The hostilities have returned in Iran for the first time in more than a month, as a war that's dragged on for six months ramps up again, with no end in sight. CBS News' Weijia Jiang and Aaron MacLean have the latest.
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Trump calls Iran war 'relatively little for us'; sanctions still impact Iranian students, officials urged to act.
As it ran on the front
Yeah, hi, sorry, I had this here somewhere — hold on. Here it is. I wrote it down because I wanted to get the wording exact, not paraphrase it, the actual words: 'relatively little war for us.' That's what he said, after the first strike exchanges in weeks. I keep coming back to that word. Little.
Because I got this other page, from the same week, different story. Bessent and Rubio, urged — not by me, by advocates, on the record — to end sanctions that are impacting Iranian students. Impacting how? The story doesn't spell out every mechanism, but it's students, it's their ability to study, and somebody with the title 'Secretary' has to sign something to change it.…
…(cont) So I did this thing at home, just to get it straight in my head. I took a scale, the kind you'd weigh mail on, and I put a coin on one side — that's the 'little war,' relatively speaking, from where he's sitting. And on the other side I put nothing, because I don't have the sanctions paperwork, I don't have what it costs a student to lose a bank account or a visa renewal. But my wife says even an empty side of a scale still tips it, if the other side's got weight on it. I don't know. Maybe that's not scientific.
Here's what I keep circling, though — 'little' is relative to something. He said 'for us.' Not for the students. For us. So the word's doing a job, and the job is telling you where to stand when you measure it.
Oh — and one more thing, before you go. If it's little enough that the war doesn't need pausing, is it little enough that the sanctions being urged to end this same week — the ones a Treasury official's own colleagues are asking him to lift — are little enough not to need lifting either? Or does 'little' only travel in one direction on that page?
“He calls it a relatively little war like it's a rounding error, but somebody's still stuck holding sanctions that are landing on Iranian kids trying to study here. Little to him means invisible to the people paying for it. That's the tell — scale is always measured from the guy who isn't the one losing his visa or his bank account.”
“It genuinely was a limited engagement, first strike exchanges in weeks, that's restraint, that's the administration showing restraint, not escalation. And the sanctions on Iranian students, those aren't new, those are just enforcement of existing policy — well, his own Treasury Secretary's colleagues are being urged to lift them right now, so maybe 'existing policy' isn't the — I'll come back to that.”
The receipts
A leading grassroots advocacy group for the rights of Iranian Americans called on the Trump administration Monday to rescind the recent message it sent when it announced new sanctions against ordinary Iranians—"that the US is at war with…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.