Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East | Lex Fridman Podcast #473

- If we wanna avoid wars, we have to have serious deterrence

because our enemies need to understand,

we will use selective, focused,

overwhelming military power when we are facing threats

like an Iranian nuclear weapon.

- I'm not seeing the peace through strength.

I'm seeing permanent militarism

and permanent war through strength.

- Do you ever, ever hold our adversaries responsible

or do you just don't think we have any adversaries?

- The easiest kind of nuke to make

outta uranium is a simple gun type nuke.

- Are you saying that Mossad fabricated it?

- Yeah. - That's where he's claiming.

Here's the offer, take it or leave it.

Zero enrichment, full dismantlement

- Through the Iranians told the IAEA,

you can inspect any five out of 10 facilities here,

carte blanche, go ahead. And they did and found nothing.

- Experts in Iran's nuclear program,

including David Albright, who actually saw the archive,

went in there, wrote a whole book on it.

And there's a lot of detail about

how Iran had an active nuclear weapons program

called AMAD to build five nuclear weapons.

- I have to refute virtually everything he just said,

which is completely false.

- I mean, really everything?

There was not one thing I said that was true?

Just one thing.

- I mean Iran is a nation over there somewhere.

You got that part right.

- 22 years of working on Iran and I got that right,

- But do you know the population of Iran?

- [Mark] 92 million. - Okay.

- Gimme a pound, dude.

- [Lex] 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 antiwar.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 Defensive 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 Friedman 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 steel man apposing perspectives

as much as possible.

All right, as it 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 Lex, 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 wanna 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 have a nuclear weapon.

And he makes that clear consistently,

I think made it very clear during his first term,

made it 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

in a sort of oval office remark.

He says, the Iranians can either blow up

their nuclear program under US supervision,

or someone's gonna blow it up for them.

And even though, you know,

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 thus 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 weapon 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 Fordo. 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 gonna take the United States

and our military power in order to severely

degrade this facility.

And Trump orders United States Air Force

to fly B2 bombers and drop 12 massive ordinance penetrators,

which are these 30,000 pound bombs on Fordo

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 Fordo,

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 wanna add to that?

- Sure. Well, he started with January, right?

Trump's second term here.

And the maximum pressure campaign.

Essentially as should be clear to everyone now.

All these negotiations were just a pretext for war.

Trump and his entire cabinet must have known

that the Ayatollah is not going to give up

all the enrichment.

That is their latent nuclear deterrent.

Their posture has been heavily implied,

don't attack us and we won't make a nuke.

While America's position was, if you make a nuke,

if you start to, we'll attack you.

So it's the perfect standoff.

But what happened was, and you might remember

a few weeks ago, there was some talk about,

well, maybe we could find a way to compromise

on some enrichment.

Maybe they could do a consortium with the Saudis.

Maybe there's some way that we...

And then nope, the pressure came down.

No enrichment, zero enrichment. But that's a red line.

Everyone knows that there's...

And even now it's probably less likely than ever

that they're going to give up enrichment.

Sure, they bombed Fordo, but they didn't destroy

every last centrifuge in that place.

And the Iranians are already announcing

that they're already begun construction

on another facility under a taller mountain

buried even deeper.

And you know, they figured out

how to enrich uranium hexafluoride gas,

you know, what, 20 years ago now.

And they will always be able to,

and this is the slippery slope that we're on

with these wars.

Is, in fact, I saw our friend here on TV the other day

as he almost pretty much just implied there,

saying, well now Trump has to go in.

You know, we were told

it's just Israel doing it, don't worry.

But then no Trump has to hit Fordo,

or else now they'll break out toward a nuclear weapon.

So in for a penny, in for a pound, in for a ton.

And now once we bomb Fordo again and Natanz again

and the new facility again, then it'll be decided

that nope, as Benjamin Netanyahu said the other day,

you know, what would really solve this problem?

If we just kill the Ayatollah, then everything will be fine.

Then we'll have a regime change and then what?

Then we'll have a civil war

with Bin Ladenites again in the catbird seat,