Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at Background Briefing.org.

I'm Ian Masters, and today we'll examine a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with the U.S. Israeli War on Iran raging, while Trump issues megalomaniacal orders

to the Iranians, that he will choose their next leader, and that the recently killed

Supreme Leader's son, Mostobah Khomeini, is unacceptable.

Joining us to discuss how the U. the US is continuing to resort to force

at growing cost in a region of diminishing importance is Stephen Wirtheim, a senior fellow in the

American Statecraft Program at the Canadian Endowment for International Peace.

He is the author of Tomorrow of the World, the birth of U.S. global supremacy,

and he has an article with Rob Malley at the New York Times we will discuss,

of course Trump bombed Iran. Then we look into how Iranians feel about being bombed in

order to become free from a government that is increasingly oppressing them and speak with Matthew Petty,

an assistant editor at Reason magazine, who has recently reported for the BBC in Persian and English.

He now covers US national security policy and its interactions with American society and domestic

politics, and we will discuss his latest article at Reason.

The goalposts of the Iran War keep shifting. Then finally, we'll speak with Robert Baer, one of the

most accomplished agents in CIA history and the winner of the Career Intelligence Medal.

He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, including The Devil We Know, dealing

with the new Iranian superpower, and he's considered one of the world's foremost authorities

on the Middle East and is an intelligence and national security affairs analyst for CNN, and his

latest book is The Fourth Man, The Hunt for a KGB spy at the top of the CIA and the rise of Putin's

Russia, and he has operated in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon against the Iranian regime. And before we begin

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