning that now? For decades, this regime has attacked us, killed our people, and carried out acts of genocide against us. Now that the regime is becoming weaker and weaker, we see this as an opportunity to finally move towards achieving our freedom. I'm joined now by Director of Research at the Kurdish Peace Institute, Megan Bodet. Megan, how are you? I'm doing well. Thank you. How are you? I'm fine. I'm writing, thinking you're coming to us from Iraqi Kurdistan now.

16:01Yes, that's correct. So great. There were a few reports this morning that some Kurdish forces from Iraq and Peshmerga have crossed over into Iran. Have you seen any evidence of this? No, there is no evidence that the Iraqi Kurdish forces have crossed over. In fact, the Iraqi Kurdish leadership has been extremely clear that that is not a activity that they are involved in, and that they are so far hoping to keep the peace. One thing that a lot of people outside of the region don't know is that Iraqi Kurdistan maintains relatively positive relations with the US, Iran, and Turkey, obviously with US military support, being important for the region, and Iran and Turkey being neighboring regional powers with pretty significant economic and military weight. For the Iraqi Kurds, the objective here is to stay out of this as much as possible, and to continue to try to balance those relationships because they know that further conflict in that region could severely damage the economy and civilian lives

17:04and livelihoods. We've already seen cuts to electricity here. People I'm talking to are buying up extra non-perishable goods. They're worried about what's going to be available in stores. There's a real fear of not so much conflict, but an economic impact. So instability is a real concern, and certainly the Iraqi Kurdish leadership are not going to be sending forces to engage in this conflict anytime soon. So in that case, where is this reporting coming from? Well, I think that there are a couple sources of this. First of all, there's a lot of misinformation in a real lack of understanding of Kurdish politics. I think that there are some people who are just confusing the fact that there are armed opposition groups among the Kurdish population of Iran that have been active for 80 years now with the existence of the Peshmerga in the Kurdistan regional government of Iraq. These are separate armed forces. They come from separate political

18:06backgrounds. They have different goals. But to a lot of Westerners, they'll just say the Kurds quote unquote and confuse them. I think there's also an information war element to this, right? As the strikes are continuing, certainly I think that actors in the US and Israel who might be in a position to leak information to the press certainly want information to get out there that might put as much pressure as they can on the Iranian government that might create scenarios that aren't necessarily true, that might try to get them to concentrate forces in certain places. Saying something like, oh, the Iraqi Kurds might consider an operation against Iran is something that could have an information war value as well. But I think that on that continuum of just ignorance to propaganda, there's an incredible amount of space. A lot of journalists and researchers don't come out here and don't ask the questions about what's going on. Do the basic due diligence

19:09to see is this claim actually true? And we saw that those kinds of lacks of standards have had really negative impacts not just on the way that people understand Kurdistan in the Middle East, but on the actual policy that gets made based off of those misunderstandings. What are people saying about the strikes on Erbil that we're seeing during this week? So authorities that are saying there are Iranian strikes. What would be the interest in Iran making those strikes there at this point? So like I think you guys were talking about when you open the program, Iran sees this as existential. They're trying to raise the cost of conflict for not just the U.S. but all actors in the region. We know that there is the U.S. Consulate in Erbil. There are U.S. troops stationed there. So for Iran, that's a pretty easy and relevant target in their effort to up the cost of the U.S. presence in the region. It's also certainly a

20:10threat to the Iraqi Kurds who, as I said again, have good relations with Iran but also have good relations with the United States. At this point in time, I would imagine that there are really serious efforts on both sides to force the Iraqi Kurdish leadership to choose a side in the conflict. And certainly I think these strikes can also be read as a message to the Iraqi Kurds to push them to not get involved and not even support by allowing the presence of any kind of U.S. presence or also presence of Iranian Kurdish groups because in addition to the strikes on the U.S. affiliated targets in Erbil, there have also been strikes on the camps of Iranian Kurdish opposition parties that are located outside of the city. These have killed and injured multiple people. This is also a warning not just to those groups. The Iranian government obviously sees this as a threat but to the Iraqi Kurds too for hosting them on their territory.

21:10So let's talk about those Iranian opposition groups on the Iraqi side of the border but also the politics on the Iranian side. So we're talking about this big area sometimes called eastern Kurdistan. There are lots of political groups, parties there. I mean, I think I counted like seven of them. There's a suggestion that the CIA is arming Kurds in the area to sort of ferment an incursion towards Tehran. What do you make of those suggestions? Well, I think that in a situation like this, it's important to remember that the Kurdish armed mobilization didn't start this year or with this war. So for viewers who might not know, the first ever, you know, the roots of the Kurdish nationalist movement in the Middle East actually started with the Kurdish rebellion against the monarchy in the 1940s with the World War II impacting developments in the Middle East. The Kurds in northwestern Iran

22:10in Mahabad were able to create the short-lived Republic of Kurdistan with the support of the Soviet Union. But by the end of 1946, after the Republic had existed for slightly less than a year, the Soviets were forced to withdraw. The Iranian regime was able to recapture those areas and the leadership of the Republic was either forced into exile or executed. So there's this history of resistance and self-determination, but also this history of, you know, failed uprisings when the Central State has been able to be a certain control. And then again, in 1979, you had the same Kurdish rebel groups and newly formed rebel groups as well. The group that founded Mahabad was called the KDPI. I believe you heard earlier on the program and interview with one of their spokespeople. Other rebel groups were founded in the 1970s. Kurds fought against the Shah in 1979. And then they were the really one of the only progressive segments of the revolution. We can say to maintain the fight against the imposition of the Islamic Republic

23:15into the early 1980s. Again, for a few years, they actually controlled some territory. But the Islamic Republic was like the Shah in 1946, ultimately able to kind of consolidate power, crack down, and violently enforce its rule on those Kurdish areas. And then through the 1980s and 1990s and into the 21st century, you've had these on and off armed mobilizations by a wide variety of Kurdish groups seeking at first self-determination through the creation of a Kurdish state. But later now, I think we can say in the 21st century, mostly autonomy in a federal system similar to what the Kurds have in Iraq. So this isn't something new. These aren't new groups. And certainly I would imagine that their conversations with any actors involved in this conflict aren't new either. I think that in a situation like this one, everybody is talking to everybody else. There are a lot of contingency plans. And again, when we look at what is reported in the media,

24:22we want to think about why a certain story might be being leaked at a certain time. I don't think anyone can say for sure if any of these plans are true or not or what's happening there. But I do think again, there's a lot of reason in the U.S. to want to put pressure on Iran right now. I think on the Kurdish side, there's a lot of suspicion that I've heard about how something like this would work. Most Iranian Kurds that I speak to, they believe that this current very centralized, very nationalistic government has to go. They want self-determination for Kurdish people in Kurdish regions. But at the same time, they're very suspicious of many actors within the mainstream Iranian opposition, such as, for example, the monarchist contingent, you know, who they see as no better on Kurdish rights than the Islamic Republic. They're suspicious of a scenario like we saw in Venezuela where the Trump administration was able to make a deal with another faction of the existing state and political conditions

25:26and the structure of the state itself didn't really change. So they can project a scenario where the Americans cut a deal with someone in the existing state structure, which in the Iranian context would mean that conditions don't improve for Kurds. And then there's the very real memory of the situation that happened just a month or so ago in Syria, where after the U.S. had collaborated with the Syrian Kurds for years against ISIS, you had this sort of shift to support for the Syrian central government, a failure of negotiations, and ultimately violent, you know, Syrian government attacks on Kurdish regions. So I would imagine that given that history, you know, this is not something that Kurdish groups would be rushing into without a lot of thought about, you know, political guarantees, which is not something we're hearing about. And without a real hard material assessment that conditions on the ground were such that an insurgency could

26:26stand a chance of succeeding. You know, you talked about state building and state breaking and here, I think, what the Kurdish parties would want to do in any scenario where they were to engage militarily and politically in some kind of action, they don't want to simply cause chaos or disorder or anything, you know, that certain foreign actors might want. They want to secure the interests and safety of the Kurdish community in the areas where Kurds live, right? They want to be able to defend those territories and they want to be able to govern them and to provide people with a better life than they have under the state that exists. That's obviously very difficult to do in a wartime context, but again, you know, from the 1940s through the late 70s into the early 80s, it's something that they have done before. So this is a long-term historical issue. I'm not exactly sure if we can say anything for certain about what the U.S. might be planning. Again, there's a lot

27:29of reasons to distrust a lot of these reports. But I think at the end of the day, the Kurdish parties are well aware of history and are being very pragmatic about their handling this. Meghan Baudette, thank you very much for joining us. That was a very informative interview. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Outside of Iran, some in the Iranian diaspora community are backing a Reza Palavi son of the last Shah who was ousted by the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Today, Iranian State TV was hacked, allowing Palavi to broadcast this message. By participating in large marches, demonstrate and express what the people of Iran want. A heavy burden of destiny rests upon the shoulders of us all, and we together will walk this path until final victory. Long live Iran. Now that clip ends there with a graphic that says kind of idiomatically, if you're not here,

28:32no one will be able to fill your place. Kind of a cheesy kind of video there. And also, you know, it's not clear that like in this moment, this is the figure that people who are being like carpet bombs want to hear from. But who knows? Last night, one of his supporters appeared on News Night. Whether you feel hopeful about the future of Iran and the 93 million people who live there. When the strikes happened, actually, I was sleep. So when I woke up, I checked the Instagram and I saw the last messages and last stories of the people in Iran. And they were saying that if I get killed in this war, it's not either Israel or US, it's the Islamic Republic, which is true. Because we need to look at the bigger picture here. Why the war is happening in the first place? This is because Islamic Republic wrote down that we run in a way that we're here and what's happening is what we're seeing right now.

29:37We are hopeful, yes. But we have one person that when I was on the street, people were shouting for his name, who is Razal Pahlavi. And he's got a whole plan of what's going to happen in the first 11 days and one, one month. And these are, of course, the son of the former Shah. He's not back by everybody. And we've certainly spoken in the past to remain in here who certainly don't back him a lot of them. And I'm sure you're saying you do and people do. But there's a lot up for grabs. There's a lot to play for. And it's a very, very serious situation. What we believe, it's a very choice, down a re-for. Absolutely. Now, look, I think we're not very likely to see a new Shah in Iran. There's not a lot of evidence that even anti-regime Iranians within the country want that. I mean, you do hear sometimes recordings of people shouting the Shah's name, but often what you really hear are anti-regime calls. And there are also competing distant groups abroad with their own ambitions for the country. But for all the groups outside

30:41the country, the possibility of a new government structure seems to be drifting further and further away. From the US war that was supposed to be over quickly, then became four weeks. Last night, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth upgraded that to eight weeks. And the spooked people for the Islamic government don't sound especially broken. This was Iranian professor Mohammed Mirandi on Channel 4 News last night. What percentage of Iran's missile stocks remain? The vast majority. Because after last year's war, it was estimated that Iran had used up around 40 percent of its missiles. Are you saying that was replenished in the last few months? Those numbers were always fake. Those numbers are provided by the Israeli regime to the media in order to convince foolish Americans that war against Iran is simple. This war was supposed to end in a day or two. It's well, they were was supposed to bring Iran down like a house of cards. That failed, this failed, and now the United States will

31:44have to pay the price. And if the United States escalates, that will mean that the most sensitive region in the world, the Persian Gulf, where a quarter of the world's energy comes from, everything could be destroyed. And if that happens, it doesn't even matter if the straight-of-horn Moses open or close, because there will be no oil or gas, and there will be no tankers. For Iran, this is a fight for survival. For the United States, this is a war of choice, a choice that has been imposed upon the American people by the Epstein class. We will expel the United States from our homeland, and we'll make sure that the United States never again thinks about aggression against our country, and we will not allow the Israeli regime to behave with impunity and to continue genocide against the Palestinian people. Throughout that interview, Miranda kept referring to the Epstein class, the Epstein coalition, like whatever you think of the government of Iran, that is some pretty good branding.

32:49It's interesting, isn't it? He's there saying they've got loads and loads of weapons left. The US has been saying that they may be running short on their side in the region. It's just a case of attacking someone in their domestic territory when you're far away from your own territory. It actually puts you at a pretty major disadvantage. I think we were talking earlier before the show started about the different and resources. Now, obviously, the US is a far more resource country than Iran, but still, this is a significant drain on the US's resources. I think every, you know, the rockets that Iran are using are something like a couple of tens of thousands of dollars per rocket fired, and at each of them cost four million dollars to intercept. So you do that day in, day out for however long, eventually that is a drain on the resources. But it's more that this idea, I think this idea that this was a war that, you know, you will be in and out, it will be over, and that's how you kind of sell it to the

33:52American public. I'm surprised to hear that the American public would buy that after Afghanistan, after Iraq. The truth is is that the US does not want democracy and sovereignty in Iran. The US wants indirect occupation of Iran's resources and of its strategic location, and people do not live under the thumb forever. And so in order to maintain that, you have to maintain an ongoing militarized presence because you are enforcing an unnatural condition, an unnatural environment, on a people who have shown before that they will overthrow governments that they don't want. You know, the reason that the Shah is not in power anymore is because he was overthrown, and that was not that long ago. And so the idea that this is, I don't know if Trump believed it, but I'm, would be very surprised if anyone in their right mind would believe that this was, as you know, it was mentioned earlier, a simple war in and out in a couple of weeks. I mean,

34:55we are talking about not only destabilizing a region which we know does not, as I said, the toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube easily, but we're also dealing with a country that has been preparing for this for a very, very long time. Yeah, I mean, there's also, you know, the economic costs of the war, the political costs of it at home for Trump, right? This is the president who, despite promises, hasn't managed to get anywhere near getting the cost of living in crisis in the States under control. America has been, and also, I mean, one of his big promises was no more foreign wars. No more wars. He's done the opposite on both. And he's spending, allegedly, I read something like a billion dollars a day on this war, whereas Iran is flying out these Shahed, I mean, they've got lots of weapons. They're using lots of different kinds of weapons, but a big part of it is these Shahed drones, which cost back between 20 and 30,000 dollars to make, and they can make loads of them in a day. But on that billion dollars a day, I don't think

35:57Americans are going to be very happy when it's, you know, in just a week and a bit's time, with two weeks time, 20 billion dollars that's been spent, or, you know, in a few months' time, multiples of that that's been spent. I mean, that's not what he promised to do as a president, right? And when people are looking at their groceries going up, oil prices going up, everything going up because of inflation involved with the war, it's not going to be a good look for him. Yeah, and it's interesting, you know, a lot of people are saying that the reason that Trump has started this war is to distract from the Epstein files. I think that's quite a reductive kind of past view. I think, you know, the deep state has been trying to go after Iran for a long time. I don't think he even needs to distract from the Epstein files because what can anyone, what is anyone, what what pressure could anyone place on him to do anything about it? But I actually think it's interesting that both are happening at the same time because they are two of the most concrete, not the most concrete, but like two quite concrete promises that held together the mega coalition

36:59was going after, you know, pedophile, billionaire elite class, with all of it, you know, all the ways that was kind of turned out to be grounded in reality and also grounded in conspiracy theory and also no more foreign wars being against the neo-conservatives, being against the Republican establishment. Trump was a huge part of his, you know, the way in which he was able to run an insurgent campaign within the Republican Party was to say and to revamp the party because we have to remember after Obama won in 2008, there was a real panic in the Republican Party that, you know, demographic change and cultural shifts meant that the Republicans would never win again. And Trump, you know, sort of brought life back into that party by bringing in people on the basis of going after, you know, billionaire elite, pedophile elites and no more wars in the Middle East, no more neo-conservatism going against the Republican establishment. And so I think those two

38:03things happening at the same time, can the MAGA coalition survive that? Who knows? Does Trump care? Is he planning on canceling the midterms anyway? Who knows? Yeah, they didn't want George Bush Jr., but they've got him anyway, it seems. The wall on Iran has also spread to Lebanon where Israel has amassed ground troops at the border with tanks and troops now in South Lebanon. Israel has also been bombing Beirut. And today, up to 700,000 people have begun leaving the southern suburbs of the city after Israel ordered them to evacuate or face airstrikes, creating massive surges in traffic and gridlock in some parts. Dalia, just quickly, Lebanon has really taken the brunt, I mean, not the brunt, but taken a lot of the flag over the last three years of wars generated by Israel. They must be exhausted. I mean, Lebanon is an unbelievably resilient country, you know, it's people have, you know, talk about PTSD not really being a framework in this region because

39:07there's nothing post about it. It's a kind of constant form of constant kind of trauma. And you know, one thing about the Lebanese is they believe in life and they believe in living through this kind of conflict and trauma, but it is on a scale that feels as if it is becoming kind of quite unimaginable. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be in Beirut right now. Yeah. Where do a million people go? I mean, we ask that same question in Gaza, they go into camps, they go into tents, they die, you know, that is what happens when you create these kinds of conditions. And with Iran on the kind of back foot now, it's very difficult to see kind of how this is going to be pushed through without even more escalation in places like Beirut and, you know, other parts of the region that have relied on Iranian, where sectors of the political class have relied on Iranian support to kind of keep going.

40:08British Prime Minister Kirstana has given a press conference, defending his position on Britain's involvement in the US and Israel's war on Iran. While the region has been plunged into chaos, my focus is providing calm, level-headed leadership in the national interest. That means deploying our military and diplomatic strength to protect our people. And it means having the strength to stand firm by our values and our principles no matter the pressure to do otherwise. The long-standing British position is that the best way forward for the regime and the world

41:10is a negotiated settlement with Iran where they give up their nuclear ambitions. Now that's why I took the decision that the UK would not join the initial strikes on Iran by the US and Israel. Now that decision was deliberate. It was in the national interest. And I stand by it. Now, a summer has come under a fairly huge amount of pressure from right-wing parties as well as the right-wing media over his refusal to get Britain involved in and let's all say this together, America and Israel's illegal assault on Iran at the beginning. So we had this from Alison Pearson in the telegraph. Trump is right. Starma has humiliated the land of Churchill. Rod Little called Starma cowardly in the sun saying he isn't cut out to lead Britain. And in the express, Starma was described as dithering. These people are like completely furious that Starma didn't just start indiscriminately bombing a nation they hate with no regard for international

42:13law, which by the way, they also hate. There was a pretty good article in the FT today on this exact subject. The papers chief political commentator Robert Schrimsley outlined a defense of what he called the hand ringers and the pearl clutches. Arguing that to surrender international law is to accept some extremely dark outcomes. Now Schrimley says this. Over in Europe where let's face it, we are all women except for Georgia Maloney or possibly the AFD. There has been quite a bit of unmanly hand-ringing about the attack on Iran. Kierstarm, Emmanuel Macron and Pedro Sanchez are among the scorned recalcitrants. This is admittedly uncomfortable for those who care about the legalities because no decent person should shed tears for an Iranian regime that massacres its own citizens and exports terror. Having flouted international law for decades, how can it demand its protection? Indeed, there are some lawyers making the case for this intervention on grounds of Iran's ongoing threat. Now, that was some pretty outdated language at the beginning there, but Schrimley's doing on purpose. After all, it was the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, who called European hand ringers and pearl clutches. And as we all know, he's the only real man

43:18on earth. Schrimley goes on to say this. But while people made debate the legal and strategic arguments, what we can't let stand unchallenged is the insidious accompanying case made by the right, and even some democratic leaders that in the new world order international law is no longer helpful or applicable. If the demise of international law is a fatal complete, why shouldn't Trump seize Greenland? Are we confident that America will always draw back from upsetting NATO allies? Why protest if Ukraine is carved up by Trump and Vladimir Putin on what grounds does the U.S. stand up for Taiwan? Now, a lot of the anxiety on the right is based on comments made by Trump on Tuesday night, where he said he was disappointed in the UK and that Starmut was no Churchill. Starmut was asked about that today. Donald Trump has suggested that you ruin the special relationship that you are no Churchill. On the special relationship? Is he right on that? Have you ruined the special relationship? The special relationship is in operation right now. We're working with the Americans in the deployment from our bases. We are working together in the region, the U.S. and the British

44:23working together to protect both the U.S. and the British in joint bases where we jointly located and we're sharing intelligence on 24-7 bases in the usual way. That is the special relationship, that is a special relationship in operation and clearly it's for the President to take decisions that he considers in the national interest the right decisions for the U.S. I understand that, I respect that. But equally, it's for me as the British Prime Minister to take decisions that I consider to be in the best interest of the United Kingdom. There's nothing controversial about that. Where Starmut does seem to be focusing his energy, though, is on getting Brits out of the region. More than 140,000 Brits are in the Gulf States and other nearby countries and they've registered with British embassies and consulates and after a delay the First Government flight departed Oman today. Some commercial airlines have now also begun bringing people home after the entire space of the Middle East was closed for days again because of this illegal war. Starmut spoke about

45:26the complexity of the operation to get people out. I want to be very clear, this is a huge undertaking. It's one of the biggest operations of its kind. Many times bigger than the evacuation from Afghanistan. It's not going to happen overnight, but we will not stop until our people are safe. Dalia, I mean, look, you know, we know that we're not completely uninvolved in this war, right? We have now said that we will allow you at the U.S. military to use our bases for what they call defensive attacks, so taking out Iranian missiles before they can be launched. And our jets have been shooting down missiles over Gulf States in order to practice, Dhamma says, our allies. But we're not involved in bombing Iran. I think that's a good thing. I don't think we should be like, we should be joining forces with pirates and renegades when it comes to international law. I also

46:28think, you know, I want a Prime Minister who cares about getting people out of the region and bringing them home and getting them, you know, getting them into safety. So I don't know what you think about that, but I also wanted to ask you about the international law point, because, you know, I thought the point in that piece is either a good one or a really academic one, because on the one hand, either you think, well, look, international law has already gone, and many people who live outside of the West would say what international law, and now we're finding ourselves saying what international law following Gaza, the genocide in Gaza, and seeing the U.S. act with impunity. But on the other hand, you might think, okay, look, it's true that international law hasn't treated everybody fairly, but that's room for improvement, not a reason to chuck it all. Yeah, I mean, the history of international law is not a universal one. But I don't think that those of us who have been critical of that, of the way in which international

47:30law was both the international law that it's supposed to be, you know, protecting human rights, I think those of us who might have been critical of it, the argument was never to ditch it all together and just have a free for all. It was always to kind of expand and adapt it in light of those limitations. I'm, of course, glad that at the moment, Britain is not involved in the active in active war mongering in Iran is in, you know, firing bombs on Iranian people. I hope that lasts. I don't know if it will. But I also do think that we sometimes have to be a little bit careful about how we kind of frame the way in which particularly since the Iraq war, Britain has operated in the region. You know, there's often this narrative that kind of Britain is this poodle of the US and Israel. And, you know, if there was no US and Israel, Britain would be this, you know, pacifist, passive country that, you know, would mind its own

48:35business when obviously like the entire blueprint of the colonization, you know, the Western colonization of the Middle East is British. It is deeply, deeply British. And in the fall, after the World War II, we see Britain continuing to fight occupational wars in Yemen, in Oman, in Egypt. So, you know, it is much more than the US. It has a deep knowledge and history of colonial occupation within the region. And I think, you know, when it comes to kind of direct military operations, is then, you know, actually carpet bombing, actually providing, you know, sending weapons and all of this, you know, at the US and Israel at the moment, don't really need that. What they do need is the thing that we are giving them, which is intelligence. You know, we, Britain's intelligence is almost second to none in the region. And we're giving them access to that military infrastructure, which, you know, why do we have

49:36bases all over this region? Because there is an ongoing, very British colonial interest in the region. And so, yes, I am glad that we're not, you know, killing rooms full of school children. But I think that that's not really a product of kind of Kistarma being sort of above this operation, not in the way that I would say like the Spanish leadership is. But I think it is about saying, okay, how can we give what we need to give in order to maintain this kind of alliance that is very much in both of our deep state interests without perhaps, you know, risking, I guess, British troops or doing something that will make him even more deeply unpopular within Britain. But we are still providing the Americas with the most valuable British asset in the area, which is our intelligence and the military bases, which is that legacy of British colonialism in the region, which stretches back far beyond

50:39American occupation in the region. Yeah, I think, I think Pedro Sanchez's refusal to let the states use their bases is partly a recognition that there will always be mission creep. So you can begin by saying, okay, we're restricting the use to these few things. And that will change over time. The definition of defensive will become thinner and thinner. And also, especially when, you know, you've got people like Hexath and Trump who, you know, you don't think are going to be, you know, particularly interested in honoring an agreement of any kind for the use of bases. Did the United States air strike at girls at elementary school and kill 175 people? Not that we know of Sean. And the Department of War is investigating this matter. And I would just tell you very strongly, the United States of America does not target civilians, unlike the

51:39Rogue Iranian regime that targets civilians, that kills children, that has killed thousands of their own people in the past several weeks and uses propaganda quite effectively. And unfortunately, many people in this room have fallen for that propaganda. So I would caution you from pointing the finger at the United States of America when it comes to targeting civilians, because that's not something that these armed forces do. So obviously what we're talking about there is the 28th of February at the start of the school week in Iran when a missile strike killed at least 165 Iranian schoolgirls in Minab with almost all of their mates between seven and 12 years old. As spokesperson for both the U.S. Department of Defense and the Israeli military said they were unaware that a school had been hit. The school sits close to the side of Shahada military complex, which is a key IRGC naval base. Whether this was a targeting error, 14 intelligence, or something else is still being investigated. I mean none of them are reasonable explanations for killing 165 children at all. What we do know, however, is that the target list was generated

52:42in part by artificial intelligence. Recently, anthropics AI tool Claude was declared a threat to national security by the Pentagon after the company refused to allow the military unfettered use of it in certain operations. At the time, Dario Amode, the company CEO said this about the use of AI in war. It doesn't show the judgment that a human soldier would show, friendly fire or shooting a civilian or just the wrong kind of thing. We don't want to sell something that we don't think is reliable and we don't want to sell something that could get our own people killed or that could get innocent people killed. Wars actually Pete Hegseth hit back by posting this on X. This week anthropic delivered a masterclass in arrogance and betrayal, as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States government or the Pentagon. Our position has never wavered and more never wavered. The Department of War must have full unrestricted access to anthropics models for every lawful purpose in defense of the Republic. Instead, anthropic AI and its CEO, Dario Amode, have chosen duplicity. Clote in the sanctimonious

53:43rhetoric of effective altruism, I don't think it is. I think it's just cloked in the rhetoric of not killing innocent people. They have attempted to strong arm the United States military into submission, a cowardly act of corporate virtue signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. Virtue is not virtue signaling. The US, however, still seems to be pretty dependent on anthropics tech. The Washington Post reported that within the first 20 hours of the war on Iran, a staggering 1,000 targets were identified. The article goes on to say this. As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people. The pairing of Maven and Claude has created a tool that is speeding the pace of the campaign, reducing Iran's ability to counter-strike and turning weeks-long battle planning into real-time operations, said one of those people. The AI tools also evaluate a strike after it's initiated, the person said. Now, this isn't new territory either. Cast your mind back

54:46to the ongoing genocide in Gaza in its most sort of frantic phases, where tools such as wears daddy, a real-time tracking system, the gospel, a structural targeting system, and lavender a database with thousands of potential targets were all used. Paul Sharer, the executive vice-president at the Center for New American Security, told the Washington Post this. AI gets it wrong. We need humans to check the output of generative AI when the stakes are life and death. Now, Dalia, we don't know for sure that this school was generated as a target by the artificial intelligence used by the US military. I do think we know that there was previously a base there about 10 years ago that was then moved in the school build. I think that's part of the history of this building that I've read, which means that you may have a model that is using outdated information or has it sort of gathered that up and put it into its targeting practices. I mean, it's a broader question just like, you know, do you find the use of AI in war? You know, one argument is that, okay, actually, there's always going to be wars, and the use of AI

55:48means that targeting will be better. There'll be fewer civilians killed. The other is that is the one that was made there, which is that actually there are no, there's no kind of moral check or sort of even conscious style check, any kind of hesitation on the parts of computers to just sort of do what they're doing, do what they've judged is the right thing to do in that situation. I say the word judge, I don't even think that's a word calculated. Yeah, and it's also a difficult one because, you know, it's not like war that doesn't involve AI or large language models or, you know, war that is driven by human beings exclusively. It's not like those wars necessarily show restraint or humanity, you know, we've seen heinous things done in wars without the use of AI at all, but I think that that point about how AI is often, and I think the public's misunderstanding or the kind of association that we make with AI is this idea that it can actually be, as you say, you know,

56:51more accurate or it can remove human error or it can remove human bias, and the implication of that is minimizing unnecessary loss of life. The problem with that is, first of all, accurate according to who, you know, we have just watched for three years, Israel killing thousands and thousands of children, labeling an entire population as terrorist as a pretext for justifying their murder and genocide. So, you know, I'm sure Israel considered that to be highly accurate, you know, if you label everyone a terrorist, then it's accurate to then do wide-scale violence against them. So, these kind of categories of definition are still of being defined by the same people and being defined by people who have, who don't, who are, you know, genocidal in the case of Israel. But also, when we look at how this has been deployed in, for example, policing, you know, the use of predictive algorithms, the use of AI in policing,

57:56again, it was introduced as this way of correcting human bias. It was actually introduced as quite a progressive, as quite a progressive measure. But what you actually end up seeing is because of the reliance on historical data, you end up seeing an acceleration and intensification of existing logics that then get deployed with even less window for accountability. Because, first of all, you know, if an algorithm breaks the law, who do you hold accountable? And secondly, the way these large language models work is that the data is drawn from such a wide range of things, and it is processed so quickly that the logics that it takes becomes actually opaque and imperceptible to any human. So, if this algorithm or this AI makes a decision, it becomes very difficult to understand, you know, what it drew on to make that calculation. And so, this is where the risks lie,

58:59the risks lie in the obfuscation and the further evasion of accountability and the intensification of existing logics, which are genocidal and devalue and cheap and human life. And I also want to make the point, there's a couple more sort of points that I want to make, which is firstly, I think this is a perfect example of how, you know, data privacy and resistance against tech authoritarianism is actually a really important part of keeping us safe. You know, we often think of these things as being against one another, that you either have privacy or you have safety. But when we are talking about these companies, you know, like like an open AI or Claude that are being deployed wholesale into like every fabric of human life, including like intimate relationships. And then we are talking about there being belief, like information between that and the military and the police and the state. That is something that makes us so

1:00:04unbelievably unsafe. Because if you think that the deployment of these technologies in these ways happening in a land far away are not going to boom around back here, you haven't been paying attention for like the past 400 years of how things work. So I think that's also a really important point to make when it comes to the struggle for data sovereignty and the struggle for data privacy. Like it's really important when we're talking about these huge corporate monopolies that are able to access a granularity and scale of data about us and the way that we live our lives that is literally unimaginable. Yeah, one of the ways in which that where that where's daddy software worked in in Gaza, which was that was that, you know, it had a lot of information about, you know, people's phone numbers, but also their habits of movement, how many people were in the house. So there's always data that's being gathered on civilians, you know, the families of fighters, if they even were fighters who were attacked are still civilians, right, gathering

1:01:06all this data on them. And then a human being set the threshold of how many of them could be killed in the house with that person when they arrived when they arrived back home. So you have there, yeah, as you say, this like terrifying way in which, you know, data that human beings can't really track, it just becomes sort of meaningless reams of information that they can't do anything with in the hands of these machines becomes wieldable and weaponizable. And then it gets added to actual weapons. And then a human being sort of sides, okay, well, actually these number of people with civilians can be killed in order to meet this target. Yeah, and I mean, I say that there's a boomerang effect, but I actually, it's actually kind of incorrect of me because we've already seen this deployed in Britain in the form of the gang's matrix, you know, the gang's matrix, which now is no longer exists, but it did exist for a long time. It was this use of predictive data analytics to mark certain young people as being likely to be in a gang or join a gang. And there are, you know, people who signed, you know, 16, 17-year-olds who signed

1:02:10up for college, you know, and turned up on their first day. And then we're told, Oh, no, you've been flagged by the gang's matrix. You can't enroll in college. They don't know that they were ever flagged up by the gang's matrix. No one can tell them why they were algorithmically flagged of being at risk of joining a gang. And it relies on proxy data. It relies on like, do you in some ways fit the demographic, you know, balance of people that we think exist would possibly join a gang, right? So it's like where you live, the music you listen to, the people you're seeing with, all of these different proxy markers that then get kind of synthesized into a label that no one can actually really trace back why that got attached to you. And then suddenly you can't, you know, get a bank account or you can't like go to school or you can't have access to services. And so we've actually already seen this being deployed in Britain. And it just takes us further

1:03:12away from where we want to be, which is accountability. Yeah, for sure. I'm like super against AI in general. I mean, we would love out about this. And it's not because I have, you know, a particular, I mean, I do have some moral objections, but my resistance just comes from the fact that I actually just like, I love my own brain and I don't need, I don't need open AI to write an email for me because I'm too lazy to do it myself or can't be bothered. But it is worth remembering, I think, that every time you use these products in that way, you are like participating in this industrial military complex, which now involves these, these machines, these models. There's no, there's no, there's no firewall between, you know, what you're contributing to it by editing those emails and so on and so forth and what's being used elsewhere anyway. Let's go, it's not going anywhere. So, you know, that's just a sort of rant into the darkness. Hey guys, I'm here in DC trying to speak out against the cynics and ask them why they're

1:04:26going to send our men and women to harm's way when our elected officials said that it would be no war or war. Anybody who feels disillusioned and betrayed by our government, you're not alone, join us in just a demanding accountability for this betrayal, free Palestine, free America, let's go. Those are the words of Brian McGuinness, he's a US Marine Corps veteran, a firefighter and Green Party candidate from North Carolina. He filmed that video before this explosive incident during a Capitol Hill hearing on the Iran War. Israel is the reason for this war. America does not want to fight this war for Israel. Let's go. Come on, let's go. America does not want to sound as thundered as the war for Israel. Your inability to name that so you may have lived this as leaders out. This is wronged up. And nobody wants to fight.

1:05:38Reminders all are coming out. Please stand up as a Marine and stand up. Let's go for America. No one wants to fight for Israel. That crack you just heard was the sound of Brian McGuinness's arm breaking as US Capitol police dragged him from the room. And the man in the blue suit who threw his weight behind the officers before McGuinness's arm snapped is Republican Senator Tim Chihi. During his arrest McGuinness continued to struggle as police handcuffed him before he had received medical attention. He chanted free Palestine from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Palestine will be free of reworking of the first line from the Marines. Him. Brian McGuinness now faces counts of assault on a police officer resisting arrests and unlawful demonstration. And these events come in the context of the US Senate rejecting a bipartisan resolution that would limit Trump's powers to wage war in Iran. The measure was rejected in

1:06:42a 53 to 47 vote drawn mostly along party lines. Only two senators across the floor, Republican Rand Paul voted for the measure, the measure to restrict Trump's powers, whilst Democrat and longtime champion of Israel, John Fetteman opposed it. Darling, it doesn't look like there's much opposition in American politics to Trump at this point. And we're seeing their soldiers having their arms broken by actual sitting politicians or taking part in the breaking of the arm. Sitting politicians in US Congress. What do you make of these scenes and what do you make of the Senate just sort of sitting by? And maybe you're not surprised. I mean, it's very interesting when it comes to the US military and the people who actually fight in the US military. Obviously, a lot of them are motivated by whatever their propaganda their state has fed them and everything. But there is also this dynamic that you have in a country where there's no universal health care. There is a lot of poverty. And for a lot of young people

1:07:50who can't afford to go to college, who don't see a prospect of a job that gets some health care in their future, the army sort of actively prays on them and sort of grooms them into joining for the promise of free college, free health care, you know, a pension, all of these things that are not accessible to them in other ways. And it's always been a kind of thorn in their side when those people kind of go through, especially go through fighting, you know, on the ground, whether it's Vietnam, Iraq and potentially Iran here. And come out of the other side and say, you know, there was no honor in that. There was no honor in what I did. And, you know, I come back traumatized with what I did. I come back ashamed. And when they translate that voice into political resistance, it's a thorn in the side for the American establishment because you can't call them dishonorable. You can't call them unpatriotic. You can't call them cowardly.

1:08:50Because they played the game. They literally went and, you know, for in the war that you commissioned. And especially when the president is at the alleged draft dodger, you know, Trump allegedly faked an injury to get out of Vietnam. I mean, it's a real kind of throttle in the seamlessness of American patriotism, which is obviously, you know, very fetishistic around the military and very glorifying of the military. When you have people who go through that and come out and say, I fought an elite war. I possibly killed people for elites. And I regret it. And I don't want it to happen again. There's very little you can argue with that other than to literally physically remove them from being able to speak. Yeah, absolutely. It creates such a conflict in the kind of the iconography of the American state when you see this happening. Or like Aaron Bush knows what, you know, like, you know, just these acts of pacifism or in support of pacifism from one of most violent militaries in the world.

1:09:57And they do because of it's of the violence that they've encountered or seen or yeah. Dahlia, let's leave it there. Thank you so much for joining me. This was great. Have you backed me? Or I love it here. And I love the new backdrop here as well. Very chic. Yeah, we had a comment from someone that it makes it look like a student digs. So let us know what you think. Do you like the backdrop? Do you not like the backdrop? Drop us a line. Thank you again, Dahlia for joining me tonight. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Come back tomorrow for another live stream from 6 p.m. for now. You've been watching Navarimedia. Good night. This broadcast is brought to you by Navarimedia. Go to Navarimedia.com slash support.