Alex Ritson

Whether those countries, such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, as you were hearing there, then feel that their direct military involvement would be necessitated, or they would leave it to the US and essentially Israel to continue, I think is a question that at the moment, I'd say that they would

do the latter, if they can, rather than getting directly militarily involved, where, you know, they don't have the strength, to be brutally honest, as the US and Israel clearly have.

Yeah, that might leave it to that.

That actually was reflected in an interview we had a little earlier, Lord Peter Ricketts, he's the former UK National Security Advisor, just take a listen to this.

He was quite sceptical that Iran was planning an imminent attack.

My interpretation of this word, preemptive, is that the Israelis preempted any risk that the US-Iranian negotiations were going to reach some sort of deal on the nuclear program.

And it reminds me very much of June last year, when the same again happened.

The Americans were negotiating intensively with the Iranians.

The Israelis interrupted that by striking and they drew the Americans into action.

That has happened again.

Trump, of course, has built up this enormous military presence.

He'd created a momentum.

Once Israel started attacking Iran, I think it was impossible for the Americans to stand aside.

But there's absolutely no clarity what the real political objective here is.

And it's very dangerous to launch military action because you've got the military forces.

You don't really have the option of standing aside.

But with objectives which can't be achieved by military strikes, obliterating the missiles, preventing Iran from using its regional proxies, these are not achievable objectives.

We're in a dangerous phase where the Iranians are bound to retaliate and try and strike some quite hard blows, I think.

Lord Ricketts and before him, our Middle East analyst, Sebastian Usher.

Iran launched retaliatory strikes targeting both Israel and US military bases in the Middle East.