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The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper
CNN's Sara Sidner Reports In "War With Iran: The Attack And Fallout" For The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper. Aired 10-11p ET
Aired March 08, 2026 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: I'm Anderson Cooper. Welcome to The Whole Story. For more than 40 years, the U.S. and Iran have been at odds. In 1979, the U.S.-backed Shah was overthrown in a revolution that brought the hard line Islamist regime of Ayatollah Khamenei to power. Supporters of that regime stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for 444 days. There have been no diplomatic relations between the two countries since then.
After decades of hostility, the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, igniting a regional war that's now going to its second week. So why did the U.S. decide to strike now? And what is the end game?
In this next hour, CNN Sara Sidner is going to look at what led to the decision to attack and what this conflict may look like in the days and weeks ahead. She also speaks for the former U.S. embassy employee held hostage back in 1979 about his hopes and his fears for the future of Iran.
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SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): The new year began with widespread dissent in Iran. Upset with their collapsing economy, citizens flooded the streets.
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: The protests were enormous, at least hundreds of thousands. It could have even been in the low millions.
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: It was about the plummeting real the massively rising inflation rate, the unaffordable cost of living, the inability to buy food and pay their rent. And then it quickly morphed into a call for a regime change.
PETRAEUS: This is a country that has the number two natural gas reserves in the entire world, the number three crude oil reserves in the world, and a quite well educated population. It should be an absolute energy superpower. Instead of that, this regime has driven the country into poverty at home and gotten them isolated internationally.
SIDNER (voice-over): But after 47 years of hardline theocratic rule, the Iranian government appeared to be on the edge of collapse.
JOHN LIMBERT, FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR IRAN: This spread all over the country and to small towns, places I hadn't heard of. And it wasn't just some politically savvy class. These were ordinary people, including people from the main market who their parents or grandparents 50 years earlier had been the money men who bankrolled Khomeini's revolution back in '78 and '79.
SIDNER (voice-over): At the same time, the Iranian people were pressuring their regime. Israel's prime minister was in the United States pressing President Trump.
DAVID SANGER, CNN POLITICAL AND NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Bibi Netanyahu showed up just days after Christmas at Mar-a-Lago for a private meeting with the president at which he basically laid out his concerns, deep concerns about the rebuilding of the Iranian missile program.
Netanyahu was there to tell Trump that he was going to go after it and he wanted the United States to come along in that attack.
SIDNER: How much do you think this is Netanyahu really pushing the administration to go forward?
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, "FAREED ZAKARIA GPS": The animating spirit of this whole campaign is surely Prime Minister Netanyahu. This is about for Benjamin Netanyahu the elimination of the Islamic Republic itself. And I think he has been able to convince President Trump that the bold thing to do is not to deal with the Islamic Republic and curtail their nuclear program, curtail their ballistic missile program, but in one fell swoop to solve the problem, to liberate the Iranian people.
SIDNER (voice-over): On January 2nd, as Iranian protests approached the beginning of a second week, President Trump wrote this on Truth Social, if Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go.
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A week later.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Trump, we need your help now.
RICHARD QUEST, CNN HOST: Iran is facing a nationwide Internet blackout.
NADA BASHIR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A total nationwide Internet blackout.
JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: Internet access and phone lines have been cut.
AMANPOUR: It was awful because we knew that when you cut the Internet, it means you don't want people to see what you're doing. LIMBERT: The Iranian regime felt its very life was threatened. So what
they did was to do whatever was necessary, including murdering their own citizens in order to stay in power.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I saw army and they were attacking us. I saw shotgun, I, I saw heavy guns.
SIDNER (voice-over): Kiarash is not the man's real name. We're not identifying him for his own safety. He's a protester who left Iran and spoke with CNN's Jomana Karadsheh.
UNIDENITIFIED MALE: The blood was all over the streets.
AMANPOUR: It was really difficult to try to get the true story. But of course in the end, the truth comes out.
SIDNER (voice-over): The truth started to come out through cell phone, video and text, seeping through cracks in the digital darkness.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: From 12:00 a.m. Thursday night onward, the type of injuries changed. The live rounds started. I've never seen anything like this.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They were aiming with lasers and the shooters were shooting people in the face.
SIDNER (voice-over): And then it was time for the regime to begin explaining all the bodies. It has admitted thousands were killed, but blamed the deaths on protesters and so called agents of Israel and the United States.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I saw two layers of dead bodies. In my eyes, I can say minimum 1,500 up to 2,000 just in one warehouse. And small bags. I realized that, oh my God, these small bags, their children's, many of them.
DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: They've killed at least it looks like 32,000 protestors. 32,000 protesters in their own country.
SANGER: President Trump said it was 32,000 killed during his State of the Union address. It may be 10,000 lower or 10,000 higher, but it was directionally correct.
LIMBERT: I have seen different numbers. 40,000, 20,000, 5,000. The exact numbers don't matter. What matters, Iranians have a government that murders them.
SIDNER (voice-over): When it was clear the protesters would not topple the Iranian government, the U.S. began making plans for Iranian talks.
TRUMP: We'll see how it works out.
SIDNER: What was the stated goal of those talks?
ZAKARIA: The talks have a stated goal that seems quite simple, which is Iran should never have nuclear weapons. The thing that it's hard to know what President Trump's exact goal is. So when he looks at a nuclear deal with Iran, does he think that ultimately this does solve the problem, the nuclear problem, or does he believe there are so many other things that I want to change about Iran that the deal never seems enough?
SIDNER (voice-over): Whatever President Trump's goal was, he clearly believed Iran had been weakened since the October 7th attack on Israel.
KARIM SADJADPOUR, SENIOR FELLOW, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE: Iranian power in the Middle East peaked on October 7, 2023. That was the day that Hamas invaded Israel. And Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was one of the very few leaders in the world that praised Hamas's attack on Israel. And what we've seen in the last two years was that Israel reacted by essentially decimating Iran's regional power.
It decimated Hamas in the Palestinian territories. It decimated Lebanese Hezbollah. That helped lead to the collapse of Iran's only regional ally, the Assad regime in Syria.
SIDNER (voice-over): And after October 7, Israel also targeted the Houthis in Yemen, degrading, but not destroying them.
WENDY SHERMAN, CHIEF U.S. NEGOTIATOR FOR 2015 IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL: Those groups were always available to Iran to spread terror. It gave the Iranian regime asymmetric capabilities, surprise, multi front attacks.
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So it was very important to Iran's ability to project power.
SIDNER (voice-over): But it wasn't just October 7th. Iran was also weakened by the so called 12-Day War last June, which was started by Israel to wipe out Iran's nuclear infrastructure. The U.S. helped finish it.
SADJADPOUR: President Trump dropped 14 bunker busting bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities and these were facilities that Iran had spent probably upwards of half a trillion dollars on in terms of both sunk costs and just the cost and sanctions and ancillary costs.
And virtually overnight those facilities were essentially rubbled.
SHERMAN: We've heard from the administration that indeed Iran is in a weaker state right now, and the administration has argued that meant it was a good time to attack. But one doesn't just attack a country because they are weak, otherwise we'd be attacking countries all over the world.
SIDNER (voice-over): Whatever the reason for the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, there is no denying that while the U.S. was talking about an agreement with Iran over nuclear weapons, it was simultaneously making moves toward war.
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SIDNER (voice-over): Davos, Switzerland, January 23rd. As the curtain fell on the World Economic Forum, a theater of war opened up in the Middle East.
TRUMP: You know, we have a lot of ships going that direction. Just in case, we have a big flotilla going in that direction.
SIDNER (voice-over): On his way home from Davos, weeks after the deadly protests in Iran, President Trump announced what he called an armada of U.S. ships on its way to the Middle East.
PETRAEUS: There was a huge effort to build up the forces in the central command area responsibility because they normally have not been anywhere near this level.
DAVID CHALIAN, CNN WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF AND POLITICAL DIRECTOR: The buildup of the military resources in the region was to point to recent history, Venezuela, where there was some buildup with a military operation deposing the country of that leader. That's the kind of threat that Donald Trump wanted, front and center for the Iranians at a much, much bigger level.
SIDNER (voice-over): As that threat built up in the Middle East, negotiations were underway between the U.S. and Iran in Oman and Geneva, led by Trump's handpicked advisors, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.
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SHERMAN: Ostensibly, the administration wanted them to give up all their ability to enrich uranium, not have any stockpile, not have any program, give up their missiles, give up their support of proxies.
SANGER: They were using these negotiations to test the sincerity of the Iranians. At one point, they even offered to the Iranians to provide Iran with all of the uranium fuel that they need for their power plants for free, forever.
They meant it to try to test the Iranians and see whether or not they were really interested in conventional power or whether they were just trying to keep the ability to enrich, to purify uranium in countries so that at some moment they could once again resume a movement up to near bomb grade fuel.
I think it was a little bit of a revelation to the administration that the Iranians were not going to give up this fuel.
SIDNER (voice-over): When Talks wrapped on February 26, Iran's foreign minister said there was an agreement on a, quote, set of guiding principles. U.S. officials said progress was made, but big gaps did remain.
SHERMAN: I'm sure there were gaps because you can't do this that fast.
SANGER: I think the Iranians would say the U.S. wasn't sincere and the U.S. would say the Iranians weren't sincere.
LIMBERT: Part of the problem has been the question is, what's the goal? What do we want out of this?
SIDNER: It has shifted. We've heard no nukes.
LIMBERT: It shifts all the time.
TRUMP: We're not happy with the negotiation. They just don't want to. They don't want to say the key words, not going to have a nuclear weapon. We're negotiating right now, but they're not getting to the right answer.
CHALIAN: I think that their belief in any diplomatic resolution was precipitously dropping day by day. The reality of a potential military strike, I think was on the rise.
SIDNER (voice-over): And with that reality came a continued rise in U.S. forces in the region. By February 28, the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier was in the Gulf, and the USS Gerald R. Ford was fast approaching, along with the destroyers, cruisers and submarines that accompany them. It was the largest naval armada since 2003. At the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
SANGER: Well, this was classic gunboat diplomacy, right? It was like straight out of the 1800s. You put a fleet off of a country's Europe shores and then you try to negotiate. But in this case, it was never quite clear if the President was using it for leverage or he truly wanted to go begin the conflict.
JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN JERUSALEM CORRESPONDNET: For us as journalists, when we were watching all of that happen, it seemed quite clear that this was more than just a tool for negotiations, that there was something really credible on the table by moving so much military power into the region.
SIDNER (voice-over): And then with talks seemingly at a stalemate, an opportunity arose.
DIAMOND: Israel and the United States had been tracking the movements of the Supreme Leader for months. And it was a few days before the operation was actually executed that the United States and Israel learned that the Supreme Leader would be at this compound in a meeting with other senior Iranian officials.
And one thing that's so stunning here is the fact that the Supreme Leader was above ground. You know, we understand that the Supreme Leader would often go below ground at night, in particular be in his bunker.
AMANPOUR: Look, some people might call it stunning arrogance. I think it was dumb that they knew that they were going to get whacked, probably. So you'd think that they would have been a little bit more careful.
SIDNER (voice-over): Friday, February 27, from his winter White House in Florida, Trump gave the order to U.S. Central Command.
CHALIAN: By the time evening falls at Mar-a-Lago, and he is sort of making appearances at social affairs, at the club, but also huddling with advisors. This operation has been given a green light already and is underway.
SIDNER (voice-over): The first missiles launched at 1:15 a.m. East coast time on Saturday, February 28, which was 9:45 in the morning in Iran.
CHALIAN: The first time that Americans hear from President Trump related to this action is in a videotape that he made and released at 2:30 in the morning on Saturday to start providing an explanation, a rationale to Americans.
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TRUMP: A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.
SIDNER (voice-over): Motivated, many believe, not just to extinguish the nuclear threat or to preempt an Iranian strike, or even to push for regime change, but perhaps vengeance. Trump told ABC, I got him before he got me.
SANGER: The President had been harboring a grudge since the Iranians certainly hired a hit team to try to get him during the 2024 presidential election.
CHALIAN: President Trump himself has had some shifting messaging on this over the initial days of this war. And when there's not a clear, concise, repetitive answer on that, it opens the President up to criticism that there's not a clear mission or strategic goal here to achieve.
SIDNER (voice-over): Throughout Saturday, February 28th, the aftermath crystal clear. 100 aircraft launched from land and sea in what's been called a synchronized wave hit Iran's command and control infrastructure, naval forces, ballistic missile sites and intelligence infrastructure.
Many Iranian civilians were killed in the initial attacks, including more than 160 children at an elementary school, according to the Iranian government.
The leadership in Iran suffered major casualties as well. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a strike on his compound, ending his 36- year rule.
SIDNER: What do you make of what you've seen on the streets after these initial bombings and especially after the killing of the Supreme Leader? ZAKARIA: You can see here and there a little bit of an eruption of joy
amongst the opponents of the regime when Khamenei died. And that's real. And there are people in Iran, lots of people who absolutely hate this regime and but I will say from having been there are also people who support the regime.
SIDNER (voice-over): Iran vowed revenge for Khamenei's death. The war is just beginning.
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SIDNER (voice-over): Just hours after U.S. and Israeli forces unleashed a barrage of via violent attacks throughout Iran, killing the Supreme Leader, other key figures and civilians, Iran's retaliation campaign began.
PETRAEUS: I am surprised by Iran conducting what is termed horizontal escalation. In other words, not just going after U.S. bases, U.S. assets, even some U.S. diplomatic facilities and so forth, but actually going after civilian infrastructure in the Gulf state.
SANGER: LNG plants, hotels in the United Arab Emirates, two data centers.
SHERMAN: I think Iran thought that part of its strategy would be to create chaos.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are multiple new fronts in this war.
UNIDENTIDFIED MALE: It's expanding, and there does not seem to be an off ramp.
SANAM VAKIL, DIRECTOR OF MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA PROGRAMME, CHATHAM HOUSE: This war has certainly widened quite quickly because from the Iranian perspective, only through externalizing this conflict and spreading the cost of this war beyond Iran can Iran find off ramps for this war.
SIDNER (voice-over): Just a week into this war, at least 13 surrounding nations were drawn into the conflict, raising concerns about just how far the war will expand and how long the surviving Iranian regime will be able to fight.
SANGER: Iran's military is very substantial. They have a lot of missiles and a lot of launchers.
SHERMAN: It has drones. It is the largest military in terms of manpower in the region.
PETRAEUS: Their leaders are being decimated. Their headquarters are being destroyed. Their bases are being attacked, all the rest of that. But you'll still have a very, very substantial number of guys with guns.
FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: We just crossed the border and are now inside of Iran.
SIDNER (voice-over): CNN senior international correspondent Fred Pleitgen and his team were the first U.S. network allowed into Iran by the regime since the start of the war. CNN operates in Iran only with government permission.
PLEITGEN: In total, the Iranians are saying that they can continue this campaign for a very long time. They say that their missile arsenal is still immense and they haven't even used some of their most modern missiles.
SADJADPOUR: It has the capacity to fight. It has the capacity to kill its own people. It doesn't seem it really has the capacity to govern.
AMANPOUR: I believe they think they're in an existential fight now and they need to do everything that they can, including hitting the Gulf American allies.
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Gulf leaders who are in touch with the Iranians told them to cut it out. And Iran is trying to say, we're not against you. We're trying to be careful. We're not trying to kill your citizens or harm your citizens. We just need to defend ourselves.
SADJADPOUR: The question is whether Iran's attacks on its Gulf neighbors has compelled those countries to go to America to say stop this war or to go to America and say how can we help?
JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: This is the highest we've seen gas prices in 11 months.
SADJADPOUR: I think the Iranian goal is to try to spike the price of oil and that's a long time Iranian strategy of trying to appeal to American public opinion in order to restrain the ambitions of the American president.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Strong new warnings from Iran this morning threatening to bomb any U.S. ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
SIDNER (voice-over): One front of the war that is having a global effect is in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has threatened to strike any vessel that attempts to pass through one of the most crucial oil and gas shipping routes in the world.
SANGER: About 20 percent of all oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz globally.
SIDNER (voice-over): The Strait of Hormuz is the only maritime exit for the Gulf countries whose economies rely on exporting oil, including the nation of Qatar, which is also one of the world's leading exporters of liquid natural gas or LNG, a power source which has been critical to Europe's energy independence from Russia.
SIDNER: What does it mean to have this almost completely shut down?
ZAKARIA: If this continues, and that's a big if this continues, it is surely going to contribute to worldwide inflation. These kind of supply chain problems contributed to inflation during COVID, so we've seen this movie before.
SHERMAN: President Trump has to be concerned about the Strait of Hormuz being closed. He has over the last few days said that we will help to finance insurance at a reasonable price since many insurers and reinsurers have pulled back or made the price too high for shippers. And that American ships will help escort tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.
ZAKARIA: That is possible, but it is a massive undertaking for the U.S. government to take on particularly financially. JPMorgan Chase said is in the $350 billion range. That would dwarf the cost of the entire war.
SIDNER (voice-over): In Lebanon, the widening conflict has reignited Israel's long standing fight against Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy force with Israel striking locations throughout the country and sending thousands of civ fleeing from their homes.
ZAKARIA: Israel has taken this opportunity to not just go after Iran, but to go after Hezbollah. Hezbollah in many ways has been the enemy Israel worried about the most. Now, I think it is trying to not strike Hezbollah. It is trying to destroy Hezbollah root and branch once and for all.
SIDNER (voice-over): While Israel has accelerated its offensive into Lebanon, Iran has extended its strikes farther north to include Azerbaijan, who announced it had been struck by Iran and European NATO member Turkey.
SANGER: One of the most interesting cases which we're still trying to understand was an attack, a missile that appeared to be headed to Turkey and was intercepted by NATO. Should the Iranians end up hitting NATO territory, it could easily trigger a widening if NATO decided to get into the conflict.
ZAKARIA: I get the sense that the Iranians are firing what they can, where they can, rather than choosing in a very strategic way to deploy firepower to a particular aim. Look, if they would like to hit American ships, they just can't.
PETE HEGSETH, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: We are not defenders anymore. We are warriors.
UNIDENIFIED MALE: Are there currently any American boots on the ground in Iran?
HEGSETH: No, but we're not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do. Why in the world would we tell you, you, the enemy, anybody, what we will or will not do in pursuit of an objective. We fight to win.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it's very unlikely to see conventional force, U.S. boots on the ground. I think there's very little prospect of that. There's some prospect of so called sneakers on the ground or maybe some of our most special operations forces. There are reports that we are helping to arm Iranian Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan.
SADJADPOUR: The way authoritarian regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran stay in power is by divide and rule. There is a danger that if the U.S. starts to arm and fund Kurdish rebel groups, that rather than helping to unite Iran's opposition, it actually accentuates the opposition's divides. And for a lot of Iranians, they fear the country being split up into different ethnic enclaves.
TRUMP: I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person. Right.
SADJADPOUR: Khamenei's assassination was the equivalent political equivalent of a nuclear bomb in Iran. It's left an enormous crater when anyone has been ruling for 37 years. For many Iranians, Ayatollah Khamenei was the only leader that they had ever known.
AMANPOUR: It's very unlikely that the next leader, if it comes from this same regime, even though it might be more palatable to the United States, will reflect the will of the people. It's very unlikely this regime doesn't reflect the will of the people or the majority of the people there.
TRUMP: Well, most of the people we had in mind are dead. So, you know, we had some in mind from that group that is dead.
SANGER: We heard President Trump say that many of those who he thought might be potential leaders of Iran have been killed in recent days and that he's not really sure who is left out there. Now this may be psychological warfare underway and the president doesn't really get a vote on who ends up leading Iran.
But it is an indicator that if the U.S. had favored candidates, they might want to think about keeping them alive.
ZAKARIA: Why Iran and the United States ended up from being closest friends to bitterest foes is a complicated story.
SIDNER (voice-over): That story next.
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SIDNER (voice-over): Cries of grief and anger echo through the streets of Tehran as thousands of Iranians mourn the death of their supreme leader. Anti-U.S. chants are also being heard, according to Iranian state.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Some of the chants was no submission, no surrender and war with America.
SIDNER (voice-over): But all is not what it seems.
AMANPOUR: Right now they're not all out into the streets. The power structure that still exists there has warned the people, don't come out and celebrate and protest because otherwise you will face, quote, the iron fist of our authority.
SIDNER (voice-over): A 2023 survey of those living inside Iran revealed that over 80 percent of Iranians did not want the Islamic Republic in power.
AMANPOUR: They still have a good 10, 15 percent who believe Khamenei is the voice of God on earth and who have come out.
SIDNER (voice-over): So how do Iranians truly feel about the U.S. right now?
AMANPOUR: What many say. And these are people who I've actually been speaking to from Tehran. Yes, on the one hand they're glad that their oppressor was killed, but on the other hand, they wish that they had been able to capture him and put him on trial.
SIDNER (voice-over): In other words, some against the regime yearned to hold their brutal dictatorship responsible on their own terms. When outside forces like the United States intervene, historically, chaos and anger ignite.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: America and Iran were for decades great friends and great partners.
ZAKARIA: Why Iran and the United States ended up from being closest friends to bitterest foes is a complicated story.
SIDNER (voice-over): Iran's king, the Shah, ruled the country for decades and was one of America's closest allies in the Middle East. But by 1979, he was overthrown by a mass revolution rallied around an exiled Islamic religious leader, Ruhollah Khomeini.
SADJADPOUR: Many Iranians who revolted against the Shah thought the Shah was a brutal dictator.
ZAKARIA: Khomeini became a symbol of what many people thought were the failures of the Shah's path.
AMANPOUR: The Islamic Revolution started to bubble in 1978. It took a full year for it to send the Shah packing.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Demonstrators who took to the streets of the capital in their thousands to celebrate the departure of the man they have hated for so long.
SIDNER (voice-over): When Iran's monarchy collapsed, a new Islamic theocracy was born. Months later, Iran's exiled king and friend to the U.S. landed in San Antonio, Texas.
SADJADPOUR: He was allowed to visit the United States for medical reasons. And the revolutionaries in Iran believed that the United States had a plot to reinstall the Shah.
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VAKIL: It triggered serious paranoia inside Iran. And you had a young group of students who then took matters into their own hands.
SIDNER (voice-over): What happened next shocked the world.
SIDNER: How do you think what you went through contributed to the relationship that exists to this very day between Iran and the United States?
LIMBERT: Oh, it's clear. It's the festering sore that has never healed. Neither side has gotten over it.
SIDNER (voice-over): John Limbert was one of the 52Americans taken hostage when Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy for more than a year.
LIMBERT: I said, (inaudible) I have besadd (ph)y. I am introducing myself so and so, and let's sit and let's talk.
SIDNER: And they responded.
LIMBERT: Open the door. Of the 14 months I was there, I was nine months in solitary.
SIDNER: Were you terrified? Were you shocked?
LIMBERT: Of course I was.
LIMBERT (voice-over): By the 1980s, Khomeini's revolution had transformed Iran.
ZAKARIA: He was a very charismatic figure. Turned out he was very brutal.
AMANPOUR: The first thing they did was take away women's rights cadres and comites, as they called them, would arrest people on the streets and there was a lot of killing.
SIDNER (voice-over): The divide with the United States deepened.
SIDNER: How much did the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s contribute to this enemy mentality?
ZAKARIA: The west and the United States supported Saddam Hussein, including Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That created bad blood, not that we'd had good blood.
SIDNER (voice-over): Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989. His close ally, Ali Khomeini rose to become Iran's next supreme leader.
GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Iran aggressively pursues these weapon and exports terror.
SIDNER (voice-over): Then came President George W. Bush's infamous line in 2002.
BUSH: States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.
VAKIL: The designation of Iran as part of an axis of evil was, I think, quite a shock for policymakers in Iran, because after 9/11 Iranians had been helping the United States in Afghanistan, sharing intelligence and trying to be supportive in that war effort.
PETRAEUS: That did obviously deepen the enmity.
SIDNER (voice-over): A decade later, the U.S. tried stabilizing the volatile relationship.
SHERMAN: I became the lead of the team to join with Europeans to negotiate.
SIDNER (voice-over): Wendy Sherman was one of the Obama administration's top negotiators for the Iran nuclear deal.
SHERMAN: We finally got a deal. That deal ensured that Iran would not get a nuclear weapon.
SIDNER (voice-over): In 2018, President Trump withdrew from that deal.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mr. President, how does this make America safer?
SHERMAN: I spent an enormous amount of time on Capitol Hill, and I said to them, we either have a deal that we can verify and monitor and ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon or we have the risk of an Arab Persian war.
SIDNER (voice-over): Two years later, Trump ordered a strike that killed Iran's top military commander, Qasem Soleimani.
SHERMAN: Previous presidents didn't do this because they understood that it would have unintended consequences. And it did. Almost immediately. Several Trump administration officials were targeted for death by Iran. We saw Iran increase its support for its proxies. These are always very tough decisions. But being bold is not always the best thing to do.
SANGER: In the second term the president has surrounded himself with people who are much more reluctant to step in and restrain his greater impulses.
HEGSETH: We have only just begun to fight and fight decisively.
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TRUMP: Our president will start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. So the only way he figures that he's going to get reelected and as sure as you're sitting there is to start a war with Iran.
SIDNER (voice-over): This was Donald Trump in 2011 when Barack Obama was president.
TRUMP: To start a war in order to get elected and I believe that's going to happen would be an outrage.
SIDNER (voice-over): This video Trump posted to his YouTube account was just the beginning. He would repeat this prediction again and again in 2011, in 2012 and in 2013, President Obama did not go to war in Iran and President Trump didn't start any new wars in his first term, a point of pride as he was voted out office in 2020.
TRUMP: I am especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars.
SIDNER (voice-over): Not starting any wars became part of his and his eventual running mates 2024 campaign pitch.
TRUMP: I don't want to go to war.
SIDNER (voice-over): Being the pro peace ticket.
TRUMP: I'll end it. Stop the chaos in the Middle East and prevent World War III.
SIDNER (voice-over): And in his election victory speech, he made this promise.
TRUMP: I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars.
AMANPOUR: President Trump has shown that he's mercurial. And does not mind changing his mind.
[22:55:00]
CHALIAN: There are some very loud, vocal, prominent voices in the MAGA movement that are opposed to this action and have been for quite some time. This notion of getting involved in another conflict in the Middle East.
MEGYN KELLY, HOST, "THE MEGYN KELLY SHOW": Being part of MAGA does not mean you have to accept another Middle East war.
MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R) FORMER GEORGIA REPRESENTATIVE: What is happening to the man that I supported? You supported the man that denounced what happened in Iraq.
TUCKER CARLSON, AMERICAN ACTIVIST AND COMMENTATOR: The public doesn't support it and it's terrible for the United States.
CHALIAN: But I would note that you should -- we should separate out those very loud voices of influence in the movement from where voters are. Our CNN polling shows that Republicans are largely in favor of this. 77 percent of Republicans told us they favor the military strikes. And those that identify as members of the MAGA movement, they are even more in favor of what the President's doing here.
SIDNER (voice-over): Attacking Iran is just one of many military actions he has taken in the past year.
SANGER: In the second term, the President has surrounded himself with people who are much more reluctant to step in and restrain his greater impulses. So we have now seen the President order airstrikes on seven different countries in just the 13, 14 months.
SIDNER (voice-over): Just weeks into his second presidency, the US carried out airstrikes in Somalia against ISIS targets.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He said, quote, these killers who we found hiding in caves threaten the United States and our allies.
SIDNER (voice-over): And in the years since, the U.S. has launched attacks in places such as Yemen.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's continuing its 24, 7 strikes against the Houthis.
SIDNER (voice-over): Syria.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The U.S. military striking dozens of targets inside Syria overnight.
TRUMP: We hit every site flawlessly and we are restoring peace through strength. We're all over the world.
SIDNER (voice-over): Nigeria.
ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Deadly strikes against ISIS terrorist targets in Nigeria. President Trump saying he ordered the attacks to stop what he says is the slaughter of criminal.
SIDNER (voice-over): And Venezuela.
VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN ANCHOR: The breaking news this morning. President Trump says the U.S. carried out large scale strikes on Venezuela overnight.
NICK PATON WALSH, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Hard to understate quite what a move this is geopolitically by the Trump White House to remove the sitting president of a country.
TRUMP: We're a respected country again like maybe like never before. PETRAEUS: I don't think anybody shed any tears over the fact that
Maduro was brought to justice. And I hope that the message is received elsewhere in the world that it is not a smart move to take on the U.S. military head to head.
SIDNER (voice-over): But nearly a week after the strikes began, President Trump reflected on his use of military might.
TRUMP: I built the military and rebuilt it in my first term and we're using it more than I'd like to use it, to be honest with you.
SIDNER (voice-over): Since the beginning of U.S. and Israel attacks, more than 1,200 Iranians have been killed and more than 200 others across the region. The United States has lost lives as well.
TAPPER: U.S. service members have now been killed in action, according to U.S. central Command. The attack came quickly, with no warning sirens for troops to evacuate or shelter, according to CNN's source.
TRUMP: We pray for the full recovery of the wounded and send our immense love and eternal gratitude to the families of the fallen. And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That's the way it is.
SIDNER (voice-over): And that is the way it is when it comes to war. This one is far from over. Just days ago, Israel's military chief of staff said they are moving to the next phase of operations and, quote, we have additional surprises ahead. Then, the United States secretary of defense issued his own ominous warning.
HEGSETH: We have only just begun to fight and fight decisively. If you think you've seen something, just wait.
SIDNER (voice-over): President Trump has called for unconditional surrender of the regime. And while Iran's leadership may be the targets, it is the Iranian civilians who will continue to suffer.
AMANPOUR: Collective punishment has been imposed on the Iranian people for 47 years for the crimes of their leadership. Sanctions have been put on them in the hope that the leadership will fall. But what has it done? It's weakened and impoverished a people who are probably the most educated in the Islamic world in that region, the most technically proficient, the best doctors in the region, the best artists, the longest history, and guess what? The most pro-American.
[23:00:04]
