Jeremy Scahill

Iran is not Hamas.

It's not Hezbollah.

It's a modern nation state with a very robust ballistic missile program and has shown a willingness to engage in both proxy warfare against Israel, but also in the case of the Gaza genocide period, has multiple times launched retaliatory missile strikes against Israel.

And I think that Netanyahu has always understood

that the the main problem that they have in terms of a deterrence of their agenda is the existence of the Islamic Republic government in Iran.

So, you know, what I would say in short is that they've concocted this nonsense about Iran always being like 30 seconds away from a nuclear bomb, because what they really want is to smash

the Iranian government.

They want to smash that state.

I'll tell you one thing that I think was very telling, and I don't think it gets talked about enough, Amanda, and that is when Bashar al-Assad fell in Syria, you know, both Netanyahu and Trump, to one degree or another, have sort of taken credit for it.

And Trump said recently, like, hey, we put that guy who was a former al-Qaeda operative, by the way, we put that guy in power in Syria.

But setting aside what anyone thinks about Syria or Assad or Ahmed al-Shara, the new president, what did Israel do as soon as the rebels marched on Damascus?

He authorized a sweeping operation by the Israeli military to go in and bomb the defensive conventional military capabilities of Syria preemptively.

Why did they do that?

They wanted to ensure that any government that would come to power in Syria, any Arab government that would come to power, wouldn't have an ability to defend itself like real nation states.

So they went in and they decimated the conventional military capacity of Syria without even knowing who exactly was going to be in power.

And so what I think we're seeing in Iran right now, we're being led on this sort of distraction operation to focus on the nuclear issue or to talk about Iran's ballistic missiles.

Iran doesn't invade other countries.

That's not how Iran wages its war.

It certainly is active on the proxy battle space.

We could talk about that if people want.