Episode 334: The Big Picture on the Iran War

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Welcome to the MacArthur Report, the podcast where I, Rich Lowry, discuss with Annie MacArthur

the latest legal and national security issues this week. What else? The latest on the Iran war

for some reason or not already following us on streaming service by the way. You can find us

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The glowing indigushing five star reviews that they deserve wherever you listen to podcasts.

Now without further ado, I welcome to this very podcast through the Miracle Riverside. Another

of them. Annie MacArthur. Rich, how are you? Not too bad. I would usually say since as we're

recording here about two hours away from the start of the NCAA tournament that I'm on pins and

needles and can't wait, but I was enjoying the upsets and I think they might on the scale that

we saw them in the past might might be a thing of bygone days. Well, yeah, I mean the way it's yet

another dynamic that's been changed by paying the athletes. So now they have even more incentive

to gravitate to the big schools. And as a result, you know, the golf between the haves and

have nots is greater. But I do think rich that in basketball, there's a lot more chance still

of upsets than football. Yeah, more of a to mix sports metaphors of cliche is more of any given

Sunday dynamic in basketball than in football. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll never forget. I think it

was 1979. I think that was the year that Indiana State was undefeated until the last game when they

lost. They lost Larry Bird's team lost to Magic Johnson and Greg Kessler's Michigan state team.

But the thing was Larry, you know, Indiana State was never really, I mean, Indiana's the powerhouse

in Indiana, right? But Indiana State was never a great team except for that one year that Larry

Bird was there. And they were really never a great team again. But like basketball is still the

kind of sport where one guy can make a enormous, you know, having the most talented player on the

field in football is an advantage, but you could go low in 11 with the most talented guy. Whereas

in basketball, you're going to win more than half the time if you have the most talented guy.

And he's always going to keep you in the game. So I don't know. I do think these two days, and

I guess this block of four days is the best. I mean, you just like the games just run 12 hours a day,

right? Literally. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. But by the time we're in the lead eight, and generally,

you have all the best teams that I tend to lose interest. Plus, I've watched so much basketball.

I've kind of gotten sick of it. Yeah. And baseball starts, you know, baseball starts the week before

the week after the tournament starts, the baseball season starts. I think they make a big mistake.

I agree with you about the later part of the tournament. I think that, you know, you have

these four great days, and then nothing happens for four days. And I don't think they're not like

the kind of sport that can sustain interest, because it's a tournament. It's not like you're

rooting for your home team, right? I don't know that they can sustain interest as well with a lot of

days off in between, but I guess we'll see. All right. So here we are with the Iran War. And you

have people who focus on just how much stuff we've destroyed, how many Iranian leaders,

we've killed the technical proficiency that we're demonstrating on the streets, the Israelis

droning militia checkpoints on the streets, literally, and say we've never seen anything like it,

which is true. And we're winning. And then you have people who focus on the downside, you know,

looking at the price of Brent crude every day, which has, you know, with some ups and downs every

single day has generally been up, who look at the straight of Hormuz, effectively closed. And

stuff is getting through the Iranians are letting some stuff through. And then there's some

occasional tankers that turn off the radar and sneak through during the night, but is effectively

closed for now. And say, wait a minute, they're huge costs. And this is ramifying in all sorts of

ways, oil plays a role in somebody other products. And then we have the fertilizer question,

and a bunch of other stuff, aluminum, just just a wide array of goods and say, this isn't what

we signed up for. And we're not going to be able to end it. So this thing is already a fiasco.

There was a nickel's Christoph column, I kind of got a kick out of the New York Times yesterday.

The headline was something, how can we end the quagmire?

Two and a half weeks, weeks in, and then the very soap-minded people that we have a lot of

respect for, like, well, throw some me to saying, look, this is a stalemate at the moment. So

where are you big picture? Well, I do think that the coverage in the Times is remarkably slanted.

And I really think it's terrible what's happened to the Times because it has historically been

hereless when it comes to reporting on international stories. The Times always had the resources

and the most interest in covering that kind of stuff. And I always thought, even as the Times

drifted, Times has always been left of center, but even as it became unapologetically

unabashedly anti-Trump to the point where it believed because Trump is a unique evil in the world,

it had the liberty to depart from journalistic principles and editorialize and new stories,

which I think has been just a fact of the New York Times since, for the last 10 years. And it's

a shame because it's a great institution and was a great paper. But, you know, every story,

it seems like in the Times, the beginning of the headlines says, war drags on. And I'm like,

I saw a headline like that yesterday. And I was like, I had to figure out, is this day 18 or 19?

You know, I just think that so. I was dragging on and it's always widening. And I've been

taking a picture of some of these headlines because I'm planning to do a video on these. But

this is yesterday. This one, the one you might be thinking of, for US, unmet expectations in Iran fit

a familiar pattern in the region. Can you see writing that a year from now?

Well, to be fair to them, they're not the only people who engage in this, right? Like,

one of the things I complained about last week is that we have people on our side who keep saying,

and when I should, what I mean when I say our side is people who are sympathetic to the war.

But we have people who say, you know, maybe what we can work out in Iran is the Delsey Rodriguez

model. And I think that that is just like historically a crazy thing to say. And when I mean

historically, like, the Delsey Rodriguez model has been in place for about 10 minutes. We have

no idea how that's going to work out. You know, at least for another couple of months before

we start calling it a model. I mean, I always thought that what's the, is that the apopryphal

was it Ho Chi Minh that they asked about the French Revolution? Yeah, too soon to tell. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a little much for me, like two centuries later. But I do think like three weeks

is a little bit of a short time frame to try to make a reading on this. On the other hand,

you know, the thing, the the factors you just ticked off are very real. And it's not like if the war

ended tomorrow, that that was going to resolve itself in short order because a lot of

a list of we're now talking about a war on infrastructure as much as anything else. And even if

people stop shooting, infrastructure has to be rebuilt. It can't be rebuilt with the speed

that people stop shooting. So there's going to be long-term lasting costs. And that's starting to

be, you know, we thought maybe a week ago that the market had factored in some of this already.

But you can see by the fact that there's been, you know, pretty drastic movement upwards in the

last two days. And again, not just with the stock market itself, although the stock market is down,

I thought I saw this morning that it was down into the 45s after it was up over 50, you know,

not all that long ago. So that's a, you know, that's not catastrophic given the given the numbers

we're talking about, but it's it's very noticeable. Much more, I think, important are the numbers

about energy and commodities. This stuff has not, I'm not sure the market has priced all this

in because stuff is now moving. And I think in a way that people are saying, boy, this is going

to be worse than we thought. Yeah. And I guess when you were ticking off the list rich,

with the, with the proviso that the list is what, the list of things that have happened good

and bad, whether it's the damage that we've done on Iran or the damage that's being done to

infrastructure, that is what controls people's perspective on whether the war is going well or

not going well. And I want to go back to what we talked about last week because I think

this is the wrong way to look at it. And a lot of this is Trump's fault because he wouldn't try

to sell the war to either Congress or the public before launching it. But if you know what your

objectives are going in, then you can have a sense, which is a, which is a firm sense of whether

you're doing well or doing poorly. If you know what it is that you're trying to accomplish,

when you were, we're really off that list, I was thinking of like a baseball game where

you don't know going in that the objective is to score more runs than the other team. So like,

maybe you get to the third inning and they score set one team scores seven runs and you're like,

well, boy, I wasn't in for this. This is going to take four hours. I may run out of players.

What are we doing this for? So I think that if you know what you're trying to accomplish,

then you're a lot less concerned about time and expense because you've factored that in

when you've tried to, when you've settled on what your objectives are. But if your objectives

aren't settled and they seem to be changing on the fly, I still have very good analysis. I thought

as good as one is I've seen by John Spencer yesterday on X explaining why the war is going

well, notwithstanding what the commentary is in the times and places like this.

But the one place I parted company with him is he said here are the clear objectives of the war

and he reeled off like five of them. You know, straight of hormones, stop their ability to get

nuclear weapons, stop their ability to project power. You know, he had five different ones.

And my reaction to it was I agree with all of this and I especially, I wouldn't question his

analysis because he knows more about military strategy than I'll ever hope to know. But I don't

think he's right that at the beginning we had these five set objectives and now we can measure

how we're doing based on that because I think we've arrived at these objectives. I don't think we

had them going in. Yeah. So I have some friendly tussling back and forth with, with no about some

aspects of this and on the editors and he said two episodes ago, I think he said, the question is,

is it worth it? And I focused on what's what's the it that is worth it? But you can also say, what's

the it? What's the first it to? All right, what's the objective and what's the cost? And we're,

you know, fuzzy on the first and prepared people for basically none of the second.

And yeah, I got to having listened to that, I really thought that it was almost like an argument

about expectations more than to me to what more than what was objectively happening. Like I,

I think Noah's analysis, especially with respect to the successes on that side of the ledger,

has been comprehensive and thoughtful. On the other hand, I don't think that you can measure

success based on what the worst case scenario, the Pentagon may have had in mind going in when they

assessed a potential Iranian threat. I mean, I think you got to take a ran as you find it.

And as we find it now, particularly after the operations over the summer and after it was made

obviously clear, particularly by the Israelis, but you know, we did our part as far as nuclear

program was concerned. But we've known for many months going into this that Iran was not the Iran

that the Pentagon was thinking about when it had these Doomsday scenarios about the way

the strait was going to be mined and the number of casualties we could expect in the kind of response

we could expect from the Iranians. They have no air defenses. You know, we basically have control

of the skies over them. And they need to let those ships get through the straits to go to China,

which means whatever some scenario on a shelf at the Pentagon said a couple of years ago

about the possibility that they might put thousands of mines in the strait. They can't put

thousands of mines in the strait if they want their own traffic to get through. So I just think

it's not about expectations. It's about objectively what is it that we're trying to accomplish

and what's the likelihood we're going to get there? Yeah, so there's been a lot of conversation

about the strait. I know nothing about the strait and the scheme of things. It's one of these things

that comes up often in foreign policy where everyone's an expert in the course of like three days.

I've shared a lot of this with you offline. I've just talked to people I rely on and trust. I

think have good judgment generally and I've talked to them for years and I get, you know, one guy

saying there's no way we can do it. It will have to be perfect as according these ships. There's

no way to be perfect given just the geography and the environment. So we really can't do it

in an acceptable cost. So we should just be looking for some sort of deal. We've eliminated a lot

of their stuff and we'll stop killing them and they free up the strait totally and we

lived to fight another day. Then I have another friend who says, yeah, we can do it. It's just

going to take ground troops on the shores to really control what's happening on the shores and

it's going to take more navy vessels than we have, which is why Trump's so desperate to get your

European vessels and it's going to take two navy vessels per tanker, which, you know, that if

you do the math, we end up, you know, we'd get 10 tankers through a day or something like that.

Then I talked to other friends, no, look, we're just, it's math. We're eliminating their

missile threat on the shores. We'll blow up their fast boats. They'll have very little to

shoot at us and once you get the navy vessels in there, they're good at knocking down drones.

So we'll be able to deal with it. And I just, I don't know, I don't know which is true.

Yeah, but the thing which is, I don't mean to go lawyer on you, but the three scenarios that

you just laid out are not inconsistent because what you said with respect to the first one,

and I think this is the overriding thing, is at an acceptable cost.

You know, so when you're saying, you know, what is the it that we're trying to accomplish?

It's not just we need to straight open. It is, we need to straight open at an acceptable cost,

meaning not acceptable in this thing could be broad, because what it means is that a cost

that we're willing to pay, which may be more than we know that we're willing to pay depending

on how this all plays out. But, you know, if the if the it that you're trying to accomplish is

the straights are open and there's no attack on any vessel, I think that's unrealistic. I mean,

this is a war. You know, I don't mean to chuckle, but you have to expect that there are going

to be losses, which is why they're devoting so much energy to suppressing their ability to suppress

power. And I think the other thing that that comes up in this all the time is you're quite right

that we have to be perfect and they only need one, but they don't only need one to win. I take it

what you mean when you say that is they only need one and it changes drastically our arithmetic

about the losses that we may sustain because it shoots through the roof, the calculation of risk.

It increases the not only the insurance cost, but also the obviously the defense costs that we

would have to pay to get an acceptable amount of traffic through. So I don't think that these

things that you're laying out are inconsistent. And I know me to be a broken record on this,

but I do think this goes back to Trump's failure to explain to the country and to the Congress

what it is that we're trying to accomplish so that we could have an informed discussion of what

it would take to actually carry that out and be prepared for the potential losses. I think

the reason that there's disagreement on this to the extent that there is is

subjectively people do have a different you know they do have different perceptions of what

kind of losses are acceptable. But I also think a big part of it is that we're coming to the

aims of the war to the objectives of the war on the fly. And that's a problem because people

are having to adjust what their assumptions and expectations are. The other thing I think that

factors in here is we keep talking about what are acceptable costs and what would be acceptable

losses. And I don't think that you can make an assessment about that intelligently without

factoring in what the Iranians are likely to do. And my biggest criticism of all of this

remains that there are basic things about their ideology that if you factored them in

your assumptions about what they might do would be drastically different. We keep talking about like

what they might do as if what we were talking about is what would we do if we were faced with

the challenges that they're faced with. And I think a good example of what I'm talking about

is the attacks on the Sunni Arab governments which is what they're obviously now doing. In fact

this morning after the attacks on the gas field in Qatar yesterday there were more attacks this

morning on the UAE on Saudi Arabia and more on Qatar. The Shiite Sunni divide goes back 14

centuries. The roots of it are in essentially who took over the caliphate in the early part

of Islam. The people who became the Shiites thought it should stay in Muhammad's family that

it should go to Ali, his son-in-law, the Sunnis ended up thinking it should be a community consensus.

That's the beginning of the divide like going back to the to the seventh century. And you know

the fallout of it is that about 90% of the world's Muslims are Sunnis but the most important

Shiite majority in the most important Shiite country is Iran. What I learned having to

sort of go to school on Sharia's supremacist ideology all those years ago is that the Sunnis

and Shiites really do hate each other and they do regard each other in a bottom line way as a

post-ate. Each side thinks the other is being unfaithful to the doctrine even though my sense of

this for what it's worth as a non-Muslim has always been that there's a lot more politics than

than doctrine that's involved in the divide. But the one thing that we can say about it from our

own experience as Americans is that while the Shiites and Sunnis have spent 14 years at each

other's throats and there's a lot of bloody internecine conflict they always put

their divide aside and they work together when the conflict pits Islam against the West.

So the default position is that it's the Shiite faction of Islam against the Sunni faction of

Islam but when the conflict is broader and it's Islam versus Christendom or Islam versus the West

or Islam versus the United States and Israel then they work together which is why you get for

example Shiite Iran being the biggest backer of Sunni Hamas and underwriting a lot of stuff

that the Muslim brotherhood also Sunni was up to. It's why you get people like the blind

Sheikh who's a great scholar of Sunni Sharia Islam being an admirer of Khomeini because of the way

Khomeini the Shiite leader was confronting America and the West. So for these guys the condition

on which they put aside their otherwise internecine Islamic conflict is that they unite against

the main enemy which are non-Muslims America and Israel and the West. Now there's a caveat to

this obviously which is from Iran's perspective if the Sunni Islamic states look like they are

contributing their assets their territory financing whatever assets they could bring to bear that

would be relevant in a war if they look like they're contributing those assets to the United

States if they're letting the Israelis for example use their airspace if they're letting American

Jews their territory for military bases if they're selling the West energy resources so that they

can persist while the war goes on then the assumption that the Shiites and Sunnis have united against

a West breaks down and as far as the Iranians are concerned the Sunni Arab states are acting as

apostates because from the Shiite perspective from the Iranian perspective they're the faithful

Muslims and the Sunni Arab states are citing against Muslims with the great Satan so they become

if that's the way they come to understand the conflict then they're not going to have any

compunction whatsoever about striking these Islamic countries and I think a lot of people thought

going in that Iran would be unlikely to strike the Islamic countries because they're Islamic countries

but you have to factor in what their ideology tells them about Sunnis and the condition under which

they won't attack Sunnis which is that you know we're fighting jointly against the West

obviously Iran's drawn the conclusion that the Sunni Arab states are on the other side

and it doesn't matter to them that they take the ostensible posture that they're

non-combatants and that they're trying to be neutral because as far as Iran's concern for a

faithful Muslim there is no neutral between Iran and the United States you've got to be on the side

of the jihad so this would be predictable if you factored in what they believe and how they

organize themselves and again I'm going to just refer to what I said last week which is

as long as the Iranian government adheres to the Khomeini model which is this principle was called

velayat the idea that and it's a revolutionary development it's a real innovation in the way that

Shiite Islam a society that is Shiite Islamic would govern itself but Khomeini's innovation

is that the religious authority runs the state that the religious authority has the final call

on military decisions legal decisions governmental decisions as long as they adhere to that then

you have to factor their sharia's as premises ideology and you can only put that you know we're

not talking about turkey here where you know you have someone like otterk who comes in who's

a founder of the state and whose idea is we have to be a more western model so what we're going

to do is we're going to cabin sharia and we'll let people deal with that in their in their

everyday personal lives but as far as the government is concerned we're going to be a

western style government with a western style military and we're going to have something like

division between the spiritual realm and the secular realm if you're dealing with a country

like that that would be one thing but that we're dealing with the opposite of that yeah so what's

your read on this strike is really strike on the south powers is that how you say it yeah

oil facility in Iran and then you have the Iranian retaliation and you have Trump

force for for swearing any foreknowledge of the Israeli strike to know you don't find credible

he does he doesn't like blowing up oil related stuff at all I was talking to someone about this

the other day who served in the first term it was just like he this guy's pointing out as a real

estate guy he never wants to give up any property or anything he owns so if you talk to him about

privatizing stuff during the first term he just he didn't like it you know we've seen this he's

very very grabby once the government was to be getting a stake in something or other because he

uses it so personally he wants interest rates to be low always as we've seen any any loves oil

and he just hates the idea of of taking out any oil facilities well you know first of all we're

not talking about taking out like this this particular strike that the Israelis did is a natural gas

facility it's it's one of the most important ones is probably the most important one

the Iranians interestingly share some of the the greatest natural gas fields with with Qatar

and what the Israelis have had is like the the Iranian parts but you know whether you're talking

about natural gas or oil rich from like a Trump perspective we're not talking about destroying

the natural gas of the oil we're talking about the infrastructure to to get at it the the the

resources is still there so you know Trump has talked about doing an operation on carg island right

which is 90% of Iran's energy resources I think it's mostly oil and this is an Israeli operation

on the infrastructure for extracting the natural gas from Trump's perspective I imagine that he

knows the gas and the oil is still there it would just be you know once we defeat the the Iranians

you know we can get Jared's companies and and Don and Eric Junior we'll get everybody in there

like all these American contractors can come in and rebuild the infrastructure and everybody

will make money right that's the way he he sort of looks at these kind of things so I don't

I absolutely believe that Trump greenlighted this and from what I have read of both Israeli

and American military officials of course this is the kind of thing nobody wants to put their

name on right but there's no way that the Israelis and the Americans right now have complete

communication about what they're doing and there's no way that the Israelis hit us and we didn't know

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book out okay so Joe Kent we have a resignation of Joe Kent as the director of the national

counter-terrorism center he put out this letter I thought was completely ridiculous

at that almost every level was gotten a lot of attention he's gotten strange new respect from

the mainstream media he's done his two-hour Tucker Carlson interview and the crux of it is that

Trump is it's really basically if only the czar knew kind of argument where's you know when the czar

is actually launched launched this war but arguing that Israel and its tentacles whipped up this

media media ecosystem that that generate all these pro-war sentiments I don't see that at all

it's not as though the American public was bragging for war with Iran and Trump was pushed into it

you know it's it's been the opposite but it's it's the already we've heard from a lot of people

that this is a war for Israel that that Trump was tricked into waging by BB Netanyahu and others

yeah this is so historically ignorant and I think our editorial on this

called that out chapter and verse I would recommend that everybody read that who hasn't read it

already but I think rich this kind of I want to say for a little bit early about this that

this goes to something we've talked about a number of times which is that in the post 9-11

reaction congress did the Washington thing which is that we have to look like we're doing something

not regardless of whether the something that they did was actually going to be evaluated or not

and I say this because this is what you have to understand to understand why we have a national

counterterrorism center which is what the position this Joe Kent character had

once you understand that this is what the what the purpose of this thing is it's shocking

that you can have an eight historically ignorant ideologue like Joe Kent running this thing

because the purpose of the national counterterrorism center which was established initially by

um a an executive order by president bush and then a few months later codified into law by

congress the national counterterrorism center is probably the most important hub of the other

thing that they created at the same time which is the office of the director of national intelligence

and just so everybody knows the reason that these things got established post 9-11

was that in the post mortem the conclusion of the 9-11 commission and every other investigative

body that looked at the 9-11 attacks was that we had been hit due to intelligence failure

and that the problem was that the left hand didn't know the right what the right hand was doing

and if we had had somebody that was in charge of putting together the mosaic of the intelligence

instead of having what we had which is what they called stove piped in other words one

one organization has this body of information the other one like the FBI has this to CIA has that

the NSA has something else and nobody is is talking to everybody else now there were easy fixes

for that because a lot of it was not structural failure a lot of it was personal failure

and to the extent that some of it was structural failure you could easily have fixed it for example

you get rid of the justice department's wall the regulations that prevented the

criminal investigators and the intelligence side of the FBI's house from communicating with

each other if you had gotten rid of that you would have detected the presence of a number of the

9-11 suicide hijackers in the United States before the attacks so there were easy

there were fixes that were straightforward that could have been done but instead what they did

was in a situation where we already had at the time I think 16 intelligence bureaucracies

we decided to add a 17th namely the office of director of national intelligence to oversee

the whole thing and the counterterrorism center was going to be the the hub and the the reason it

exists is it takes the intelligence about terrorism that is in the possession of every single

node of the American intelligence community it has no operational role but it's supposed to

have an analytical role so it's the it's the unit that takes everything from every other

organization and puts it together so that we have an idea of what the entirety of the threat

environment looks like so that's what this guy's job was you can't have somebody in that job

who's an idiot log you have to have a straight I mean if if if the job is worth having which I

doubt because the fact of the matter is the CIA and the FBI and the other intelligence agencies

are not relying on the national counterterrorism center or Tulsi Gabbard to try to figure out

what you know what the threats are you know they see themselves as the people who are running

intelligence but let's pretend let's just say you know the national counterterrorism center is

vital to keeping America safe if it is you've got to have an intelligence pro you know somebody

who doesn't have an ideological bent that he brings to every single piece of information

who is willing in an open-minded way where you check your own premises constantly

to try to put together all of the information that all these different agencies have so we can

get an accurate picture of what our threat environment is that's the opposite of what this guy

is right um so the fact that he's in that job is insane and here's the other thing that's insane

and I have to say this is somebody who um you know uh uh was kind of in on this from the

beginning this whole idea that Israel is running American counterterrorism is insane

you know al-Qaeda which is not only which was not only the main threat and the threat that caused

that carried out 9-11 and thereby created this whole intelligence ticket that we have

but al-Qaeda arose out of the afghan mujahidines jihad against the Soviets from 1979

through 1989 uh bin Laden was a big contributor to the war against the Soviets and when he had

that whole structure put together the idea at the end of the jihad against the Soviets was

what do we do now and what bin Laden decided was we take the jihad global against the other major

superpower so al-Qaeda exists according to al-Qaeda itself to take out the head of the snake

which is the United States in its early years um al-Qaeda would talk occasionally about Israel

but it did almost nothing about Israel you know Hamas had operations in Israel and Hezbollah did

al-Qaeda's operations were all against the United States it's serially hit the United States for

the eight years and the run up to 9-11 and then killed nearly 3,000 of our people in attacks

on that destroyed the world trade center torpedo torpedo onto states it attacked the Pentagon

and probably we're trying to attack either the white house or the capital but that other plane

was taken down heroically by the passengers they exist to attack the United States what's the

biggest thing that comes out of al-Qaeda in the years that followed 9-11 ISIS the Islamic state of

Iraq and al-Sham ISIS began as al-Qaeda in Iraq its purpose from the beginning was to fight the

United States in Iraq and to foment insurrectionary civil war in Iraq mainly between Sunnis and Shiites

by the way but the whole thing was to destabilize it and attack the United States they had almost

nothing to do with Israel now all these outfits are doctrinally opposed to Israel and the

animus in Islam especially as interpreted by fundamentalist Muslims is doctrinal it's scriptural

there's numerous verses in the Quran that explain it if anybody actually wanted to open their

eyes and read what what it all actually says so i'm not making the case that they don't care about

Israel doctrinally they're opposed not just to Israel to Jews that's what they're that's what

their thing is it's Jew hatred but these organizations exist particularly al-Qaeda and ISIS to fight

the United States, Komenis regime existed and came into being to fight the United States death to

America was like their calling card the first thing they did as a regime was take hostages from the

American embassy so yes does this happen is really component of course it does but Israel's not

the head of the snake as far as these people are concerned we are so the idea that this is about

Israel is lunatic yeah so just a last thought here before we move move on to something else

it just seems to me probably have about a month if if if the current sort of energy situation

holds and you know in baseball we talk about putting crooked numbers up on the board we already

have a cooking cooking number on the the front of the the price of a gallon of gas at every gas

station which is a three instead of a two as it was a couple weeks ago if it's a four I think

and sort of in a sustained way I think that's that's a problem and you know if the price of

crude is well above a hundred dollars you know a month from now I think that's a that's a big problem

and if we haven't you know fully opened up the street by then yeah I think you're I think you're

right as far as the timeline is concerned the other thing I think we should throw into the the mix

for that rich is that yesterday for the third time the Democrats attempted in the Senate

to enact a a war powers resolution which if they got a majority would then trigger all kinds of

things about you know time limitations on Trump now we'd have a whole big constitutional thing

if you know they were able to enact that and they defied him or he defied them and then

you know we're off to the races on that but I'd mention this because if if the development you're

talking about come to pass and you get those kind of crooked numbers that's going to show up in

the polls with respect to the midterms and if it looks like the Democrats are going to take control

of either one more likely the House obviously but one or both chambers and even if they don't take

control of the Senate if it looks like it's going to be a lot closer than it is now not that it's

not that the Republicans have a lopsided advantage now but it could get closer right

that changes the political mix here a lot you know you're going to get you're going to get war

powers resolutions that actually pass and that's going to change the if that happened that would

change the political dynamic so I think it's not just I think you're quite right all those

economic metrics and they'll affect how people feel about the war but they'll also affect how

people feel about the midterms which could be big problems for Trump yeah sorry last thing actually

directly on Iran so you're dismissive of you know a so-called moderate popping up his head and

taking over Iran is there in your view is there a possibility or is this another way of saying

a moderate but having a hardliner someone who you know internally is as hardline as anyone else

who just has a pragmatic streak is just like you know what our country's getting destroyed and

everyone's getting killed are all our leaders so I'm just going to cut a deal with some sort of

deal with Trump to to stay his hand for now is that is that a realistic scenario in your view?

You can't have that if they maintain the structure of Comanis regime I think what you're talking

about could happen if they said you know we're going to put aside the framework of Comanis regime

and you know that you have elements of the IRGC who aren't you know raging jihadists,

Devotees who want to you know basically run the country like a

So I guess outline in your view would be a kind of regime change

Yes it would be well look the regime is Comanis regime right so anything that you would do to

change the structure is regime change you know I don't mean to regime you know we use the term

regime change in a cavalier way like very often we'll hear people say we really what we really

need is regime change in the United States and what what they really mean is that they want the

guy who's president now out and they want a part a president from the other party and that's not

regime change the American regime is still the same it's just a you the partisan control of the

government what we're talking about now I think is structural change in the regime which is

regime change so if you took out the Comanis framework of the government which has been in place

for almost a half a century where the Sharia authority runs the government then what you're

talking about can't happen because why well for example you just said you know somebody looks at

this and says you know we're they're killing all our people we've got to cut our losses here

and you know live to fight another day in in the in the Sharia supremacist view you know in the

West we keep talking about like Iranian citizens they don't think of citizens they don't have a

concept of citizens they have the Sharia authority and subjects not not citizens the obligation

of the Sharia authority is to execute Sharia law faithfully as it was propounded by Muhammad

as Allah's law and the duty of the quote that what we like to call citizens but what they think of

subjects of the Sharia state is to obey and as far as they're concerned in the jihad

some people have the obligation to fight it and some people have the obligation to die and what I

mean by that is if for example you can call a lot of Western media attention with respect to

the understanding of the war to the fact that there's an American missile that ends up because

of what it hit having reverberations at a school where you know what is it 175 or 140 I can't

remember the number off the top my head but those children die as far as we're concerned that's

a tragedy because children were killed from the Iranian perspective of the Sharia supremacist

regime that runs the country that's a coup because those people died in the jihad they'll be rewarded

in the afterlife but in the meantime though the media condemnation and the condemnation from other

countries on the United States for for that having happened is helpful that's the reason for example

that Hamas when they waged the war against Israel constantly sets up these you know these depictions

which usually are fake about like these children got killed or this hospital got struck

that's helpful to them it's hard for us to look at it this way because we think it's atrocious

you know the idea of using citizens this way and using innocent people and non combatants this way

that is not how these people look at war they look at war as everybody who fights in the jihad

is rewarded by Allah in the end if you die in the jihad your reward is rich if you die waging the

the jihad your reward is the richest but what you do in life is either you fight the jihad which is

you know the highest level of pleasing Allah or you die in the jihad and that helps the cause

so they're not looking at it that way and as long as you have people who are running the state and

from what we're told I mean you know who knows the comedy son who is now supposedly assuming he's

alive is the is the leader it said that he was more anxious to bring on the end of days than

the father was if anything the father who didn't seem at all pragmatic to me was allegedly more

pragmatic than the son is so if you have the if the regime is being run by the father didn't know

what time it was clearly wow he I mean well he does it now that's for sure I don't I don't even know

but do we even know if the son's alive I mean we really don't even know if the son's alive

and if he is alive if he's compostmentous I mean actually to your scenario maybe it would be

helpful if the son isn't alive you know maybe if what's going on here is the IRGC is communicating

that yeah yeah we have an ayatollah he's he's in charge of but they're really running the show

and they need to have that box check so that they could do whatever else they they think they

need to do there may be elements of the IRGC that you could actually cut a deal with but you're

never going to be able to cut a deal if they if they actually have the Khmerny regime in place

with a with the Sharia supremacist authority is calling the shots then you're not going to be

able to cut a deal with them but but even to the extent of saying you know what we're not going

to rebuild our missile facilities and we're going to let go of the the the straight and you stop

bombing us even a deal of that that limited nature how would you how would you

they're like one of their main tenets is that the prophet said that war is deception

um if you couldn't you couldn't take a guarantee like that any further than you could throw them

it wouldn't mean anything totally even we're we're we're going to stop in the straight and you stop

honest that nothing you know look could you take something like that like you like could

Trump take something like that and declare victory I guess but if that regime is there you're

always going to have to worry that the regime is going to rebuild and I think if you leave it with

you know the regime is in charge of the straits um you'd be fooling yourself if this regime hasn't

changed if the regime is still under the sharia authorities I mean if you met you can make a deal with

them you know look they they um they told Obama and they told the United States government they

told the bush people this too that they didn't they not only didn't want nuclear weapons that

Ayatollah comedy had issued a fat war against nuclear weapons it was a total lie but for years

Obama and John Kerry ran around saying they don't want nuclear weapons that the Ayatollah says

that they have a fat war against nuclear weapons so like we actually you know we built our policy

around the around the possibility that what they were saying was true even though all of the

evidence of sense was that it wasn't so actually that that brings up another thing I forgot

that I wanted to bring up with you so we have reports or I don't know whether Whitcoff maybe

said it himself directly with Markle then or someone else but but it's certainly out there that

Whitcoff says the Iranian said what we we have mature we have the material and we can go to

11 nuclear weapons in days or weeks or whatever it was so that this is part of what's driving the

administration's imminence argument and then you have Tulsi Gabbard saying no actually troubles

kind of right first time around it was totally completely obliterated and there's been no sign

that they are that they had restarted their program so how do we square this circle is Whitcoff

saying what they could have done if they really wanted to and Tulsi saying that they hadn't done it

yet so yet so there were no indications or no evidence that they they were starting again

how do you think about this this issue well first of all with respect to Whitcoff I think you

have to cut him a break because you know crypto's down about 60 percent since was it November I mean

he's the poor guy and I wouldn't trust him on anything that had to do with math onto those

circumstance you know I think that what we what we likely know and you have to watch these weasel

terms like starting up their program what the hell does that mean starting up their program

my sense is that there is a quantum of enriched uranium that is unaccounted for that almost is

baked in the cake because the way the Obama JCPOA played itself out we didn't really have a

reliable way to verify what they were doing in the way of enriched uranium so there is uranium

evidently in the negotiations we can't account for the uranium and I don't think the Israelis can

account for the uranium either I'm sure they have a very good idea in the of the potential places

where it could be but as we've said rich and number of times Iran is a huge country and the

you know the places where they could could hide stuff are almost limitless so you have a situation

where you have unaccounted for enriched uranium since we don't know where it is we also don't know

whether they have access to it for all for all that we know and I'm sure you know we have to

caveat here that the intelligence people presumably especially if they're getting information from

the Israelis who have these guys pretty well penetrated they may have a much better idea

than anything we're going to discuss here but since we can't account for it there's always

the possibility that they have access to it the fact that they may have access to it doesn't mean

that they're in a position to do anything meaningful with it but of course if they did have access

to it that would be that would be a good start for trying to get their program going again

but in order to get their program going again they would have to have a facility that was available

to them that had an adequate number of centrifuges that was up to the task of enriching uranium

from what we theorize is now about 60 percent to weapons grade now the jump from 0 to 3 percent

which is like civilian grade use is harder than the jump from 60 to 90 so I don't want to I don't

want to suggest that it would be a great feat to get from 60 to 90 but it would be a remarkable

feat to get from 60 to 90 under circumstances where you are where you're being bombed to smithereens

I think I've read this morning that we had we had hit 7500 targets and the Israelis have hit

under over 10,000 and we're still doing it every day so they would have to have a safe place

that they and they would have to have enough centrifuges that were operating and by the

and remember now if centrifuges don't operate constantly yeah they break down and they have to be

fixed so it's a big so you know who knows what we have indications they were starting up their

program means it could it could just mean that they we have unaccounted for uranium that we think

that they may have but whether they're actually in a position to make concrete steps to actually

develop nuclear weapons you know that's unlikely on the other hand this goes back to what we

were just talking about which is leaving the regime in place right is it acceptable at the end of

this to have that regime still in place even if let's say it made a deal where that convinced Trump

that okay we're going to let the straits open again which is of course remember it's not

inconceivable the Iranians benefit from the strait being open because they need it too right

so let's say they they're willing to cut that deal but what we have to accept is

that regime is still in power and we have this unaccounted for enriched uranium

you know is is that unacceptable I don't I don't see how but maybe it's it's funny how this

works because so Iran doesn't want to fully close the strait and then apparently we've now

decided we're going to let the Iranian oil flow and all the tankers go because going to increase

the global supply and help produce the price so we got the Iranians won't go all the way and we

won't go all the way either but both driven by the economics of oil so just I'm wanted to get

a couple other topics but we've kind of run out of time but I'll just throw a couple last little

thoughts say you won you know part of the joke can't argument just this this isn't Trump you

know we never could have expected this of Trump but if you think about what is Trump like he likes

exercising authority and power right he likes doing it on his own prerogative in his own authority

and and likes doing it with just extreme optionality so where does that go if you're commander of

chief that that's the military right so we shouldn't be shocked that he's using this military

tool and then as you alluded to briefly he's been an Iran hawk for 50 years you know on an

off occasion I say oh Obama's going to start this war with Iran is going to be terrible you know

it's just for political reasons or it's going to become really popular by waging war with Iran only

that half the hope of that dynamic happens here with with Trump we haven't seen it so far but

but I don't think anyone should be shocked that that that Trump has has done this I wouldn't

necessarily predict it I I guess you know at the on an auguration day the second inauguration day

but if you told me it was going to be happened I would have said wouldn't have said no you know

there's no way because we didn't elect Rand Paul we didn't elect JD Vance we didn't elect

Rich Colby yeah but you know what you will what we elected I don't want to say the Trump is not

a finished product but he's just an impetuous guy who believes his gut is yeah a reliable way

to conduct a government and the problem is his gut doesn't tell him the same thing hour by hour

much less day by day so for example you know I I think we've been doing these head scratchers

which are we're we're kind of stupid arguments to have because if you think about Trump's

constitution like his personal constitution it's easily it's easy to explain what happened like

for example remember we had like for about a week a big to do over did we not factor in that they

might close to straight yeah and like there was a bunch of people saying you know because they

thought it was they they hate Trump so they thought it was expedient to say he's a moron he's stupid

so therefore there was no consideration that they might open the close to straight you know

as a practical matter close to straight I don't want to get into this whole stupid thing about

like it's open but it's not open you know it's if ships aren't getting through it's not open

um but you know we had some people saying they couldn't they never even thought about this what a

bunch of incompetent then you have a bunch of people come back and say are you kidding me like every

military exercise we've ever done and every study we've done has factored in that these guys don't

have an air force and one of the things they have to defend themselves is that they can always

close to straight they've been planning to do it 40 years of course it was on the table and

this went on for days but the answer obviously was of course we thought about it of course it

was out there but we in the United States is all kinds of things right we as the intelligence and

we as the Pentagon what happened here was yes they thought about it but Trump decided it would

never happen like we're going to do this outrageous shock and all kind of thing to Iran and they're

going to be so stupified by it that they'll surrender and they'll they won't do it it's not that

we didn't consider it it's that like Trump in his gut thought like if we make it costly enough for

them and he absolutely doesn't try to factor in with their ideology is he just thinks this is like

you know this is like a tough real estate thing like if you make it tough enough for them they'll

capitulate and I think that's exactly what happened again I mean we're seeing the same thing again

and again I think that Trump absolutely signed off on the Israelis hitting the gas infrastructure

in Iran and then when he saw that Iran didn't surrender from that and instead turned around and

hit Qatar and Saudis and the UAE and saw what was happening to the prices then he decided today

my move is to distance myself from Israel pretend that I didn't know anything about it and warn

Iran that if they keep hitting Qatar they're gonna they're gonna be hit like they've never been hit

before which is kind of weird to say when it's like day 19 and every day we hit them like they've

it's just disguise gut you know that's what that's what it is and you know look maybe it'll work out

but you never you never gonna I try to case against a I try to case one time with a judge

who was a a famous judge for his mercurial temper and he was a judge who had like migraines

and you never knew when he was gonna explode so they you know I had it was like a six week trial

and every minute of the trial was like being on tender hooks because even if you felt like it was

going well any moment it could you know he could just like the the big old hand would go over the head

and you'd be like I feel the earth moving underneath me and everything would change so you know

when you're dealing with one of these mercurial characters even when things seem to be going well

you can never get too comfortable I guess the upside is that even when things are going terrible

you never know whether he's gonna do something that you know changes the equation the other way

but this is a very it's it's not a stable way to go about warfare we're a tremendously powerful

country and we have unbelievable military and I think we have good intelligence even though we

we take shots at the political elements of them from time to time so you know

there's always a chance that we can win something like this just because of the sheer talent

and power of those people but this is never going to feel stable yeah all right well that's

all the time we have this podcast has been produced by the incomparable Sarah Shuddy thanks

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