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Transcript context

…There we go, agreement. The following is a debate between Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz on the topic of Iran and Israel. Scott Horton is author and editorial director of Ntwar.com, host of the Scott Horton Show and for the past three decades, a staunch critic of US foreign policy and military interventionism. Mark Dubowitz is a chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of the Iran Breakdown Podcast, and he has been a leading expert on Iran and its nuclear program for over 20 years. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. If you do, I promise to work extremely hard to always bring you nuanced, long-form conversations with a very wide range of interesting people from all walks of life, and now, dear friends, here’s Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz. Gentlemen. All right, it’s great to have you here. Let’s try to have a nuanced discussion/debate and maybe even steal man-opposing perspectives as much as possible. All right, as a stands now, there’s a barely stable ceasefire between Iran and Israel. Let’s maybe rewind a little bit. Can we first lay out the context for this Iran-Israel war and try to describe the key events that happened over the past two weeks, maybe even a bit of the deep roots of the conflict? Sure. First of all, thanks so much for having me on. Great to be on with Scott. I know he and I don’t agree on a lot, but I certainly admire the passion and the dedication to stopping wars. So that’s something we want to talk about. So let’s talk about how we got to this war. So President Trump comes into office and immediately lays out that his Iran strategy is maximum pressure on the regime and he will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and he makes that clear. Consistently, I think made it very clear during his first term, made a clear throughout his career and thus begins this process with the Iranians, which has kind of multiple tracks, but the one that Trump sees most interested in at the time is the diplomatic track, and he makes it very clear from the beginning and a sort of Oval Office remark. He says the Iranians can either blow up their nuclear program under US supervision or someone’s going to blow it up for them, and even though at the time we think Netanyahu is really trying to push the president into a military campaign, well, I’m sure we’ll talk about that throughout the podcast. The president authorizes his lead negotiator and close friend Steve Witkoff to begin outreach to the Iranians, and that’s begun the Oman round and it’s Oman round because it’s taking place in Oman with mediation efforts by the Omanis. There are five rounds of negotiations with the Iranians, and through the course of those negotiations, the US finally puts on the table an offer for Iran. We’ll talk about the details of that. The Iranians reject that offer, and we’re now into the sixth round, which is supposed to take place on a Sunday. On the Thursday before the Sunday, the Israelis strike and they go after in a rather devastating campaign over a matter of now 12 days. They go over and go after Iran’s nuclear program, the key nuclear sites, going after weapons scientists who are responsible for building Iran’s nuclear weapons program and also go after top IRGC Islamic Revolutionary guard commanders as well as top military commanders, and yet there’s still this one site that is the most fortified site. It’s called Fordow. It’s an enrichment facility. It’s buried under a mountain, goes about 80 meters deep. It’s encased in concrete, it has advanced centrifuges and highly enriched uranium. The Israelis can do damage to it, but it’s clear it’s going to take the United States and our military power in order to severely degrade this facility, and Trump orders United States Air Force to fly B-II bombers and drop 12 massive ordnance penetrators, which are these 30,000 pound bombs on Fordow in order to, as he said, obliterate it, more realistically to severely degrade it. So that happens. B-II bombers and drop 12 massive ordnance penetrators, which are these 30,000 pound bombs on Fordow in order to, as he said, obliterate it, more realistically to severely degrade it. So that happens. And then he offers the Iranians as he’s been offering all the way through. You have an option, you can go back to Oman, I told you Oman, and you decided to force me to go to Fordow, but now we can go back for negotiations, and he forces a ceasefire on the Iranians, gets the Israelis to agree and that’s where we are today. That’s where as you say, a tentative ceasefire that just came into effect and we’ll see now if the Iranians decide to take President Trump on his repeated offers, join him in Oman for another round of negotiations. Scott, is there some stuff you want to add to that?…

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