This is The Guardian.

The kind of blowback has been pretty extraordinary, perhaps a lot more than the Americans thought it would be.

This is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change on America first conditions of President

Trump's choosing. Nobody else's as it should be. This is a war of choice. Chaos in Iran kind of

works for Israel. We have seen a sort of falling apart of the rules-based order. Today, escalation and retaliation as war rocks the Middle East.

From the Guardians today in focus, this is the latest with me, Noshinigbal.

Joining me today is Jamie Wilson, the Guardian's Head of International News. Jamie, we've just heard

from Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, as he's rebranded the Defence Secretary

position. Now, he's made his first statement since Israel and the US began this bombardment

of Iran on Saturday. What did we learn? I think crucially, we learned probably for the first time since

the bomb started on Saturday morning exactly what the US war aims are here. He was pretty clear.

This wasn't going to be a forever war. The aim was to destroy the Iranian missiles, to destroy

the Iranian Navy, with the ultimate aim of destroying any defenses that Iran has,

that would allow them to build a nuclear weapon.

He accused Iran of basically waging war on America and American people for 47 years

and said that this wasn't about regime change, they definitely were changing the regime. So it was a

funny semantics. Yeah, it was typically Hegset, quite punchy, quite angry, very angry with the

media who were asking questions as normal, saying that the media had no real right to know what

was going on on the ground and what the American sort of what was actually happening in

terms of the operation. So, yeah. And of course, there are wider implications across the

Gulf. The war has spread. Lebanon has been hit by bombs from Israel. Hezbollah has been striking

Israel, Saudi, Bahrain, Qatar. I mean, everyone seems to be embroiled in some way in retaliatory strikes.

...