Who Is Winning the War in Iran?

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Daily. Nearly three weeks into the war in Iran, The US and Israel have largely decimated the regime's missile capacity, taken out key leaders, and disrupted its central command. And yet, Iran has not backed down. In fact, the regime has become more hardened and is wreaking more havoc than ever. Today, my colleague Eric Schmidt on how Iran continues to challenge the most powerful military in the world and what president Trump's options are for getting out of this conflict. It's Thursday, March 19. So, Eric, we had you on the show ten days into the war to lay out where things stood, not in terms of rhetoric or stated goals, things that have been pretty hard to nail down, but in terms of hard facts, what has actually happened on the ground. And here we are almost at the end of week three of this war, and we wanna do something similar. So please orient us. Where do things stand right now? So here we are, as you said, nearly three weeks into this campaign. And from a military standpoint, the commanders think they're doing pretty well. The United States is decimating the radical Iranian regime's military in a way the world has never seen before. They think they're actually a bit of ahead of schedule. In less than two weeks, we've rendered the Iranian Navy combat ineffective and continue to attack, naval vessels. They've hit over a 120 Iranian naval vessels. This includes ships that lay mines in the Gulf. They've struck more than 7,800 targets in Iran. Wow. These are things like missiles, missile launchers, drone storage areas. And this is The US and Israel or just The US? This is just The US. Wow. The Israeli Air Force has carried out its own campaign in parallel with The United States, and they in particular have gone after many of the Iranian leaders. Israel claimed to have hit the hideout of Iran's security chief. There's another big hole in the top of the leadership. They've killed the top security chief, Ali Larijani. Another killed by Israel, Gomorrah Z Soleimani. He was the head of They've killed the head of the besiege, the militia group that ruthlessly suppressed protesters in January. And then on Wednesday, they announced they killed the intelligence chief for Iran. He was responsible for overseeing the country's entire global terror network. These are very prominent strikes that they've carried out against the leadership of the country at this point. So these are obviously massive blows to the structure of the regime. To what extent do those deaths, though, actually impact the regime itself? Because it seems like they're still there. That's right. The regime has been quite resilient. Iran has been hitting back with attacks across the region. Using underwater vehicles to hit tanker ships off the coast. Despite the fact that they've lost these top leaders, they have factored that into …