Episode Details

When it comes to telling stories about what I did in my weekend, I thought I had a pretty good one, but Donald Trump takes the cake. Bombing the hell out of Iran and taking out the Ayatollah Khamenei and other key members of the ruling theocracy surely trumps what most of us did.

As you will know by now, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran beginning Saturday. There were talks going on between Washington and Tehran over Iran's nuclear programme, or what remains of it. But the US and Israel decided the talk was going nowhere, and so on Saturday the strikes began.

Iran responded to the attacks with missile and air strikes across the region, including in Israel, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq, creating havoc across the Middle East. Hundreds have been killed, the majority in Iran. Despite that, that's nowhere near as many have been killed Iranians as have been killed by their own government's agents in the form of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

Donald Trump says the operation is ahead of schedule. Commentators have said it's difficult to know what will happen next in Iran, what the outcome of taking out the top tier of Iran's rulers will bring about. But it's difficult to know what President Trump's endgame is too. We don't know what's going to happen next with him, as Middle East correspondent at The Economist and political author Gregg Carlstrom said this morning on the Mike Hosking Breakfast.

We've heard wildly different stories from Donald Trump about what he's trying to achieve here. His video message announcing the the war on Saturday morning suggested that the aim was regime change, that he wanted Iranians to come out into the streets and overthrow the government and take control in Iran. But then in an interview with The Atlantic magazine that was published just about an hour ago, he said that the Iranians want to talk, and so he's going to talk to them.

Maybe there's a diplomatic deal that he can make with this regime that just a day ago he was suggesting to overthrow. So I think it's hard to assess whether this is, you know, successful or not from the American perspective because it's not entirely clear what the Americans want.

Indeed, or what will happen next. It's an ongoing situation. There is apparently a complex but clear process to select a successor to Iran's Supreme Leader, who was also the Commander in Chief. In line with Iran's constitution, a three member interim leadership council is now in charge. They will rule until the body tasked with selecting the top cleric, the Assembly of Experts, completes its work. They can choose an individual or they can choose a leadership council.

Trump just a few hours ago told a reporter from The Atlantic that the country's new leadership, so it would be this interim leadership council, wants to talk with him. He plans to do that. He said they want to talk, I've agreed to talk, so I'll be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long. There is no great love amongst the people of Iran for the current regime.

There are reports of Iranian citizens rejoicing in the streets in the midst of the strikes, ecstatic that the Ayatollah is gone. And you can understand why, as I referenced, since the beginning of the 25 26 Iranian protests, there have been widespread massacres of civilians at the behest of the Iranian government. According to the Iranian government, oh, we've only killed 3,117 which is a hell of a lot more than the combined US Israeli air strikes. The people themselves say we think it's around 36 and a half thousand machine gunned down in the streets, making these among the largest massacres in the modern history of Iran.

There's been a near total internet shutdown by Iranian authorities as part of their crackdown on the protests, restricting c