Dr. Trita Parsi

He was not there and they did not hit that house.

They hit a house about two blocks or two houses down the street.

But they also appear to have tried to hit the house that the dissident politician Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was the person who won the elections in 2009 and would have been president, who was a reformist, had it not been for the election fraud in which Ahmadinejad took power again.

He's been in house arrest now since 2009 for about 17 years.

That house was also targeted.

It seems to be an effort to eliminate this.

all elements of this system, whether they are dissidents, whether they're reformists, whether they're in power right now.

And that would be more in line with what I think the Israelis would want, which is to have a complete power vacuum at the top, which makes it far more likely that you will have a civil war or that you would have essentially a complete, not just regime collapse and implosion, but state collapse.

I'm not so sure if that really is what the administration wants.

I certainly would believe that they would recognize that this is not in the interest of the United States to see that level of instability.

And whether each and every target is coordinated between the two sides, I have no insight into.

But I could definitely see if this was just an Israeli war that they would do this.

The U.S.

being involved in it raises some question marks in my head.

What we see from the counterattacks is that they happen very fast, which is about two hours into it, rather than 12 to 18 hours last time.

They were not taken by surprise.

They're not at a very, very robust level in terms of a large number, but it's also very important to understand the attack so far by US and Israel is not at all at the same level as it was during the Israel war of June of last year.

Tonight, we may see something much, much more.

But what we've seen so far has not at all been at the same intensity as we saw during the summer.

And given the fact that the firepower is far, far greater right now, I think that in and of itself is interesting, whether that is because they wanted to start slowly, whether they thought that perhaps the initial wave of attempts at decapitation would be successful.