Key details on Iran war after ceasefire news

And for more now on the US-Iranian ceasefire, we're joined by CBS News Senior Foreign Correspondent Elizabeth Palmer in Tel Aviv. Elizabeth, how is Iran reacting to this deal? Well, it's playing it as a huge victory. Very soon after the ceasefire deal was launched, supporters flooded into the streets. They were waving their own flags and chanting, burning American flags. State television put it this way. The announcer read, "The enemy"-- that is the US and Israel-- "has suffered an undeniable historic and crushing defeat." A little more on the Straits of Hormuz. A senior Iranian official has told the Reuters news agency that Iran could open the Straits on Thursday or Friday ahead of the meeting with the US and Pakistan, as long as the ceasefire holds, but only in coordination with the Iranian military. In other words, Iran is already acting as if it's got what it asked for, and that is a formal recognition that it is the boss of one of the world's most important and sensitive energy arteries. I also want to add that Iranians who had been hoping that this war might help get rid of a regime that they just despise, the people that you saw in the streets in January, many of whom were killed, now fear that the regime is going to come out of these negotiations strengthened and even more brutal. So, Elizabeth, how does Israel fit into this? You no doubt saw the front-page news in the New York Timeswhich indicated that the Israelis had a very strong role in-- I won't use the word pressuring but in getting the president of the United States to listen to their concerns about Iran and that the president listened to Prime Minister Netanyahu against the advice, according to the New York Times, of some of his own advisors. What are you hearing? Well, surprisingly muted. First of all, I should say it's the end of the Passover holiday, and so offices and so on are still closed. We did get a press release from the prime minister's office this morning that simply said, "Israel supports President Trump's decision to suspend strikes against Iran for two weeks, subject to Iran immediately opening the Straits of Hormuz and stopping all attacks on Israel, the US, and the Gulf." However, while the Pakistanis explicitly said that the ceasefire would include Israel's attacks on Iran's proxies in Lebanon, Hezbollah, Israel has contradicted that this morning and, in fact, today launched the biggest attacks on Hezbollah since this war began. Now, if Iran did decide that was a breach of the ceasefire and it begins to fire its own missiles on Israel again, then the war could reunite really in a day, in hours. That is the biggest threat at the moment, and we're not sure how this is going to go and whether or not Washington will weigh in and tell Israel to cut it out because they might put the entire future of these talks in jeopardy. All right, Elizabeth Palmer for us in Tel Aviv. Thank you.

All right, CBS News contributor Elliot Ackerman joins us now. He's a former CIA officer and Marine Corps veteran. Elliot, good to have you here at the table with us. Thanks for being here. So we've got this temporary ceasefire in place. How did you-- I mean, there were a lot of people who-- so you had two groups, right? You had people who were up in arms by the president's threat to wipe out Iranian civilization, and you had other people who said, this is Trump. This is him at the bargaining table. This is how he negotiates, and at the 11th hour, he's going to declare some level of victory or a ceasefire, which is exactly what we saw. So I want to first get your reaction to the ceasefire. Well, I think what we see is the maximalist language that the president uses. It creates conditions where you could have a single slippage. And, obviously, wiping out a civilization, that's pretty extreme. So I think it puts not only the United States but potentially our allies in a very difficult position, to say nothing of the service members who would have to execute those orders. So at a certain point, yes, you could say, oh, this is just Trump being Trump. But when you're on that type of stage and the stakes are so high, the language really matters. And I want to ask you about the language as well and the impact that it may be having on service members now, since you mentioned that. In your article in The Free Press, "Is Trump asking troops to commit war crimes?" you said, quote, "If our commanders had engaged in rhetoric about how white phosphorus or any of our weapons would be used to bomb the Iraqi people back to the stone ages, it would have placed me in a very difficult position." It's a really powerful perspective. So explain to us how this moment is really impacting current service members, the options that they have, and what could happen if someone defies a military order? Well, this goes back to the language. So as Trump is using language about wiping out a civilization, obviously, in the media, we've seen a lot of talk about, would that constitute a war crime? And anytime you're talking about criminality, there's this idea of intent. And so his language indicates intent. And service members executing one set of orders under a certain intent, it's not a war crime. But if you're talking about deliberately targeting civilians, wiping out civilizations, that same set of orders could constitute a war crime. And if you wear the uniform of the United States military, you're obligated not to follow illegal orders. And so Trump is injecting those types of questions of legality into this conversation based off of his rhetoric. The secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, declared this total victory. And again, Elliott, as a student of history, you'll know that there were people in the wake of Vietnam who declared that the United States actually won the war in Vietnam. But we bombed that civilization into oblivion, and perhaps if you look at the raw numbers, you can declare some kind of victory, but we didn't win that war. Did we win here? No, we didn't. I'm glad you brought up Vietnam. I mean, I think a lot of people aren't aware of the fact that we dropped-- the United States dropped more bombs, more tonnage of explosives into North Vietnam than in all of Europe in World War II. And there was a moment at the end of the Vietnam War where the senior Vietnamese generals met with a senior American general, and he pointed out the fact that we won every battle in this war. And the Vietnamese general said, that might be true, but it is also irrelevant. So, ultimately, victory in war comes down to politics, and I don't think we're anywhere near declaring who has been victorious. And oftentimes in war, too, the outcome isn't total victory. It's just a reshuffling of power structures. The other thing, Elliott, that I'm very curious about is going back all the way back in the 1980s when I went to my very first ROTC training camp at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I remember members of the 82nd Airborne Division talking about the operation in Panama. And we called it Operation Just Cause. They called it Operation Just Because. This is something that, you know as a former Marine, that people in the military are constantly sort of either mocking the objectives of our politicians and they know that they understand that they are the tools of those objectives/of the policies that are put into place by our politicians. But in this particular case where the objectives were not very clear-- yes, regime change, perhaps. Yes, it's to reduce Iran's ballistic-missile capability. Yes, perhaps-- how do you think, just from what you're hearing from people in the military, our men and women who have to fight these wars, how they feel about this particular? They'll never say anything on the record, but I'm just wondering what you're hearing close to the ground. I mean, that's different because the US military isn't a monolith. I mean, there are many different points of views that service members have. There's just sort of a culture of omerta that you don't speak of your political views. But I think one thing that becomes very difficult is President Trump kind of uses this culture of confusion. He keeps the enemies guessing. But at a certain point, the troops, the individuals assigned to execute those orders, they do need to know what they're doing and why. And I think if I were sitting on one of these amphibious ships as a Marine right now, I would certainly be having a hard time as a Marine officer kind of keeping my troops focused when there's so much sort of getting yanked around as to, Are we going to Kharg Island? Are we not going to Kharg Island? What are we doing? And I think that confusion can seep into the ranks. Elliot Ackerman, thank you so much for your time and sharing your perspective.

Love your perspective.

It's so important.

Such a good article in The Free Press. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.