Why did the US and Israel launch a war with Iran, and what comes next?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 5 March 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's less than a week since the start of the US-Israel war with Iran. And it's already spread across the Gulf region as Iran retaliates. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for 36 years, was killed in US and Israeli airstrikes on Saturday. The question now is who is in control in Iran and whether the regime in its current form will remain or if this will trigger major change. David Aaronovitch and guests discuss how the US-Israel war with Iran started and what comes next.
Guests: Anshel Pfeffer, Israel Correspondent, The Economist Professor Ali Ansari, founding director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at St Andrews University Dr Burcu Ozcelik, Senior Research Fellow for Middle East Security at the Royal United Services Institute Laurel Rapp, Director of the US and North America Programme at Chatham House.
Presenter: David Aaronovitch Producers: Caroline Bayley, Kirsteen Knight and Nathan Gower Production Co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele Sound engineer: Neil Churchill Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:09.5 | Right now, the missiles and drones are flying, the bombs are falling. |
| 0:14.6 | The stage is dominated by threats, explosions, worries about stranded citizens and oil and gas prices. |
| 0:22.5 | But what comes after all that? Iran isn't Liechtenstein. It's a country of 93 million people |
| 0:29.3 | speaking a myriad different languages, whose supreme leader and his entourage have been |
| 0:34.3 | eliminated and who now have been invited by the US president to rise up |
| 0:39.2 | and seize power. So, is there a plan for that? Are there candidates for power? Is there |
| 0:46.6 | an organised internal opposition or an external one? What next in Iran? Step into the briefing |
| 0:54.0 | room and together we'll find out. |
| 0:59.9 | First, to discuss how this war started, I'm joined by Ansel Pfeffer, who's Israel correspondent for the economist. |
| 1:07.3 | Ancel Pfeffer, who was the driving force behind this attack on Iran? |
| 1:12.3 | Was it Israel or the United States? |
| 1:15.0 | Well, it was a combination, I think, of Donald Trump and Binium and to Niao. |
| 1:20.5 | Israel, almost weeks after the 12-day war in June, had reached a conclusion that a significant part of Iran's ballistic |
| 1:31.5 | missile project had remained intact or intact enough for them to renew production pretty quickly. |
| 1:38.0 | So that was unfinished business from Israel's perspective, And I was hearing from military sources already |
| 1:46.0 | late summer last year that Israel would have to go back and do at least a limited operation against that. |
| 1:54.8 | Then fast forward, four months, and you've got Donald Trump's sudden message to the protesters in Iran that help is on its way. |
| 2:03.7 | And then all of a sudden you have this dynamic whereby Don Trump is somehow saddled with this promise. |
| 2:09.6 | And he wants to show that unlike Barack Obama, sort of failed Iranian protesters during his presidency |
| 2:16.8 | and also failed to enforce the red |
| 2:19.4 | line on Bashar al-Assad with a chemical weapons attack in Syria. |
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