This is CNN Breaking News.

Welcome to the lead. I'm Jake Tapper, and we start with Breaking News, the war on Iran.

It's getting more expansive and more expensive and more complicated by the hour.

And the United States exit plan remains unclear as of now.

Right now, Iran's retaliatory strikes on countries across the Middle East continue,

putting millions in harm's

way and stranding American travelers just in the last few hours. The grounds of the U.S. consulate in

Dubai in the UAE were struck by a suspected Iranian drone. You can see the smoke rising above that

strike in this image. This is the U.S. embassies in Beirut, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are all closed. The latter

in Saudi Arabia was also hit by suspected Iranian drones. Thankfully, we're told no one was

injured. On top of all that, the U.S. State Department told U.S. citizens to leave more than a dozen

countries in the region, suggesting that any Americans there should take any available commercial flights.

Of course, in many of those countries, there are no commercial flights because airspace has been

closed because of the war. In other places, there are commercial flights, but, well, look,

here's video of one commercial plane taking off amid smoke and explosions in

Beirut, Lebanon, not exactly flying the friendly skies there. Surely the U.S. government

already had a plan in place for evacuating Americans, right? Well, take a list.

Why wasn't there an evacuation plan and who do you send planes to get people out?

Well, because it happened all very quickly.

We thought, and I thought maybe more so than most, I could ask Marco, but I thought we were

going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked.

They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack Israel.

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