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As the United States and Iran prepare to hold talks in Pakistan aimed at ending the war, Israel is continuing to bomb Lebanon, where the death toll from Wednesday's massive wave of attacks has topped 300.
"It was 10 minutes of terror, a day that the Lebanese are calling Black Wednesday," says Lebanese Australian journalist Rania Abouzeid, speaking with Democracy Now! from Beirut. "It was hard to tell what was blowing up where, because those hundred or so attacks were all happening simultaneously."
Israel and the U.S. have claimed the Iran ceasefire deal struck this week does not include Lebanon, contradicting Iran's position. Abouzeid says direct talks between Israel and Lebanon are very "divisive" as many Lebanese fear being left out of a regional settlement, with Israel allowed to continue its attacks, displacement and occupation in the country.
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President Donald Trump gave a primetime televised address Wednesday to discuss the war on Iran, his first since the United States and Israel launched attacks on February 28. Trump gave few clues about when or how the war could end, but he boasted about killing top Iranian leaders and degrading the country's military. He threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages, where they belong."
Despite the grandiose claims, built on "lies and delusions," Trump "did not add anything new," says Iranian American scholar Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, who calls Trump's shifting justifications an admission of "defeat in the war of narratives."
We also speak with journalist Spencer Ackerman, who says the U.S. has already lost the war. "Iran has changed the entirety of this conflict," he says. "It has pivoted this conflict onto its own territory and its own goals, and the United States does not have a military mechanism to redress that, primarily the throttling of the Strait of Hormuz."
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