Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to American Prestige. I'm Danny Bessner, here, as always, with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson.

And we're very excited to welcome back the Pacific Northwest's finest, Shamik's Malak Afzali, who you could find at Shemis-Malek-Avzali

at Substack.com to talk about recent goings on

in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

Shemis, thank you so much for joining us.

Always happy to be here.

So let's start with the recent Israeli attacks on Iran,

and what looks to be, at least

if signals seem accurate, Iran's lack of response. What do you make of this? I talked about it

a little bit on our news episode, but there's something almost ritualistic about these exchanges

at this point. And it seems like neither side wants to escalate, but also Israel might want to

escalate. So it's, to me, it's confusing strategic moments a little bit when you're trying

to divine intentions. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are.

I think Iran placed itself in a bit of a trap when the attacks from Israel first happened in that, you know, there were videos of Iran and air defenses engaging Israeli missiles over the skies.

At least from that, it seemed fairly successful. There were no blasts of all refineries. There were no gigantic

fireballs anywhere. So it felt incumbent on the media and on politicians to portray this as a

complete failure, like the Israeli retaliation back in April. You know, Iran, number one,

no need for us to engage any further. But when it eventually became clear that four Iranian soldiers had been killed in these attacks,

suddenly everyone was left holding the bag, because now you have to continue this cycle of attacks in some way if the new equation

that was determined by the IRGC Commander-in-Chief is to hold up, that if Iranian soldiers

die, if Iranian military officers die, then that requires an overwhelming response by the Iranian military.

The issue is that now we are getting to the point in which, you know,

...