Mark Mazzetti

And as we've seen, Iran has not responded the way that the United States and Israel had hoped it would.

Iran has shown no sign that it is eager to back down.

And I think there's also a sense for Netanyahu that he's not going to get another chance to do this.

A war against Iran has been

netanyahu's obsession for decades and now he's got the united states president leading the war and once that ends it's probably not happening again and so he sees this as his last best chance to achieve these goals in the middle east and he's going to be determined that nothing ends before he gets most of what he wanted

Thanks, Allie.

Have we now delegated the most solemn decision that can be made in our society, the decision to go to war to another country?

David, Mark, welcome to the show.

So in my lifetime, there have been many false alarms about a full-fledged U.S.

war with Iran, where it seemed like we were close, but obviously it did not happen.

This is a full-blown war by the United States and Israel against Iran.

Last summer when the Israelis began a conflict, there were clear lines that they didn't want to cross.

They didn't want to kill the supreme leader or topple the regime.

And the ambitions in this conflict are extraordinary.

President Trump said he is trying to basically knock off the leadership of the country and let the country of Iran figure out what goes on from there.

This has never happened before.

OK, so clearly we are at an unprecedented moment.

Talk about how we ended up here.

And not only that, there's another important element here, and that's after last summer's conflict with Iran,

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, starts making the case that there needs to be another round of strikes, that last summer's war didn't finish the job.