Alastair Campbell

Well, I think let's start with, for people who are interested in a kind of granular US view, maybe look back at the recent leading interview that we did with Rob Malley.

And just to remind people who are listening, Rob Malley was...

the lead negotiator on the JCPOA, which was the old Iran nuclear deal and was Obama's point man and then Biden's point man on Iran.

And we obviously got him on because the US fleet has been gathering around Iran for months now, much in the way that it did in Venezuela.

So people remember there was a lot of false alarms around Venezuela, people very concerned that

This enormous American military, naval, and air presence, marine presence had ended up around Venezuela.

But for weeks, nothing really happened.

And then the strike occurred.

And the same pattern roughly has been followed in Iran.

So over the last weeks and months, more and more American assets have been moved into the region.

And there was a real sense, actually, even when the strike happened in Venezuela, of people saying, oh, I'm surprised it's Venezuela.

I thought they would be doing Iran first.

When we did a recording, I think a month ago, we were talking about why it might not have happened yet.

There was a speculation that Israel felt it wasn't quite ready.

I'm not getting into the rights or wrongs of this yet.

We're getting the rights wrong.

I'm just talking about the logistics, the tactics.

One argument was that Israel wasn't quite ready.

Its defenses weren't quite ready.

Another argument was that the Gulf countries were holding off