Brooks and Capehart on Trump's decision to launch strikes on Iran

It's been nearly one week since the U.S. and Israel launched those attacks on Iran.

Meantime, the newest jobs numbers are adding to economic uncertainty.

To discuss all this, we turn now to the analysis of Brooks and K-PART, that is, at the Atlantic,

David Brooks, and Jonathan K-PART of MSNOW, it's great to see you both.

So before we get into how Americans are reviewing this war, which we need to talk about, I just

want to kind of circle back.

It's the first time we've spoken since the war was launched, and we've seen evolving

justifications from the administration about why now and what they hope to accomplish.

So David, let's just start there.

What is your understanding of why this war was launched now and whether or not it was

justified?

Well, you know, I hate the way the decision was made, which seems to have been extremely

haphazard.

I have shared everybody's reservations and fears that there's no exit strategy, that there's

no plausible way to change the regime, let alone the deaths that are happening.

And so I share everybody's fears.

It's also true that the 1979 Iranian Revolution was one of the worst events of the 20th century,

and it began 47 years of terrorism, extremism, theocratic fascism.

It started with one to two million people dead in the Iran-Arak War in 1980.

There were 341 Americans killed by Iranian supervision in Beirut, and you go on.

And Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, they've destabilized the Middle East.

They've killed people in Syria.

A couple weeks ago, they killed somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people in Iran who are

protesting.

And so this is a destructive and savage regime that has destabilized the Middle East.

It's also a regime that is an unprecedentedly vulnerable situation.

It's lost the faith of its people.

Its economy is in tatters.

Its military is destroyed.

Its regime is decapitated.

So I'm ambivalent.

I hope the Iranian regime falls, and that could happen.

What bugs me, frankly, is the people who are sure, the people who are sure this is a terrible

thing, and the people who are sure this is a good thing.

We just don't know.

But the people who are ignoring the horrors that Iran has perpetrated on the world for

the last 47 years should be hoping this works, and we just don't know.

If given what we went through with the Second Gulf War, given what we went through in Afghanistan,

why on earth are we now at war with Iran?

That's what I'm trying to understand.

I would feel better if the president and his administration would give us the American

people a consistent rationale.

Instead, we've gotten multiple rationales within the first 24, 48 hours.

And I still don't really understand why we're doing what we're doing, and really what

is the end game?

If you are going to go in there and break it, you know, Colin Pound's pottery barn rule,

well then, what's the plan?

Don't know what the plan is, and you know, the thing that's been bugging me about all

of this is the level of disrespect.

The president has shown Congress, has shown the American people, has shown the military

by doing what he's doing with no clear plan, talking rather politely about the potential

of loss of life of service members.

But then today in an interview with Time Magazine, when he was asked about, he said, about

potential reprisals on Americans at home, he said, I guess, and said, you know, this

is war.

There will be loss of life.

No, Mr. President, you owe the American people more than just glib talking points about

something so consequential.

I guess the Iranian regime is terrible, and great if it falls, but only great if there's

an actual plan for what comes next, if slash when it does.

It feels like the American public has a lot of questions about it as well.

This is a look at how the war is resonating back home, according to a few questions from

our latest PBS News and PR Maris, pulled just 44 percent of Americans support U.S. military

action in Iran.

56 opposed it, that includes 66 percent of independence, and just 36 percent of Americans

approve of how President Trump is dealing with Iran overall.

That is down from 42 percent in January of 2020 when the U.S. assassinated the Iranian

general, Kassim Solimani.

So David, the man who ran on no new foreign wars is up against the public that doesn't

want to see this happen.

How does this end?

First, I would say the reason we're at wars is because Iran declared war on us 47 years

ago.

And we've been in a forever war with Iran that has gone up until last week when they were

trying to reconstitute their nuclear weapons.

As for the American public, America has learned the lessons that Jonathan mentioned, even

I've learned the lessons of the lessons of the Iraq war and the lessons of imperial overreach.

And so it's good for us that we've learned that lesson.

The second thing that causes the low poll ratings for the war is a local rating for Donald

Trump, and distrust in the way the war seems to be run by the civilians, but definitely

not the military.

But third, Donald Trump didn't sell the war.

We had a, whether you like the outcome in the Iraq war debate, we had a year-long debate

before George Bush went to war in Iraq.

We had nothing.

We had a few minutes in the State of the Union that was throw away.

And so if a president is going to make, spend the American treasure and blood, he really

owes it to the American people to sell them on it.

And he did nothing.

I'm, it'd be nice to go to Congress, but it's been decades since Congress declared war

on anybody.

And that's for both parties.

But he should sell it and explain what the heck he's doing.

And they have not done that, which is why people are so anxious and nervous about it.

You know, those poll numbers sort of highlight an AP and RC poll that was conducted a week

before, you know, we went to war with Iran that asked people whether they, what they

thought about the president's handling of, not just foreign affairs, but his military

actions, what he was thinking.

And a majority of them said that they disapproved.

That was before he took action against Iran.

So I can only imagine what the American people now think, just broadly of the way he is conducting

his conducting military actions and foreign affairs.

But again, I go back to, if the president wants those numbers to get better, if he wants

the American people to see and support what he's doing, then he has to do more than put

out videos on his social media platform and blively talk about something so incredibly

serious.

David, can I ask you briefly, how do you see this ending?

Do you see the goal as regime change and what does that mean?

Because the IOTO is now dead.

They could vote into place a successor who's equally hard-line.

How do you see this ending?

Well, I mean, the short answer is nobody knows.

We could have a successor who's even more hard-line, which seems to be in the offering right

now.

But we could have a successor who's not democratic, by any means, but is less hard-line and is

less wedded to the nuclear program that is less wedded to spending money on terror armies

opposed to the Iranian people.

On the other hand, the regime collapsed.

I've seen regimes collapse.

I was there when the Soviet Union collapsed.

It seems impossible to imagine a collapsing until the regime collapses.

And it collapses from a loss of faith, a loss of confidence.

And the Iranian experts that I've been reading from Iran say that maybe 10 to 20 percent

of the people in Iran actually support the regime.

So that's a lot of enemies.

And now you have Israel fighting alongside the Gulf States and the Saudis.

So there's a coalition against this regime.

And so those three things seem to be all possible.

I do want to turn to the jobs numbers because it is the number one issue for American voters

and Jonathan.

I'll start with you because all of the uncertainty overseas is resonating back here.

Now it's been a really choppy week for the markets.

We just reported a net loss of 92,000 jobs in February and downward revisions for previous

months.

The president says this is all part of the plan.

The agenda is working.

The turmoil is going to be short-lived.

What do you see here?

He's been saying that since he was running for president and then got inaugurated.

This is bad.

And when we were talking about this in an earlier call because it had been flying, I asked,

was there a revision of the January jobs numbers?

Because that, those numbers went unexpectedly high.

And because of Heather Long, my former colleague at the Washington Post, Navy Federal Credit

Union, I've been paying attention to that because she long ago wrote about the fact that

if you took out healthcare and potentially hospitality, there's been no job creation

in the United States since April of last year.

She's calling it a hiring recession.

And so the fact that the January numbers have been revised downward, the February numbers

are already down.

It's just more validity to the argument that she's been making.

And also more evidence to the American people that whatever the president is doing, he thinks

he's doing to improve the economy, it's not working.

David, the argument that this is the process, it'll just take time, do you buy that?

Well, it's been a year.

And there's been no job growth.

And there's been everything done to maximize the uncertainty of the American people, whether

it's tariffs or a rock, or anything else Donald Trump wakes up and does that day.

And so people have lost faith in the future.

And that's why they're not quitting, that's not hiring, that's not throwing investing.

And it's this rabid uncertainty that's out there, that the economy's not terrible, wages

were up 3.8% year after year, which is pretty good.

But nobody's doing anything, nobody's moving.

It's not yet AI, AI is not the thing here.

That could be the thing next month, but it's just the rabid uncertainty.

It could be the thing next month, or next week, we will say, David Brooks, Jonathan K.

Park.

Thank you both so much.

Thanks so much.