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Click on Prem Thakker : ‘Hello everyone. Sending you all wishes of safety and care wherever you are today. Thank you all for joining us in another Zateo town hall. Today the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, setting off a series of events that are still unfolding as we speak. One such attack by the Israeli and US governments killed over 80 students reportedly at a girl school. Iran's retaliation included attacks on US bases in the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, and and so forth. Debris has endangered civilians in these countries and now Israeli officials are claiming that they say that the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead. History, as we see, is being written and it's not yet clear who's going to be left holding the pen. We will be live for the next hour. Please feel free to share questions with us wherever you happen to be watching. We'll try to get to as many as we can. Later, I will be joined by Nagar Mortazawi and Tria Parsi. But first, I will be joined by my colleagues Mehdi Hasan and Swin Subub saying, [Question to Mehdi Hasan] My how are you reacting to things? I know things are changing by the second, but when you first saw the strike and now, what are you thinking about?"
Mehdi Hasan: Yeah, I saw the strikes last night. I was in a hotel room in Atlanta heading here to Texas for an event and I was uhI wasn't sure what it was, right, Prem? Because a lot of the reporting, including from Swin, who's going to give us his take in a moment, was is this going to be a smaller strike first and then they do a big strike later. Is this Trump's way of bringing the quote unquote regime to the table? Even though they were in the middle of negotiations, even though hours before these strikes, the Omani foreign minister, the Omanis, for those of you who don't know, don't tend to talk very much in public. The foreign minister of Oman went on American TV and said, "You know what? The Iranians have pretty much agreed to everything the Americans want. They've gone beyond what Barack Obama got from the Iran deal." And yet, they still attacked, which everyone should keep in mind when they hear American officials saying this was about the nuclear program. A complete load of BULLSHIT! This is a huge attack. Trump called it a massive wave of attacks last night.And Tom Cotton, Senator Tom Cotton, the very hawkish Republican chair of the Intel Committee has said today, "This is an attack that won't end in days. It's going to last weeks." So, we are looking at a major attack. I've always worried that a war with Iran would make the war with Iraq look like a walk in the park. I hope I'm proven wrong. Something you said, Prem, stuck out to me, which is, you know, history's being written, but we don't know how it's going to be written. The problem we have, and I would urge all Zateo subscribers to keep this in mind who are watching right now, is the media are going to tell you all. sorts of things about who's up, who's down, who's won, who's lost. It's meaningless. This is the first few hours of a major, major war. Remember what happened after Iraq? Remember George Bush standing on a ship saying, "Mission aAccomplished." Remember the people who mocked some of us saying, "See, it all worked out amazingly. We took over the country. We got Saddam….Iraq was the disaster it was." Same with Afghanistan. Same with Libya. This early basking of triumph doesn't always last. Let's see what happens with American soldiers. Trump has talked about American soldiers losing their lives possibly.…..’
