Chapter 1: What are the current developments in the war in Iran?
In theory, I knew that this kind of thing can happen in any family. Upstanding citizens are always turning out to be secret criminals, and I wouldn't even call my cousin Alan an upstanding citizen. But it's one thing to know and another thing to understand. Alan, murder me? What the hell was Alan thinking?
From Serial Productions and The New York Times, I'm Em Gessen, and this is The Idiot, out March 26th, wherever you get your podcasts. From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kittroff. This is The Daily. Nearly three weeks into the war in Iran, the U.S. and Israel have largely decimated the regime's missile capacity, taken out key leaders, and disrupted its central command.
And yet, Iran has not backed down. In fact, the regime has become more hardened and is wreaking more havoc than ever. Today, my colleague Eric Schmidt on how Iran continues to challenge the most powerful military in the world and what President Trump's options are for getting out of this conflict. It's Thursday, March 19th.
So, Eric, we had you on the show 10 days into the war to lay out where things stood, not in terms of rhetoric or stated goals, things that have been pretty hard to nail down, but in terms of hard facts, what has actually happened on the ground. And here we are almost at the end of week three of this war, and we want to do something similar. So please orient us. Where do things stand right now?
So here we are, as you said, nearly three weeks into this campaign. And from a military standpoint, the commanders think they're doing pretty well. The United States is decimating the radical Iranian regime's military in a way the world has never seen before. They think they're actually a bit of ahead of schedule.
In less than two weeks, we've rendered the Iranian Navy combat ineffective and continue to attack naval vessels. They've hit over 120 Iranian naval vessels. This includes ships that lay mines in the Gulf. They've struck more than 7,800 targets in Iran. Wow. These are things like missiles, missile launchers, drone storage areas. And this is the U.S. and Israel or just the U.S. ?
This is just the U.S. Wow. The Israeli Air Force has carried out its own campaign in parallel with the United States, and they in particular have gone after many of the Iranian leaders. Israel claimed to have hit the hideout of Iran's security chief. There's another big hole in the top of the leadership. They've killed the top security chief, Ali Larrajani.
Another killed by Israel, Gomorraza Soleimani. They've killed the head of the Basij, the militia group that ruthlessly suppressed protesters in January. And then on Wednesday, they announced they killed the intelligence chief for Iran. He was responsible for overseeing the country's entire global terror network.
These are very prominent strikes that they've carried out against the leadership of the country at this point. So these are obviously massive blows to the structure of the regime. To what extent do those deaths, though, actually impact the regime itself? Because it seems like they're still there. That's right. The regime has been quite resilient. with attacks across the region.
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Chapter 2: How has the U.S. military strategy impacted Iran's military capabilities?
as opposed to a much larger potential target set for Iranian missiles and drones. Okay, so bottom line, it sounds like the Pentagon is feeling like it's executing its military mission successfully. I do hear a but, though, in what you've been saying, because you've been careful to emphasize military success. That's right, because on the other side of the coin, there are political goals.
And of course, the president has been articulating several over the last several days, some of which seem to conflict with each other. Certainly on the first day of the war, he talked about regime change altogether in Iran. He seems to have moved away from that. He talks about denying Iran's capability to ever develop a nuclear weapon. Right.
He talks about devastating Iran's ability to project power in the region, that is, its ability to threaten not only the United States, but its neighbors in the future. And so it's a shifting array of targets and also a shifting end state as we come to the end of this third week. Right.
And as you've said, despite all of the decimating of Iran's military capacity that has happened, the regime is not backing down. So just explain that. What are we seeing? Well, the main thing that we're seeing is with the dwindling amount of resources that the Iranian military has, they're being very selective in their targeting.
They're still trying to hit American bases, American embassies in the region. But their most important thing is they're basically now entering a new phase where economic warfare is probably their biggest tool. So now what they're doing is they're going after the economic vulnerabilities of the United States and the international community. You're talking about the Strait of Hormuz. Exactly.
This narrow strategic waterway through which so much international commerce flows in and out of the Persian Gulf. And what they've been able to do is with a handful of mines, the New York Times has reported, but just the threat of attacks. They basically brought international commerce to a trickle.
And that's the main concern right now of the administration because it's sending global shockwaves in terms of the economic impact this is already having. And Eric, just to understand the situation on the ground, the way that Iran is holding up traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, it's not just theoretical threats, right? There have been actual attacks, right? That's right.
I think nearly 20 different tankers, whether they're oil tankers or cargo tankers, have been struck. Wow. And that has a real deterrent on other shipping companies and their insurers who might want to send ships either out of the Gulf or a growing number of ships that are waiting on the other end to come back into the Gulf itself.
And Eric, can you just explain how exactly they're hitting ships just on a tactical level, what they're doing, how they're doing it and with what weapons? Like, how does this work? Sure. There are three main kinds. One is there are mines that they can put out in the water. And the Iranian military is believed to have somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 mines. It may actually be more.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of Iran's leadership losses?
Okay, Eric, if we are looking at options that range from, your words, bad to super bad to worse, where should we start? What's on the table and what's the likeliest path that you think the U.S. military will take now? So the first option is how do you deal with this problem of the Strait of Hormuz that we've been discussing?
And one of the options on the table is for the US Navy, perhaps with other countries, to basically conduct tanker escorts where you have Navy ships that would escort commercial vessels out of the Persian Gulf and then take other ships back in. These are probably be Navy destroyers that are equipped with special radar that can track incoming missiles, deal with drones, that kind of thing.
They would almost certainly be accompanied by drones and helicopters overhead that could also detect drones, not only in the air, but in the sea. They would be looking for threats on the shoreline, and they'd be keeping an eye out for those speedboats that we talked about with the gunmen on board who might fire an RPG at vessels.
So it would be a very complex operation where you'd have to have dedicated as many of 12 or so of these specialized destroyers leading some number of commercial vessels through this straight, which is 21 miles at its narrowest point. You're going through channels. And again, they're having to go through this as they look for all these different threats that could pop up at any given time.
And if you look at it, the possibility of a missile getting through one of these warships, getting hit and maybe American sailors being wounded or killed, that's also very much a distinct possibility.
And the ultimate decision here will rest with the shipping companies that own these vessels as well as their insurers to see, is it worth, even with the protection of the US military and perhaps the militaries of other countries that donate ships, is it worth the risk of getting your cargo through?
That's the risk that they have to balance versus holding off and waiting for some kind of diplomatic solution, which right now the chances look quite remote of achieving anything like that. Yeah, I cannot imagine being a captain on one of these tankers imagining such a voyage. So that option does sound bad, does sound incredibly risky. What's the next one?
So the second main option is basically taking over a place called Karj Island. This is a small island in the northern part of the Persian Gulf off the Iranian coast, which is Iran's main oil hub. About 90% of its oil production go through this place. And just last week, on President Trump's orders, the US military bombed the military installations. Over 90 targets were hit.
on this island itself. These are the military emplacements that protect the oil infrastructure there. Now, the president at that time said, I ordered the Pentagon to avoid hitting the oil infrastructure because of the long-term economic impact this would have not only on Iran,
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Chapter 4: How is Iran retaliating against U.S. and Israeli actions?
So what's the option? Okay, so one option is to take those Marines that are steaming from the Pacific region and have them do some kind of amphibious landing or some other kind of military operation to seize control of this strategic island and pressure the regime to concede on other fronts because the Americans control this very important economic hub for Iran.
But they'd have to go through the Strait of Hormuz, right, if I have my geography right? I mean, we're talking about these Marines popping out of the water, but they have a tough journey to get there before that. Yes. And everybody would see them coming because, as you said, first they'd have to go through that strait.
And presuming if they make it through that safely with all the protection that they and their— equipment would have, they could make it up several more hundred miles up into the northern part of the Gulf, then they would have to stage this operation, which presumably the whole world would be keeping an eye on. There'd be no strategic surprise there in doing that.
Even if you were to succeed with that mission, and military commanders, again, have for years planned this as a possibility if they ever went to war with Iran, once they seize this territory, they immediately become a target for the Iranian military, which is just a short ways off the coast of Iran. Right. They have to defend it once they seize it. They would have to defend it. Exactly.
So they could then, again, be threatened by whatever remains of Iran's arsenal of drones and missiles there. So there is, again, something that would become quite a high threat to do. Now, you take the risk of seizing the island, but it could backfire on you if somehow during the course of the initial invasion or subsequent occupation,
the oil infrastructure there is damaged, and then you've kind of lost the whole point of taking this island if the economic part of it is destroyed or damaged seriously. And this option of seizing Karj Island, in the best case, you're saying, it would essentially allow the U.S. to put a lot of economic pressure on Iran.
My question is, is there any guarantee or even expectation that that kind of pressure would actually effectively stop Iran from from continuing to do what it has been doing, which is wage asymmetric warfare that is disrupting traffic through the street, attacking its neighbors, all of this stuff. Is that pressure seen as effective in this context?
Well, there's no guarantee at all, Natalie, that this strategy would be effective. And what we're seeing now is, with many of the top leaders killed, what might remain of an Iranian regime may be even more hardline than what existed before, be even less willing to negotiate
with the United States, particularly if they felt they had this gun to their head, literally, and economically, they're willing to basically go down as martyrs rather than knuckle under to the American demands. So there's no guarantee this would work at all. Okay. So far, these options have not left me with a particularly optimistic view of what's coming. Is there anything else available?
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Chapter 5: What strategies is the Pentagon using to assess the war's progress?
So you've got that problem. You also have the problem of trying to extract these canisters. It could inadvertently set off a chain reaction with this nuclear material. To state the obvious, this option seems incredibly risky and dangerous and kind of insane. It is. And again, this is something the president has openly talked about. This is an option. So again, this would not be a surprise.
So the Iranians, again, they know this is the ultimate target for the United States. They're going to fight to the death to protect it and preserve it because that, you know, in the end is really what they want to hold on to, their ability to produce a nuclear weapon.
So what you're describing is a very difficult situation for the president in particular, as he is looking at what he said were the goalposts and what it would actually take to achieve those goals. I just wonder whether there isn't
a final, less horrible option in all of this, which is the president coming out and saying that this is over and that we have actually accomplished enough, calling it quits at this point, cutting bait. Is that a potential? Well, it certainly is because the president's actually floated this idea.
He's talked about how the war is essentially over from a military standpoint, of how they've already achieved these extraordinary goals of degrading or destroying much of Iran's ability to fight back, much of its ability to terrorize and threaten its neighbors in the United States. The leaders that the United States has condemned for all these years, many of them are dead.
And even if a weakened regime was in place, hardline that it may be, it could be contained. Although we are currently seeing the limits of that containment because while they are weakened, they are still able to create tremendous instability in the world. But go on. That's right.
I mean, again, this is the rhetorical case that the president presumably would make if he decided to essentially declare victory and move on. Also, we should point out, I mean, for one side to declare victory in a war, it doesn't mean the war is over, right? Like, Iran doesn't have to agree. Iran could keep firing back in all the ways that we've seen. That's right.
And Iran could take other steps that we haven't discussed, like activating terror cells in the region, in Europe or the United States. And to be sure, Israel may not want to stop fighting either. They may have goals that are not fulfilled, both in destroying Iran's capability to threaten Israeli territory. The President and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk almost every day about this.
And they are not necessarily on the same page in terms of when to quit this fight. But so far, they've been consistent in their war aims.
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