Iran and the Nuclear Bomb
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Dear listener, ahead of season three, and I promise it's coming, we wanted to record this special episode because of recent events in Iran. You may have heard that on the 27th of November 2020, a top nuclear scientist in Iran was assassinated by the Mossad. And Eamon called me up and said, "Thomas, we must record an episode because 2020 started with a bang and it's now ended with a bang."

What he was referring to was the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in January of this year, which episode one of season two was all about. And now, at the end of the year, this Iranian scientist has been assassinated by the Israelis. But before Eamon tells us all the gruesome details, let's get some context.

Hello, Eamon. Oh, hello, Thomas. How are you? I'm very well, thanks. It's been a few months. What, about five months, I think, since we last met to record one of these episodes. Indeed, it's been too long. I mean, just get the vaccine done. Let's

Meet real life. It's been way too long. You know, we're all looking forward to season three. It is coming. I promise you, dear listener, it's coming. But in the meantime, we have another special bonus episode of Conflicted for you. Although before we go straight into it, I just want to say, Eamon, what do you think about my lockdown hair? Well, I don't know. Are you going back to becoming a monk? No.

Obviously, listeners can't see, but my hair has gotten very long during lockdown, with all these various lockdowns. It's halfway to Jesus' hair length, kind of. Well, that's very flattering, I think. Whereas you, of course, in order to record this podcast from home, you're sort of surrounded by suitcases and pillows and blankets to dampen the sound.

Not only that, I exiled the kids all the way to the top floor's bedroom and locked them in. You're being much nicer about your kids. You usually call them the little monsters. Oh, yes. I mean...

Recently, you know, my daughter's school, they asked me that she will be participating in the Nativity's play. The Nativity, or like the story of the birth of Jesus. Indeed. So they asked me, we want her to play, you know, one of the angels. So we want some white clothes and stuff like that. I said, the angels? She should be playing Judas, Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, something like that. The devil who tempted Jesus in the desert. Yeah.

Amen. You're revealing your Islamic credentials, but not your Christian ones. Judas was not at the birth of Christ, neither was Pontius Pilate.

Anyway, we've got a lot to discuss, not just your daughter's nativity play. We are going to spend today discussing something that recently happened in Iran when that country's top nuclear scientist was assassinated, an assassination carried out by Israel's national intelligence agency, Mossad.

This is a major event. Who knows, it could even lead to regional war. So, Amon, obviously the assassination was carried out by Israel because they are very concerned that Iran never acquire a nuclear bomb. Iran's nuclear bomb program is very old from even before the revolution. The Shah of Iran was working on a nuclear bomb program.

It's been a long time coming, this Iranian bomb causing a lot of fear and anxiety around the region and the world. But my question to you is, what is so particularly dangerous about Iran getting a nuclear bomb, especially seeing that Pakistan has the bomb, India has the bomb, Israel sure as hell has not just one but many, many bombs.

And if reports are to be believed, even Saudi Arabia, Iran's great arch nemesis, has access to the bomb through its ally, Pakistan. So if all of these regional powers, all rivals of Iran, have the bomb, why shouldn't Iran have it? Okay, this is a question that will divide many listeners.

And the answer will divide them even more. But nonetheless, we have to think first about the motives. Whenever we look into any country possessing the nuclear weapon, we need to look into the motives as to why this country is seeking to arm itself with nuclear weapons. Okay, so in the example of, say, India. It's because of China. So India has the bomb because China has the bomb. And then Pakistan had the bomb because India had the bomb. You see the domino effect here.

China possessed the bomb and then they invaded India or Kashmir. It was 1962 war between the two countries. So of course China became nuclear and India was always looking at China with trepidation that it is a country that is rather big and populous and could be a real challenge in the future.

So... Yeah, you know you're a populist country when India thinks you're too populist. Indeed. Okay, so I get that. But so Iran's gonna tell me, "Well, you know, the United States has the bomb and they're our great enemy. They're the great Satan after all and they are always trying to destroy us. So we should get the bomb to protect ourselves from the United States. Not to mention Israel has the bomb. They're also our enemy. So we should get the bomb to protect us from Israel."

Indeed, and I will tell you something, this is exactly the argument of North Korea. And in the case of North Korea, it worked. Why? Because as soon as they possessed the bomb, it became very clear that if North Korea were to be invaded,

All they have to do basically is just use their artillery to rein in tactical nuclear weapons on their southern neighbor, and you will have a catastrophe of biblical proportions. So you're saying North Korea used the excuse of defending itself from America to acquire a nuclear bomb, which basically protected itself from needing to reform in all of the ways that

the global community would like it to reform. You're saying the Iranians, they're calculating in a similar way? Well, that is what it looks like to the outside world, but there is a major difference here. Unlike North Korea, unlike Pakistan, unlike China, unlike India, unlike Israel, unlike all of these powers combined, Iran has the habit of developing a technology and then transporting that technology into non-state actives.

I see. Not just selling it, but actually just giving it away to project its power through these proxies. Exactly. The problem with Iran, and this is why I always, whenever I debate with an Iranian friend, I say, look, if you were a nation like Pakistan, behaving like Pakistan or behaving like India or behaving like China, even North Korea, for God's sake, I would have said yes.

Possessing the nuclear weapon makes sense in order to protect your oil wealth and your wealth as a nation and your integrity as a nation from any attempt to divide you or to conquer you or to invade you or anything like that.

But the problem is that Iran has a habit, and it is a well-recorded habit, it's not like conspiracy theory, it's well documented by the UN of all organizations, that Iran transported and transferred military technology that they developed themselves to their own proxies, including technology that is capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

These are various forms of ballistic missiles that Iran has produced and sent to the Houthis of Yemen. I mean, Hezbollah, do they have these ballistic missiles? Yeah, they do. And this is the problem. And they sent to Syria also. So the problem is,

If you already did something that no nation on earth ever did before, which is to arm a non-state actor like the Houthis, an insurgent group that is almost bordering on being a terrorist organization. So if you arm them already with ballistic missiles that could reach 1,400 kilometers in range,

and they were already fired against international civilian airports like Riyadh and even they attempted before to fire at Abu Dhabi and Dubai airports.

So here is the problem is that you already transported a technology that is capable of carrying nuclear weapons. These missiles are nuclear weapon capable ballistic missiles. You're saying then, Ayman, that it's not so much that Iran itself will use the bomb to nuke Israel or nuke Saudi Arabia or whatever. You're saying that the threat is there that Iran would give the bomb to one of its proxies, an even less responsible actor than Iran. Exactly, because Iran...

It's not out of the realm of the possibility that Iran develops a nuclear weapon that is capable of being detonated at surface level.

hidden in a suitcase or hidden in a container or a barrel or whatever and then shipped and smuggled into any city around the world and then Iran could easily phone up, let's say DC and say "Hey, we have three nuclear devices in DC, in New York, in Seattle, in San Francisco, we will obliterate you to heaven if we don't get to the table and negotiate a new power arrangement in the Middle East."

I mean, this is the problem is that we are dealing not with a government that is displayed rational playing by the rules. This is one reason why this is, by the way, this is only one reason why the West and Israel and everyone else is worried about Iran. I'd say it's reason enough. I think we can take it. Let's just we'll take your word for it. It would be very, very bad if Iran got the bomb.

For a while now, beginning in 2009 when Barack Obama became president of the United States, there was a concerted effort to rein in Iran's nuclear bomb ambitions and that sort of manifested itself eventually in what's called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the famous Iran nuclear deal that Obama negotiated that was agreed by the UN Security Council and Iran in July 2015.

Now this nuclear deal, Obama's Iran nuclear deal, it was an attempt to, you know, what? It was an attempt to stop Iran from getting the bomb? No. Even Obama himself and everyone else said this will delay Iran's ability to obtain nuclear weapons for anywhere between 10 and 15 years. So the deal just delayed the bomb. It didn't prevent the bomb. So why was it such a good deal in Obama's eyes? Why would he want to broker such a deal?

One of the mysteries of Obama's foreign policy, which was disastrous, you know, many people, even from the liberal and the left persuasion, believe basically that Obama's foreign policy was full of contradictions and incredibly naive, to say the least. But in his opinion, or at least this is what I suspect was his opinion, he wanted to create a

a sort of balance of power in the Middle East where Israel is no longer, and Saudi Arabia along with it, are no longer basically the favorite children of America who can do whatever they want, and that Iran, we should acknowledge that it has legitimate claim to influence in the region. Unfortunately,

Obama more or less sounded like, you know, Ambassador Kennedy just prior to World War II. This is JFK's father, Joseph Kennedy. Exactly. So Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, he believed that if you give Hitler what he wants, I mean, there will be no war. The problem with Iran is that, I know, like, I mean, it's a cliche, you always, like, invoke the Nazis of the 1930s. Have you just pulled the Nazi card already, Eamon? Yeah.

Yeah, but look, we are not talking here about ideology. We're talking about political realities of the ground. And that is the fact that Iran is using the Shia minorities in the region as the means for expanding that influence.

And the problem is, if that influence was positive, I would be 100% for it. Well, I think we've established Iran's negative influence in the region. I'm more interested in Obama. So you're saying he's naive. He wants to create something like a balance of power in the region between...

Iran on the one side and Israel stroke the Gulf Arabs on the other side. And you think that might be a good idea, but Iran is just not the sort of actor you can rely on to maintain balance because they actually want to upset the balance of power in order to reach something like hegemonic status. Well, I mean, Obama always dismissed the eschatological nature

of the Iranian regime. The whole Western foreign policy apparatus seems to overlook, as you've said many times and conflicted, overlook the eschatological underpinnings of the Iranian regime. The idea that the Mahdi is coming back,

The end of times are coming and Iran plays a key role in ushering in these end of times. We've talked about that a lot on Conflicted, of course. Exactly. So the trouble here is that Obama thought that, no, no, no, no, they don't have any, all of this talk of eschatology is just only as a

lip service to their faith they're trying to manipulate their own masses but in reality if we play along we will discover that they are pragmatic people who only just want influence in the region they want to have what they believe basically is their right is to be a powerful influential nation in the Middle East

And Obama pursued that really, really doggedly. And in fact, more and more it's coming to light that in order to achieve his nuclear deal, he did turn a blind eye to a large extent to a lot of Iranian bad actions, and not just in the region, but in the world. I mean, I think that the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States, ignored Hezbollah's global drug trafficking business, which is the means where they get lots of their money. And

The money that was given to Iran as part of the deal was largely spent on furthering to arm and extend its proxies across the region. So, you know, Obama knew that this kind of stuff was going on, but he thought it was so important to get this deal that he just ignored it.

Yes, because unfortunately when you don't understand a region and you have already pre-existing notions of minority equal good, majority equal bad, therefore Shia and Sufis and Muslim Brotherhood equal good,

good, the Sunni monarchies equal bad. If you deal with it from this, you know, naive point of view... It's sort of a binary, a strict binary, kind of, if you have power, you're probably bad. If you're fighting for power, you're probably good. Yeah. It's very simplistic. Exactly. But you see, this is exactly what, you know, I have always struggled to explain the politics of the Middle East, you know, to people in the West,

who really believe that if someone is a minority, that really means that they deserve sympathy, don't understand that minority doesn't equal good and that majority doesn't equal bad. Certainly the Iran nuclear deal was not greeted fulsomely by America's allies in the region, particularly Israel and the Gulf Arabs.

So how did, let's say, Saudi Arabia, your home country, how did it greet the Iran nuclear deal? I mean, in the end, it sort of went along with it, but it wasn't happy. No one was happy. No one was happy about it in the region, except Iran, of course. But...

the Saudis thought about it and they thought, okay, look, it will fall apart because we know the Iranians, you know, it's in their nature to renege on every, you know, agreement that ever happened with them in the past. So they will find a way because at the end of the day, they need to get to that level. They need to get to that level of power. So they will still push against

against the international community in Syria, they will still push against the international community in Yemen. They will behave in such a bad way that it will lose them the trust that they are gaining. If that is what the Saudis were thinking at the time, it seems that that has proved to be prescient because earlier this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency itself said, having inspected Iran's nuclear program in line with the deal,

that it has enriched 12 times more nuclear uranium than the deal allows. So the Iranians definitely, it seems at least, didn't intend to follow by the rules of the deal anyway. I mean, the idea that

Iran was going to abide completely by the rules of the agreement and it's complete naivety. I mean, the people who don't understand what Taqiyya is. Taqiyya, this is a principle associated with Shia thought, which says that a Shia Muslim is allowed to hide his faith from others.

hide his true intentions even. In order to protect himself and his community from what would be considered to be oppression. This is very different from the Sunni understanding, which in a way is more like the Christian understanding, where you're sort of expected to be very proud and open with your faith, even if it means that you are persecuted. Exactly. Just look at, for example, Al-Qaeda and ISIS. I mean, they were never coy about what they wanted to do. No one would ever accuse ISIS of being coy. Exactly.

Exactly. But in the case of Iran, the idea is, okay, let them think that we are abiding by the rules, we will do everything they want, we will allow certain facilities to be inspected.

But in reality, they were able beneath the ground in Natanz and Fordow and other places to enrich 1200% more than they were allowed under the points of the agreement. Well, that agreement, which was not greeted with much joy throughout the world, was ultimately, if not ripped up, it was certainly stymied by Donald Trump, who pulled out of the deal in 2018, reimposed sanctions on Iran,

which not only immediately strained relations with the EU further, who were also signatories to the deal and continue to support it, but caused the Iranian economy to immediately tank. And the Iranian economy has just gone from bad to worse, which has caused, I think as Trump intended, a lot of unhappiness there. But the real thing is that now that Donald Trump has lost the election and Joe Biden is coming to power,

and has been reconstituting Barack Obama's, basically, his entire foreign policy team. So the thing now is people are wondering, will Biden sign back up to the deal or renegotiate a similar deal? That's what people are afraid of. And as far as I am aware, Israel and the Arabs are saying, not over our dead body. And for this reason, this attack took place. The origins of the attack will take us back to 2018.

So if you remember in 2018, in early 2018, the Israelis carried out one of the most audacious intelligence operations outside of Israel. This is when they got their hands on an enormous cache of secret nuclear program documents from within the heart of the Iranian regime. And they just got it out of the country somehow. Exactly. I think, what, half a ton of materials?

the archives, the papers, the files, every nuclear scientist who was working on the nuclear program. And there they discovered, of course, basically they smuggled the whole thing outside of Iran. I mean, that is, it's incredible. But of course, they shared this immediately with their American and European allies. So Israel smuggles these documents out of Iran, right?

revealing to the world, incontrovertibly, that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program. Now, in the meantime, some very interesting geopolitical developments have occurred in the region, which is basically more and more Arab states coming out openly as allies of the State of Israel. This is a new thing. This year, especially when the Emirates said,

Yeah, okay, we're establishing diplomatic relations, normal diplomatic relations with Israel. Everyone says, and it's true of course, that this is all about the Iranian threat as they perceive it and countering that threat. Now this, would you say, is just an epoch-changing moment in the recent history of the region, this thaw, open thaw in relations between the Arabs and Israel? It was inevitable. I think...

In Israel, you know, if you talk to people in Tel Aviv, they will tell you basically that Iran is both a curse and a blessing. It's a curse that it is a significant threat to the national security of Israel, whether through, you know, through its own military might or the might of Hezbollah just to the north and the might of Hamas, you know, just to the south in Gaza. But it's a blessing that it pushed the oil-rich Arab countries to our laps. Israel's laps, you mean? Yeah.

it seems that there is an enthusiasm among the people themselves, you know, large segments of the Gulf Arab populations, you know, because of the fear from Iran and Iran's intentions,

they were willing to embrace the Israelis because as far as they are concerned the Israelis never killed a single Saudi or an Emirati or a Bahraini. As far as they are concerned it is Iran threatening them through the Houthis, through Hezbollah cells in the region in order to destabilize these countries and Iran of course has ambition always there. That is the reason why.

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This is becoming more and more public that Israel is as allied with the Gulf Arabs and other countries. I mean, Sudan seems to be coming on board as well, which is an amazing achievement. And all of this most recently has manifested itself in a meeting that occurred on the 22nd of November 2020 this year, a meeting in northwestern Saudi Arabia in this place called Neom,

which is yet to be built, but in the planning stages, a futuristic city that kind of symbolizes the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, MBS, his vision for the future. So at NEOM, a meeting occurs between MBS, Mike Pompeo, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of State, and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

This meeting has been called in order to inform MBS and the Saudis about a planned assassination of this Iranian nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Who was Mohsen Fakhrizadeh? It's enough to say, I think, he was a former member of the IRGC. This is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which indicates that he's no ordinary Iranian. He's an ideologically committed Iranian, committed to the revolution and its goals. And he is the so-called grandfather of Iran's nuclear program.

Why target him? Why assassinate him? And there are lots of other nuclear scientists in Iran. Was it just to send a message? Well, first of all, regarding that meeting, I don't think they informed the Saudis that there will be an assassination of a particular person. They just informed them that we are going to take an action against their nuclear program, but be on the alert because

Keep your air force and your air defense ready just in case Iran lash out and retaliate. So if the Americans or the Israelis are going to attack Iran...

In Iran, they have to warn the Saudis in advance because the assumption is that it's very likely that any retaliation would target Saudi Arabia. Yeah, and because Saudi Arabia is hosting two, at least, bases for the U.S., as well as other allied nations like France and the U.K., therefore, any attack could target them. And also because the air defense umbrella is

Of the Saudis that include also the Bahrainis and the Bahrainis hosting the fifth fleet of the US Navy and therefore it is important for the Saudis to know in advance I want to focus on this scientist, Mohran Fakhrizadeh Why assassinate him as I asked? Why assassinate him? Why is he important to kill? Well, because he was the one who was on behalf of the nuclear program and the weaponization of that program He was the one who was reporting directly to the Ayatollah himself

So he is someone, just like Qasem Soleimani was responsible for Iran's expansionist conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen. Dear listener, Qasem Soleimani, who was the subject of episode one of season two of Conflicted, was the head of the Quds Force, whom the Americans assassinated in January of this year.

Yes. So like Qasem Soleimani, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was a key member of, let's say, the inner circle of the security apparatus of the Iranian regime. This is the equivalent. Let me put it this way. Imagine if in April of 1945,

Okay. Are you pulling the Hitler card again? Not the Hitler card. I'm talking about the World War II. Okay. Yeah. Imagine that someone would assassinate Oppenheimer. The father of the nuclear bomb program, yeah. In America. Imagine if he was assassinated.

along with his team or along with his friends, just before, months before the Americans were about to experiment on the bomb. It would have delayed the program basically for four, five, six months, possibly a year. But nonetheless, it would have shifted

shaken the White House at the time. It would have shaken the American administration at the time. It would have... And that's exactly what Israel and its allies were trying to do by assassinating Fakhrizadeh. But I want to ask you, how did they find him? I mean, this guy is not, you know, you can't look him up in the phone book. This guy was seriously underground. There were, I mean, there were no images of him.

No, there was one image by mistake. Since he was a young man, you know, he was in his late 50s, was he? Early 60s? Early 60s, yeah. How did they find him? By, you know, by complete mistake. There were two things. First of all, you remember that cache? Yeah, the huge cache of documents that Mossad smuggled out of Iran. Exactly. You know, it had a file of him with an older picture.

And that older picture, it was displayed by Benjamin Netanyahu during that presentation in 2018. So Netanyahu holds up a picture, an oldish picture of this guy. This guy, he's enemy number one. This guy's the Oppenheimer of Iran. Exactly. Then what happened is by mistake earlier this year, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was meeting with the country's top scientists from all different fields during the COVID issue.

So what happened is Fakhrizadeh was actually sitting just behind the main camera, the main TV camera that was focusing across the room on Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the photographer of the

National News Agency of Iran was taking pictures across the room and he by mistake... It's a stills photography. He's just snapping photos for propaganda purposes so that they could be on the front pages of the newspaper the next day. Exactly. That photo appeared just briefly on the Iranian National News Agency website. Then it was taken down, but by that time it was too late. A photo inadvertently caught...

Fakhrizadeh, who shouldn't have been... obviously everyone knows you must never take this guy's picture. If you accidentally take a picture, you must destroy it. You must never publish it. This happened accidentally. Exactly. But the Israelis are always watching for Iran to make a mistake. Exactly. They snapped it. They were able to confirm his identity. Once you have an old picture of someone,

Through facial recognition technology you can confirm that this is the latest picture of this man. But how does having a photograph of Fakhrizadeh, even a recent photograph, how does that help them track him down and slay him in the street? How does that work? Well, it helps because when you want to assassinate someone you need to know his facial features. I mean, that's the first thing. Okay, that's him getting into the car.

That's him driving to his place. That's him. So what will happen is that Israel, just like, you know, you remember when we were talking about in the same episode, we were talking about the privatization of intelligence. Yeah. You remember in the same episode where we talked about Qasem Soleimani and I said to you basically that countries like the US, like Israel, they rely a lot on a network of local collaborators.

And, you know, a country like Iran with lots of people hating the regime, you are no short of any collaborators who will work with you because they are enemies of the regime. They love their country, but they just hate the regime that is there. So that's normal. It happens.

So, Israel, there is no question about it, have networks of spies, saboteurs, and agents, and operatives who are working for Israel at different levels, whether military, information, you know, and... Okay, fine. So what do they do? They photocopy this photo of Al-Khrizada. They hand it to their spies inside Iran and say, find him? I mean, that's hard to do. That's hard to do. Yeah.

It's more sophisticated than that. All you need to do is get someone as close as possible into the nuclear program. How do we know they have people inside the nuclear program? Because of two incidents before. The first one is when they stole the whole information archive. Yeah, in 2018. Yeah, yeah. That's a big one. How did they know about that? They have someone inside. Second is when they were able from inside to blow up

the upper level of the enrichment plant at Natanz facility uranium enrichment facility so that happened from the inside so therefore they already have people inside who would have recognized okay yes that's a man who's leading us

He is using different pseudonyms. We call him Dr. you know, whatever, you know, Majeed or whatever. Let's call him Dr. Strangelove. Okay. Dr. Strangelove. Okay. So Dr. Strangehate is someone basically who, you know, is someone who drives this car. This is the car registration. So you see that you start to collect suddenly, you know, the threads.

this is how many people follow him, this is how many cars go with him, oh by the way, he has a house in this location. Once they get to that house, that's it, everything is easy from there, because if they know where his principal residence is, they can follow him to other residences, they can follow him to his offices, to his briefings, and then it's a bit by bit, they have a full picture, and then they decide where to do it.

So five days after the meeting in Neom between the U.S. Secretary of State, the Israeli Prime Minister, and the Saudi Crown Prince, on the 27th of November, 2020, Fakhrizad is assassinated. Now, in today's London Times, there is a description, a

official description by the Iranian regime of what happened and I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear from you if you think it's true. It says, "The head of the Iranian military nuclear program was killed by 13 bullets fired with such accuracy by a remote-controlled machine gun that no one else died."

The machine gun, which the Iranians say was mounted on a pickup truck and controlled by artificial intelligence via a satellite feed, was said to have identified Fakhrizadeh by facial recognition. Fakhrizadeh had his spine severed in the attack, but the attack was so accurate that his wife was unhurt.

Now, this is actually a radically different story from the one the Iranian government first said when they said that 12 assassins ambushed Fakhrizadeh's car after a pickup truck had exploded nearby to distract security services.

So this is quite a radical change of story and it makes the Mossad seem to be even more invincible than most people would have thought. What do you think the truth is, Ayman? Well, the truth is somewhere in between. I mean, there was no question that there was a bomb to begin with at the beginning and that there were six casualties in total. By casualties, you mean dead people? Yeah, but the targeting was of the... not of his car because, yeah, his wife was there.

But the targeting was of the car that was going behind him which contained the protection team. I see. So they basically bombed his bodyguards. Yes. And in the kind of chaos, men with machine guns jump out and shoot Fakhrizadeh dead. Of course. That's exactly what happened because his own two sons said exactly this is what happened. So why would the Iranians be saying it was AI, satellite, machine gun, drone...

Iron Man flew up and then Thor brandished his hammer and smashed. Why are the Iranians actually bigging up the Mossad's powers? No matter what, they don't want to say to their fellow Iranians that we have Iranians working for the Mossad. Ah, so they want to deny that the Mossad has inside help. Okay.

But even if we believe this outlandish story of a satellite-operated machine gun mounted on a truck, who actually smuggled that machine gun in? Who put it on that truck? And who placed the truck there? And who knew about the entire movement, except if there were Iranians working for the Mossad? If I had to guess, I'd say it was a cooperation between Captain America and the Incredible Hulk. Now...

Fakhrizad is assassinated and there doesn't seem to be much immediate fallout. I guess if I was an Iranian, I might think, come on, regime. This is egg on your face again. I mean, you can't even keep...

your own top nuclear scientists alive. You can't even keep the head of the Quds Force alive. What is wrong? Are you just incompetent nincompoops? Let me put it this way. Iran was in between a rock and a hard place. That is by the fact that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. Damned if you retaliate, damned if you don't. But the lack of retaliation is the lesser of the two evils because if you retaliate,

You give Netanyahu and Trump exactly what they wanted, which is for them to... Do you hear kids? There's the little monster. Okay, say, hello, dear listener. Not yet a natural broadcaster, Eamon. Maybe she... So Iran was in a situation where it's damned if you retaliate, damned if you don't retaliate.

If you do retaliate, you give Trump and Netanyahu exactly what they want. You know, it's a gift from heaven to them. You know, they will just bomb you into oblivion. Exactly. You give them the exact pretext. But if you don't, you appear weak in front of your people, in front of your enemies, in front of everyone. So Iran has chosen to appear weak. Yeah, appear weak because they are weak. You know, what can they do?

If you can't retaliate against Israel and expect that the Israelis basically will take it on the chin. You say this, Ayman, and you seem to be undermining what you were saying at the beginning of this recording. Is Iran actually a huge threat then? I mean, are they just cowardly nincompoops? Clearly, Israel has the upper hand. America, as you say, could bomb it to oblivion if it wanted to. The problem is, this is how they behave.

while they are weak, God help us, how will they behave when they are strong with a nuclear weapon? That is why they are trying to get to the nuclear weapon where they can do whatever they want at will. Because that's it, like, you know, I mean, standing against them will risk

not just only a nuclear war, but it will risk them giving the bomb to a third party without any ability to retaliate against, who will smuggle the bomb into your cities and blow it up. So what do you see around the corner then? I mean, just in the near future, are we talking regional war here? Is this assassination going to lead to war? Is it going to lead to more assassinations? Well, I was told, and in good authority, that this is not the last provocation.

and that the next six weeks will witness more provocations against the Iranians, not only inside Iran but outside of it, and this will continue in order to dismantle their ability to reach that milestone of having a bomb. That's the first thing. The second thing is...

Even if Biden wants to resume the nuclear agreement that Obama negotiated, he will know that this time it will be a united front where the Gulf Arabs, as well as Israel, as well as Egypt, all of these countries coming together to present a formidable front, saying basically no.

Since the last agreement, Iran behaved badly in the region, especially in Yemen and Syria, and therefore we need you to renegotiate something else. So the assassination is not just sending a message to the Iranians. It's actually sending a message to the president-elect. It's saying, look, buddy, don't even think about it. We're not going to roll over like we did last time. We're not just going to nod and smile like we did to Obama. We will oppose you.

Exactly. You read Biden's article in the New York Times. It's very clear. He said that he will come back to the agreement, but they must include now the ballistic missiles and the long strategic weapons that Iran is using. Now, there is a very good reason for it. Iran, for the past five years, has been firing ballistic missiles at Saudi Arabia, as well as cruise missiles that were accurate in targeting the oil facilities.

Who was helping the Saudis to some extent with detection, especially of these missiles, the Americans, but also there was an Israeli component to the American help.

The reason for that is because the Israelis are as worried about what Iran is experimenting with and developing because the testing of these weapons in the Yemen war has enabled Iran to reach a level where they had the new missile called the Quds 2. The Quds 2. Yeah, the Quds 2 is a cruise missile that actually fly over the water, over the Red Sea,

and was able to avoid detection by the Saudis and then it just veered. This is an attack that occurred the day after the meeting in Neom. On the day of the meeting, on the evening of the meeting. Oh, the evening, I was reported the next day. I said the evening of that, the very same day, the Houthis fire a cruise missile

which avoids flying over the land. Yes. It flies low down over the water, and then at the very last minute, it does a 90-degree turn, and it attacks an Aramco oil installation in Jeddah. Is that right? Exactly. And this is an indication, actually, both of two things, the sophistication of the Iranian missile program and the program of its proxies, but also it's an indication that the Saudi air defense system is extremely advanced.

good. The Saudis have managed to basically intercept and shoot down most of these missiles that have been fired over land. So they're developing new strategies to get around the Saudi air defense system. Exactly. They will fire from the coast in Yemen and then it will fly over the Red Sea all the way. When it comes parallel with the target on land, it will just veer off towards the target and attack.

This is the problem here is that such capabilities, you know, given to third party, given to a, you know, a ragtag militia, you know, like the Houthis. So basically, when we look at a radical fanatic group like this in possession of such weapons that could target water installations, oil installations, it can target shipping and, you know, and the maritime routes, etc.

We have to ask ourselves, what irresponsible nation did this? And we all know it's Iran. So can the international community, and this is, we come back to the first premise of our discussion, it's about trust. We trust North Korea more than we trust Iran. Why? Because North Korea, Pakistan, India, and China, all of them pursued the weapon based on self-preservation.

However, for Iran, it's not about self-preservation, unfortunately. Well, this was meant to be a quick bonus episode. As ever, Eamon, you're full of ideas, full of facts, full of interesting stories, and full of great analysis. I hope, dear listener, that you've enjoyed the return of Conflicted, if only for a bonus episode. But I promise you, before too long, there will be a season three, and it's going to be a corker. It's going to blow your minds and expand your imaginations to encompass conflict.

more than you could possibly believe. So, Eamon, lovely to see you, lovely to hear you. Lovely to see you too. Lovely to hear the little monster screaming in the background a couple of times. Good luck with that. And dear listener, we will see you in the new year. We'll see you soon. Goodbye. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. It's produced by Sandra Ferrari, edited by Jake Otajewicz.

Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.