SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
And we are joined now by Daniel Shapiro. He was U.S. ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration and deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East under President Biden. Ambassador Shapiro, thanks so much for being with us.
DANIEL SHAPIRO: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: First, what is your reaction to the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran?
SHAPIRO: Well, there's no question that the United States and Israeli militaries combined have tremendous power, force, intelligence, technology that are going to be able to do significant damage to Iran, its nuclear facilities, its ballistic missile program, and apparently, they're attacking leadership targets as well. In fact, the Israeli media is reporting that they believe the supreme leader may have been hit and maybe even killed in today's attacks.
But what is striking - and your reporter was alluding to this - is that the president made this announcement, essentially in the middle of the night. I think most Americans are probably waking up this morning, wondering how it is that we find ourselves engaged in a major Middle East war. It is something he said he didn't want to do when he was in the campaign. He did not lay out the predicate, the strategy, the objective of this operation before it began. In fact, he had multiple conflicting or overlapping objectives - nuclear missiles, protect the protesters, bring down the regime.
And so rather than have that clearly laid out for the American people and allow Congress to express itself on it, we're off and running before any of that has happened. So he's taken a lot of risk to get the United States so deeply engaged in something that is potentially going to have some success, but also a lot of danger attached to it without any prior discussion with the American people.
SIMON: Regime change is suddenly being expressed as a U.S. goal, not just the shutdown of the Iranian nuclear program or nuclear assets, but regime change. Do you think that's practical?
SHAPIRO: Well, there's no question this is a regime-change war, just to hear the president's description of it overnight. And he calls on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government. Now, of course, we should say this Iranian regime is vile. It's oppressed its own people for nearly half a century. It's wrought mayhem and violence all over the region and attacked the United States and many of our allies many times, so its demise would be very desirable. But regime change produced by airstrikes is almost undoable, and we're clearly not in the position of putting U.S. ground forces on the ground in Iran. So to produce the regime change the president called for, the burden's going to fall on the people on the ground.
SIMON: And what are the consequences of that? I mean, we think immediately of political ferment, and obviously, that could result in violence too.
SHAPIRO: It certainly could. I mean, it's a big question mark, a big unknown. Anytime you start down this path, you don't really know where it leads. Again, I hope to see the demise of this regime, and I hope the Iranian people have a better life. But what has been launched now could produce all kinds of outcomes, and it could produce a military dictatorship. It could produce a civil war. It could produce a splintering of the country itself. None of that is to defend the regime, but it is all to say that the United States now has authored the beginning of a process that it doesn't know where it's going to lead. And so there's a lot of uncertainty attached to what the president has launched, again, without any real discussion with the American people or Congress before he launched it.
SIMON: And we've already seen Iran retaliate by striking Israel, as (laughter) we don't have to tell you, and U.S. military bases in the Gulf. What do you think Iran's calculations for survival are?
SHAPIRO: Well, if the Iranians take seriously that this is a regime-change war, and I think they should, they will fight with everything they had. In the war last June, what's called the 12-day war, when Israel struck a ballistic missile and nuclear targets, some regime targets, and then the United States finished off the underground nuclear facilities, Iran responded, but it didn't respond with everything it had. It barely shot at U.S. bases only one time. Today, it's shot multiple times at U.S. bases, multiple times at Israel. I think when survival's at stake, they will hold nothing back, and so it could get very violent.
SIMON: Daniel Shapiro, former U.S. ambassador to Israel. Thanks so much for joining us, and stay safe, sir.
SHAPIRO: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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