Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestis Politics Special on US-Israeli attacks on Iran.

Operation Epic Fury is underway.

Sounds like a very much something written by Donald Trump or Hexeth.

And to think that just two days ago in Geneva, there were talks going on,

and the Amani mediator was heading to Washington to report on progress. And now we are with some

pretty major bombing underway. Rory, where do you want to start? Well, I think let's start with,

for people who are interested in a kind of granular US view, maybe look back at the

recent leading interview that we did with Rob Malley. And just to remind people who are

listening, Rob Malley, was the lead negotiator on the JCPOA, which was the old Iran nuclear deal,

and was Obama's point man and then Biden's point man on Iran. And we obviously got him on because the

US fleet has been gathering around Iran for months now, much in the way that it did in Venezuela.

So people remember there was a lot of force of arms around Venezuela, people very concerned that

this enormous American military, naval and air presence and marine presence had ended up around Venezuela,

but for weeks nothing really happened, and then the strike occurred.

And the same pattern roughly has been followed in Iran.

So over the last weeks and months, more and more

American assets have been moved into the region. And there was a real sense, actually, even when

the strike happened in Venezuela, of people saying, oh, I'm surprised at Venezuela. I thought they

would be doing Iran first.

And when we did a recording, I think, a month ago, we were talking about why it might not have happened yet.

So there was a speculation that Israel felt it wasn't quite ready.

I'm not getting into the rights or wrongs of this yet.

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