Transcript
Speaker: ah Hello and welcome to Sips and Substance, where we distill politics down to its essence. I'm Justin. We have Jonathan over here. Hello. And yeah, I'm back from Sequoia.
Speaker: And i have to say, I want to congratulate Doug Burgum for actually doing a decent job. ah This will be our little woke secret, but did you know that on Juneteenth, you can get into the park for free?
Speaker: I did not, but I'll bet you Doug Burgum has nothing to do with that, if I had to guess. And i'm I'm not going to congratulate Doug Burgum because I'm not particularly pleased with, say, the the the decision that we're going to open up a gazillion acres for roads and farming, roads and farms.
Speaker: lumber and all kinds of stuff that they just announced last week. um So yeah. I think the parliamentarian said no to that. So if there's that. Who knows? The desire is there. Exactly.
Speaker: The national parks were there before him. So I'm going to give credit to the national parks more so than than Doug Burgum, especially since they're more or less operating on skeleton crews these days since, oh, I don't know, Doug Burgum decided to fire a lot of people at Elon Musk's behest, I guess. So yeah.
Speaker: Yes, I love the parks and I've and enjoyed some time out in nature as well recently. um But yeah, I don't know where the credit is really due. So it was interesting because obviously you don't have internet in the parks unless you can get like a solid Wi-Fi signal or a Starlink or something like that.
Speaker: So once I had that, I texted you and messaged, you know, a political ah form I'm part of. and like Hey, did I miss anything important? Yes, like get I got to give you a good response. Other than that we bummed it in, though.
Speaker: Yeah. So yes, that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to you know talk about how we got here. It's been a long journey. We've been talking about bombing Iran for basically my whole life.
Speaker: More or less since 1979.
Speaker: And yeah i want to focus on two themes here. The first theme is we really need to be comfortable with uncertainty. There's been a lot of folks out there who are for sure, we know what's going to happen next.
Speaker: And you know we don't even know what the damage is to the nuclear facilities. So if you're someone who wants to know exactly what's going to happen now, this is not the show for you. And that's just not the reality we live in.
Speaker: And the next thing I really want to focus on is the how we got there. Sorry, how we got here and how we can pin a lot of this on Trump. And I'm not just saying this is like, oh, I'm an anti-Trumper.
Speaker: He has made some fundamental decisions during his first administration that helped pave the way to having to make this decision. When we talk about all that, I do want to bring it. And I know you do, too. We're going to bring it down to, well, ultimately, was this the right thing to do or not?
Speaker: And I think we've have differing opinions on the degree to which um it ends up being good or bad policy decision. And I think it'll be interesting um for us to kind of hash that out once we've covered ground in terms of where we're at, how we got here, um and what's going on.
Speaker: Before we do that, right, I have a beer for the day. um I'm kind of, again, still going over some of the beers that i that I've already done and people may have seen before. But this one I thought was appropriate for today. We've got the Furious IPA. And I'm not so much furious about um the Iran thing. I'm pretty annoyed with, say, oh, I don't know, RFK as usual. Supreme Court has me a little annoyed today.
Speaker: Also kind of More than a little miffed at the Democrats just kind of being missing still. right there's there's There's not really a response, which at least an organized response that I'd like to see.
Speaker: So the Furious Beer will keep me company for now. It's still a really solid IPA. And as you can see by the more amber kind of color, it's got a ah fairly substantial malt.
Speaker: um, backbone to it. So while it's really hoppy, it's got the malt sort of balance that out and play off of that. Um, gives you a really, really good beer that finishes very smoothly and just goes together really well. I mean, surly,
Speaker: in case you're not furious enough, you can also be Surly because it's Surly beer. um They make some really good beers. um Good Midwestern beer. You can find it all over the country now. Apparently you can find it here, all over the Midwest.
Speaker: um Good IPA to have. If you're looking for something that's similar, that's not Surly, if you can't get Surly, it's not really a traditional IPA, like either East Coast or West Coast. It's more like ah If you're looking for something else that's similar, maybe like a a hopped red.
Speaker: and um Oscar Blues, which you can get all over the country, they have a beer called G'Night, which used to be Gordon, um one of my favorite beers ever. It's like a really hopped red. um And there are a lot of places that are making that's kind of like more of a red ale, so more hoppy or more malty, so different kind of flavors from that.
Speaker: and then the hop content to balance it out. So look, if you can't find this, want something similar, find a ah red IPA if you can find it, or a really hopped red ale, and you'll get something similar.
Speaker: All right. So I think we're going to set the stage here and give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background. Iran has had a nuclear program for a very, very long time.
Speaker: And we've been talking about them acquiring a nuclear weapon since the Bush administration. I remember when I was in college, that was a long time ago. we were just saying, oh, are they going to get a nuclear weapon? Are they not?
Speaker: and What should we do? We're like in the middle of the Iraq war. So going to war with Iran wasn't popular at all. And yeah, it's just something that we've always been concerned about. And I'm sure everyone remembers Bibi Netanyahu's speech before the UN where he has his like bomb and he says, okay, if Iran's here, you know, that's when we're going to act.
Speaker: And even though we've had people saying that Iran getting a nuclear weapon is imminent, That doesn't mean that the concern is overblown.
Speaker: And part of the reason why they don't have a nuclear weapon is because we've taken many different steps. We've employed various strategies to ensure that they don't. So obviously we've put sanctions on them over the years and it's not just us, it's been the EU.
Speaker: We had the Stuxnet virus that was a joint operation between the US and Israel where we developed a specific type of worm that focused on the what it the siemens software that controls the uh plcs and the hardware something like that i thought it was the centrifuges we yeah yeah and so the centrifuges end up getting destroyed not all of them but some of them and that set their program back uh for some time because they were just like how did this happen what's going on so
Speaker: even though only a certain amount of centrifuges were destroyed, they wanted to kind of figure out, well, what happened? And so they decreased production of enriched uranium substantially. And then we had the diplomatic route.
Speaker: So under the Obama administration, we had the JCPOA. So the Iran nuclear deal, that was the agreement between the UN security council. So, you know, Russia, China, France, what have you, Germany, plus the EU and Iran.
Speaker: And That was a very controversial deal. It didn't get ratified by the US Senate. A lot of Republicans made sure that there was no enforcement mechanism from a legal perspective, right? This was just sort of like an agreement that whoever was the US president would just abide by.
Speaker: And that's concerning, right? you know Engaging in diplomacy, but then not being able to back it up through the laws of your own country is a very risky maneuver. And the reason why people said it was a bad deal is because it only addressed one of the three things that we didn't like Iran for. it So obviously it addressed the nuclear weapons and it, in my opinion, did a fairly good job about that, but it didn't address their ballistic missiles program.
Speaker: and It didn't address their support for terrorism. And so obviously the ballistic missiles program is important because that is a national security threat to our allies in the region and us because we have bases all throughout the Middle East.
Speaker: And ballistic missiles are one of the primary ways of deploying a nuclear weapon. So yeah, you could have a fully functioning nuclear weapon like we did in World War II, but if you don't have the ability to project that somewhere, then it's far less effective. It can't be used as a powerful deterrent.
Speaker: So here's where I wanna devil's advocate you a little bit, a couple of things, right? First, the idea is I'm gonna have to say, I don't remember Netanyahu's speech in front of the UN.
Speaker: um Maybe I'm older than you and things mix. I know I'm older than you and things kind of mix together. But I do remember Netanyahu saying over and over again, for the better part, if not the entirety of your lifetime, that Iran is right there. They're gonna have a bomb and they're going have a bomb right away. They're weeks away. They're weeks away.
Speaker: And that's one thing people have been showing lately when he's saying, oh, they're weeks away. And then they're showing all the old clips of him saying they're weeks away, they're weeks away, they're weeks away. So in a lot of ways, you might be, you might take him not necessarily at face value because it's, I don't think it's a coincidence that this Israeli attack on Iran and then convincing the United States to come in has done wonders for Netanyahu domestically.
Speaker: People in Israel are rallying around the flag as people do, and his domestic support, which was kind of shaky, has improved quite a bit. Don't think that that's a coincidence. um Beyond that, I'd like to talk a little bit more about the first deal, right?
Speaker: The Iran nuclear deal. You talk about, i don think you I think you properly pointed out as successful in a way, right? um Because it that deal is somewhere around 10 years old, something like that. don't know exactly offhand. um But that's 10 years that Iran did not acquire a nuclear weapon, right?
Speaker: If you take the Trump administration at face value and that we obliterated their missiles and the the british obliterated their program, maybe maybe not, right? hard to see read see anything even from them that says we've put them back more than 10 years.
Speaker: right So to argue that this was a bad deal because it put them back as far as this bombing campaign did or more, but there are other assessments that say we didn't.
Speaker: We put them back maybe a few months. Also from the Trump administration, they just don't happen to like that. right um It's hard to argue that this military campaign is more effective than than the original deal, which as you properly pointed out, Trump scrapped, right?
Speaker: And got us into this position where there is no deal. um And what are you going to do now? And so we've decided the diplomatic route didn't work simply because you don't look like you're a tough guy if you're enforcing a diplomatic route.
Speaker: It didn't work, why? Did they have a nuclear weapon? No. Are they closer to a nuclear weapon than they were before? well Possibly. But if you listen to Netanyahu, they've been painfully close to a nuclear weapon every time he's opened his mouth about it for the past 25, 30, 35 years.
Speaker: Right. um So it's hard to say if you don't know anything about it and you're told we have this nuclear deal and they haven't built a weapon since. um Hard to to come to the conclusion, well, that didn't work.
Speaker: Right. Because it seemed to. and Now, again, you make points about they've built ballistic missiles. They've sponsored terrorism. um Their sponsoring of terrorism against the United States has decreased considerably since this deal.
Speaker: went into place. like right um But again, the policy that Trump and most American presidents are are after is not Iran will never have ballistic missiles or Iran will never sponsor terrorism.
Speaker: Those things are problems for us, but problems on a whole different level than Iran with a nuclear weapon. Now, I think later on we'll discuss the feasibility of keeping the nuclear weapon away from forever, but that's a different goal than Ballistic missiles and terrorism.
Speaker: Yeah. And so when I say bad deal, I don't necessarily mean that it's a bad deal at preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. When I say bad deal, I'm saying that it doesn't cover all of our U.S. interests, which is why I talked about the ballistic missiles program and the ah funding of terrorism.
Speaker: Do you think it makes sense to have to link all those? Because like we had deals with the Soviets. Right. Right. yeah And that's a very good point. Yeah, so obviously it's in our interest to try and link them, right? Because at the end of the day, Iran is a destablinging destabilizing force.
Speaker: They are responsible for the, indirectly at least, through their proxies. In Iraq, for instance, they effectively killed hundreds of US soldiers.
Speaker: They've propped up the regime in Syria. They fund, they prolonged the Yemeni civil war. They funded Hamas. They are frankly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims by prolonging these conflicts. Right.
Speaker: ah And obviously these are all bad things. Now, from my perspective, this was, even though it's a bad deal in that it doesn't address all of the U S interests, it's still better than no deal.
Speaker: And it did effectively prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, which out of all these three things, ah Iran having a nuclear weapon is a definite. No, we cannot have that happen.
Speaker: Uh, that's sort of the, um, main strategy for not just us, but from the UN Security Council, right? It's a very fringe view to allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
Speaker: Well, we'll get to that later because there are some other people, there are some serious people that don't think that's a fringe view, but at least for American policy, that's sort of ah different level than the other ones.
Speaker: And to get back to this sort of linkage thing, that's ah always been a big issue in foreign policy circles. um An easy place to go back to is, say, the Vietnam War. Right. um You've got Russia and China to greater and lesser extent funding a lot of what's going on in Vietnam in that area, killing a lot more American soldiers. But we're still trying to have agreements with these countries about other things.
Speaker: Right. Right. um And so it's in an ideal world. You'd love to be able to say we'd like to resolve all these issues and get them done more often than not. In the the international relations, foreign policy arena, you can get one thing done.
Speaker: And you hope that that leads to progress on other issues. So to me, because it just focuses on what the government's main interest at the time was, it doesn't necessarily make it a bad deal.
Speaker: I think that that's that to me is a little, it's kind of over-optimistic and pessimistic at the same time. You're kind of hoping, hey, we should have been able to do more. And because we didn't, it's not such a great deal.
Speaker: um To me, just knowing a lot about the sort of the history of diplomacy and how that tended to work out, It's very rare when you can have some sort of pact that addresses all the issues. Right. And I don't disagree with that, which is why i think from the nuclear proliferation standpoint, it was a solid deal because the proof is in the pudding. They didn't acquire a nuclear weapon.
Speaker: And even though that, even though Trump got rid of the deal and imposed really harsh sanctions, Iran tried to adhere to the deal in hopes of Trump realizing that, hey, you know what?
Speaker: You can come back to the table and the deal is you know pretty solid. And he sort of wants a deal, right? He's saying he wants diplomacy. He also said he didn't think it might be necessary. But to get back to calling it a bad deal, I guess one of the reasons I'm opposed to saying that is that Trump scrapped it because it's a bad deal.
Speaker: right Well, what makes it a bad deal? It kept nuclear weapons out of their hands for however long it's been. By definition, if that's your ultimate foreign policy goal, that makes it a good deal.
Speaker: Yeah. And again, it's because of the politics. He's spinning it as a bad deal for domestic political reasons, more so than geopolitical international relations reasons.
Speaker: Because if, in fact, they got closer to a bomb after the deal was scrapped, that kind of indicates not such a great time to get rid of the deal. And also, after the deal, they didn't get a nuclear weapon and yet.
Speaker: So maybe be simply corollary rather than causal, ah to use fancy political science language. But we had a deal. We don't have a nuke. We don't have a deal.
Speaker: You feel the need to bomb to keep them from getting a nuke. Those are different scenarios. It was a trade-off, right? When I say bad deal, I'm just simply pointing out that a lot of our interests weren't covered. Okay.
Speaker: Let's say incomplete deal then. Can we say incomplete deal? That's fair. Again, I think people are conflating it with Trump's assessment. It's a bad deal. And I know you're not saying that. Right. But it kind of sounds like it. So if you say incomplete deal, i' I'm ah right right with you. It is incomplete. It doesn't resolve all our issues with Iran.
Speaker: But it did seem to address the major issue fairly well. Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I'm not going to pretend that Iran is some angel and that they adhere to the deal by crossing every T and dotting every i They have secret nuclear facilities that they don't want the IAEA involved with.
Speaker: Iran, in their interest, they're going to try and get around the deal because that's what you do when you want to acquire a nuclear weapon. But again, it seems that their progress was hampered enough ah through through through the JCPOA.
Speaker: And it seems, from what you can see, it at least externally, it seems like they restrained themselves. Right. right yes yeah They're truly ah weeks away, like Netanyahu has been saying forever and like we're saying now.
Speaker: Well, why are they weeks away and why haven't they just made a bomb? Right. It's not tough to go from weeks away to having a bomb, but they've not done this. Right. So and we haven't bombed them for a long time.
Speaker: it it's It's been a year. We've never really bombed Iran's nuclear facilities. Right. Why didn't they make a bomb if they were that close? It seems that at least Part of that is attitude, right? They decided they wouldn't take these last steps unless they've done it in secret.
Speaker: um So this the incomplete deal seems to have done what our everything that our bombing campaign did. It delayed them from getting a bomb without having any sort of resolution, which is my big beef with the bombing campaign. It kind of picks up from there.
Speaker: We're going to delay them a different way. but we're not going to have any sort of resolution with that either. It's just going to continue to play out, yeah um which will be my segue um into sort of the next, the next bit, which is the arguments against, right. Why, you know,
Speaker: why not why not bomb? or like To me, it's, when you want to say incomplete deal, this is sort of incomplete bombing. we've not gone We're not going to, and there's and no circumstance I can imagine, where we're going to get on the ground and institute regime change.
Speaker: Right. So unless Iran decides for itself, they're going to change regimes or they decide, you know what? Nuclear stuff, it's not for us. We're going to change.
Speaker: um This to me is just another way of delaying sort of an incomplete military mission. Tremendously... successful tactically.
Speaker: We seem to have blown up what we wanted to blow up. We seem to hit what we wanted to hit. Now it's a question of how much damage these bombs were capable of doing, but that's, if we didn't do as much damage as we wanted, has nothing to do with the military performance.
Speaker: They put the things exactly what they were supposed to. Um, we don't know exactly how great it was blowing up people under a mountain, but we may never know really. Um,
Speaker: It's just hard to say that an incomplete bombing to me is better than an incomplete diplomatic agreement. Yeah, I don't think you're wrong about that. And i think what really changed was the risk analysis.
Speaker: So one of the reasons why America told Israel over many administrations not to bomb Iran was because they were worried about Iranian proxies. You know, if Israel attacks Iran,
Speaker: And just imagine what the world was like before October 7th. The general consensus was, well, Haifa could be destroyed by Hezbollah, which is ah ah one of the northern cities in Israel.
Speaker: The Houthis could shut down ah the sea routes. And a lot of U.S. troops and are in iraq and Iraq could be attacked by Iranian proxies.
Speaker: And i think based on Israel's tactical success post-October 7th, that has changed the analysis because, well, wait, Iran really isn't that strong.
Speaker: And that, I believe, was part of the calculation for Israel to go in and start doing their decapitation strikes. The Israelis... have air supremacy. So Iran doesn't control the airspace anymore, which is one of the reasons why we're able to go in and have a tactically successful mission.
Speaker: And when you adjust the risks there and the possible responses, that changes your decision tree, right? Potentially, certainly something to think about. But the way I look at it is, do the rewards change?
Speaker: What makes the rewards of bombing any more promising than the rewards of diplomacy? the The diplomacy at the last round of it seemed to deliver what we're interested in.
Speaker: Right. Yeah. Ten years of delaying a bomb for 10 years. I don't think anybody's pretending or hoping or even imagining that bombing has put them back more than 10 years.
Speaker: Yeah. I don't think even the most generous assessments right now would say that it's you're talking about maybe two, three years, something like that. So why, even if the risk is less, why embrace something where the return isn't any better?
Speaker: I don't see the argument for that um unless you're 100 percent convinced and have good evidence that the diplomacy route can't work and they are going to actually go the the extra step and make the bomb right now, um assuming that's still your goal. And it seems to be that our goal, they can't have one.
Speaker: OK, but. We're counting on them still to decide not to take this extra step. And if they eventually get back to it, we're kind of saying, well, we're going to have to do this again in 10 years.
Speaker: Right. And what I think we can decide and make a judgment is that Iran is probably at a weak point right now. They're as weak as they've been in a long time.
Speaker: Right. And as soon as the bombing has stopped, which it has, presumably they're going to start building up again and they're going to see where they were weak. And they will probably, in my estimation and and prediction, is dedicate more resources to where they're weak.
Speaker: Right. They're going to really focus, in my I would imagine, on air defenses yeah and mass producing missiles.
Speaker: Right. If I'm Iran and I'm thinking, what happened? What went wrong? Why isn't Israel scared of us? Well, we don't have we have these big missiles, but not enough of them. They can shoot them all down. Right.
Speaker: If we could make more cheaper missiles and just fire off barrages of the thousands, they'd have a harder time shooting them down. Right. And i guarantee you that this is if some Iranian happened to be hearing this, and like, oh, my God, there's a great idea.
Speaker: Somebody has thought about that there. Like, what's what's the problem with our why isn't Israel scared of us? We don't have enough that we can shoot off at any given time that they're scared of us. Right. That's what they're going to focus on.
Speaker: Being able to overwhelm Israeli anti-missile defense and have better air defenses at home. Right. And they do that. Come 10 years or however long it is, um I'm going to guess.
Speaker: to go out limb and say within the next five years of Netanyahu still in power, he's going to say again that Iran is weeks away from having a bomb. Just because that's who he is. That's what he's always done. right Five years from now, Iran will be stronger than they are today.
Speaker: Yeah. Let's pull on that thread a bit ah about diplomacy and how it may or may not work. So Biden tried to create some sort of new deal that mirrored the JCPOA, right?
Speaker: And after Trump pulled out of the deal, one of the things that he did was he assassinated Soleimani.
Speaker: And eventually orran Iran's new president, he's a ah hardliner and he wanted, he basically said, look, One, you guys aren't trustworthy. You assassinated one of our most important people and you pulled out of the deal. So even if we got into a new deal, there's no guarantee that the next president isn't going to pull out again.
Speaker: And because the president is a hardliner, they're going to want more. So they don't want the IAEA sniffing around looking for secret nuclear facilities.
Speaker: They're going to want to keep their ballistic missiles program intact. And the Biden administration basically came to the realization that, well, these guys aren't interested in diplomacy. And I think from Iran's perspective, again, pre-October 7th, they felt that they had a lot of leverage.
Speaker: Well, that too. and And like you said, they struck a deal and more or less stuck to their end of it. They didn't build a nuclear weapon. um And then the US pulled out. why What incentive do you have to make another deal?
Speaker: You basically did the ultimate thing that they told you to do and you're being punished for it. yeah I don't think Iran had any incentive to be diplomatic. And I think this bombing campaign, yeah we talked about certainty and having to be rather uncertainty and having to be comfortable with that.
Speaker: You mentioned at some point that when you have a strategic objective, part of the goal is to narrow your probability tree of. Yes. Eliminate some uncertainty, right? Your, your strategy should be ideally advancing you towards the point you want to be at.
Speaker: Yeah. yeah We don't have that certain. Yeah. We have no way more uncertainty now. Yes. And we, at best, if everything worked out as perfectly for us, we've delayed Iran ah certain amount of time.
Speaker: Yeah. That's the only thing we've achieved. yeah right um The other things we've achieved, we've pissed off the Iranian populace in a way that they've they're giving more support to the regime than they were before, right which is hard to do in that country, but somehow we figured it out. right um So it's just it's hard to say what benefits this particular bombing has done.
Speaker: right And I'm and we've talked about it in a lot of different formats in terms of strategy um in the Israeli strategies as well. It's like I'm not a fan of a strategy that says, well, we'll kick it down the road for a while and then we'll get back to it.
Speaker: It's like historically that doesn't work particularly well. Right. And it doesn't. It doesn't. Right. It keeps the status quo. It can for a while. It assumes no mistakes and it assumes no changes.
Speaker: Right. um Who's to say that, you know, we don't have some drastic mistake next time. Suppose next time one of the B2s has a catastrophic um failure and just crashes in the middle of Iran.
Speaker: right um yeah a second point That's not that unusual. Crap like that happens all the time. and Look at the Laden mission, right? Yeah. We've lost a a stealth helicopter there and we had to adapt.
Speaker: right One of our best helicopters, we didn't have a lot of them, it died. And it crashed. How's that going to play? Or if we miss, a bomb doesn't fall right and it blows up a school or a hospital or something like that.
Speaker: Again, these are the kind of mistakes that exacerbate stuff. Or somebody in Iran could not take it as well. but Maybe there's a ah more hardliner in charge and they decide to respond differently. They get tired of us doing this and stopping and doing it and stopping. And you know it just, when you do something like this just to buy yourself some time,
Speaker: It drastically increases the uncertainty around response and around mistakes, and it doesn't bring you closer to a resolution. or I don't think we're any closer to a full resolution than we were before the bombing.
Speaker: I don't think we've convinced Iran, you don't want a nuclear weapon. I think if anything, we've reminded them, you really do want a nuclear weapon. You just don't want the intermediate stage before you can get one, right?
Speaker: Yeah. so it's yeah i mean so So we've drastically expanded the cone of uncertainty. ye Honestly, part of it could be, well, they got their ass kicked so badly that they're going to come to the diplomatic table.
Speaker: Maybe it would work. i mean, look at Muammar Gaddafi. But on the other hand, this is a regime that thinks in the long term. So while they might have a tepid response initially, and they responded by telegraphing that they're going to bomb a base that we have in Qatar and there were no injuries and stuff like that.
Speaker: But when we assassinated Soleimani, you know, they attacked our base and we didn't have any U.S. soldier deaths, but we did have many soldiers who suffered traumatic brain injury.
Speaker: But then ah couple years later, there was very credible intelligence that they tried to assassinate Donald Trump. Now, I don't know how credible that is, but that's a very aggressive move by a regime.
Speaker: Sure. It wouldn't surprise me if five years from now, they tried to do something really aggressive in response to... help In terms of getting their ass kicked, right?
Speaker: Israel you and the United States have very thoroughly demonstrated and defeated their air defense capabilities, right? um Casualties have been very low, right? This is not the kind of thing that's just...
Speaker: destroyed the Iranian infrastructure and populists and and population centers and things like that. It's nowhere near the bombing campaigns of, say, World War II or even Vietnam. but Gaza has suffered. Even Gaza.
Speaker: They've gotten beaten, but not in a way that has... I don't think, fundamentally changed sort of the passion part of the equation because the israelian the Iranian population hasn't suffered because of this.
Speaker: They've suffered an indignity showing, hey, the Israelis who, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the Iranian government has done their best to make their population hate Israel, right?
Speaker: Now these people have come over and bombed us. that's going to strike a nerve, right? The death to the USA and death to Israel chants are not new. This is something that's been going on there for a while.
Speaker: And to see more of that um is concerning, right? It's, we're addressing part of the strategic equation, but certainly not all of it. And certainly not in an in a lasting kind of way, right?
Speaker: And if you think about, hey, we're delaying them, this is good, maybe. um But if you're Iran, Do you not try to pursue, if you're still interested in nuclear weapon, do you not try to pursue all the other avenues?
Speaker: Do you try to talk to Russia, say, hey, maybe you put us under your nuclear umbrella so they can't do this anymore? Or can we get something on the black market? Can we buy one from Russia? Can we get something from North Korea?
Speaker: what is What about Pakistan? Can we strike some sort of deal with them? but There's all sorts of ways you can try to get a bomb. And if truly they're a couple of weeks away,
Speaker: they were a couple weeks away, how far back have we pushed them? Right. I don't, I don't know. We're not going to get a straight answer. I don't think um from the Trump administration that we can believe one way or another, right.
Speaker: um Because they're just, they haven't been particularly credible. Yeah. So, so let's talk a little bit about effectiveness from tactical perspective and then we can move on to the credibility issue.
Speaker: So, Israel, for the most part, they're the ones who took out the Natanz. ah Sorry, my pronunciation might be off, but one of the nuclear sites, it's effectively destroyed. And the IAEA confirmed that the centrifuges just aren't operational anymore. The above ground stuff seems to be going. right Yeah, Isfahan, same thing.
Speaker: and And the real question is the 401, which is the underground facility. And the DIA, so the Defense Intelligence Agency, they're really good at analyzing you know, battlefield damage.
Speaker: I think it's called a BDA. Battle damage assessment. Correct. me enough I was watching Chuck Schumer the other day and somebody told him to say a battle damage assessment and he completely butchered it. A battle assessment for damage, I think is what he ended up with. Something like that.
Speaker: You know, Chuck, if you're going to try to use the acronym, please try or just don't. so So, you know, we have with low confidence that it didn't achieve its strategic objectives in that we didn't delay the program for years.
Speaker: It seems mere months. Now, again, low assessment, Things could change later on. And know we have the CIA saying something different, and we're going to have various other intelligence agencies. We have many that are going to come up with their own assessments, similar to what we had with COVID and the origins of COVID.
Speaker: The FBI believed one thing, CIA believed another. That's just how Intel works. And the Israelis also said another. And I think another thing to to mention in terms of how intel works, right?
Speaker: It's one thing to provide data. If you've got an and into an intercept, boom. You've got satellite eight images, boom. Once you've decided to go beyond that and have an interpretation, then all sorts of biases and political stances come into play, right?
Speaker: Not a surprise that the Israelis are going to tell us, this worked great and pushed them back for years. I would be astounded if they said anything other than that. Right. Don't stop them from saying in a couple however long that, hey, they're weeks away.
Speaker: But right now they're going to tell Trump, you did a great thing. This was wonderful. Right. um The CIA, you know, Tulsi Gabbard is on the outs. her If she has more of an influence, like she does with the CIA, they're not going to... D.I., but CIA, she's... She's yeah he's in charge. she yeah and So they're not going to come up with an assessment where she's at that says, yeah, the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency is right, we didn't do... We knocked them back a couple months.
Speaker: There's no way in the world that after that assessment, the CIA is going to come out with anything but what they said. Now, they might be accurate. But do they have the credibility? Do you believe Tulsi Gabbard?
Speaker: Do you believe the CIA? I absolutely do not believe Tulsi Gabbard. I mean, this is why it's so important to have serious people in serious positions. and Because that ship has sailed. It has.
Speaker: But you have to realize that, you know we are living under the specter of the Iraq war intelligence debacle. It's really hard to convince people that the intel is accurate.
Speaker: Especially when you have dueling and interpretations in your own government, and the first one is what you don't like. you get an and You get an assessment, you don't like it, so you come up with ones that happen to agree with you.
Speaker: Anybody paying attention to anything would it be a little bit skepticable skeptical if your second assessment happens to agree with you when the first one didn't. It's just common sense. again, maybe the same assessment is correct.
Speaker: But given that this administration has been really pushing this narrative, that was this massive success. And you have Pete Hegseth, you know, crying about how the soldiers are so upset that the pilots that were demeaning their mission.
Speaker: It's just like, dude, this is like a real reality yeah show. We know that the Trump administration, both of them have a very close relationship with the truth. So probably we should give them the benefit of the doubt. And so that's, it's, it's very frustrating because, you know at the end of the day,
Speaker: very few people want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. We want these decisions to succeed. We want our American interests fulfilled. And when you have people who don't have credibility, it's just so hard to continue pushing your interests.
Speaker: And i was listening to a another podcast with a person who is an expert on yeah or Iran and whatnot. And he mentioned that when he was doing analysis involving iran Iranian proxies in Iraq, he didn't want to have his name on the analysis because he was worried that for political purposes, and this was like in to the 2008 election, that it could ruin his career if he was wrong.
Speaker: And you know it's common knowledge now that Iranian proxies are involved in Iraq and all throughout the region. But back in 2006 and 2007, that was very that was a very controversial thing to say. People were really reluctant to say, yes, this is absolutely happening because we lost credibility due to the invasion.
Speaker: And that's why credibility is so important. And frankly, I don't think we have that credibility now. Now, the one thing that I'd still like to sort of throw into the, throw a wrench into the works here at the end when we wrap up is, is talking, is getting back to the ideas like, is this really a good strategy overall because of the timeline involved? i Do you think we can keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon forever?
Speaker: Not without regime change. Okay. So that's, this is a problem that, that I think we, we overlook. I agree with you. I don't think we can keep them from getting a nuclear weapon forever. If we can't do that, does it make sense to try to get yourself ready for the day when they have one?
Speaker: Right. um There's a the most famous theorist, realist theorist in um international relations in the last 50 years, Waltz, was of a mind that, hey, if everybody had a nuclear weapon, the world would be a safer place because you wouldn't be able to do things like bomb Iran if you're Israel, if they know But the problem that I have always had with that and the criticism wider than me is that if everybody has nuclear weapon, it really increases the chances of accident and mistake.
Speaker: um So that's a problem. and and And when you think about Iran having a nuclear weapon, we look at them as not maybe the most rational of actors motivated by religion in a way that we don't want to see really out to destroy Israel. And they might be willing two get incinerated themselves to destroy Israel, right?
Speaker: I'm not sure how much credibility I put in that. i tend to do i do tend to think that nuclear weapons have sort of a moderating effect because these people, while say like...
Speaker: People who sponsor terrorism, say like Iran, they're happy to do that. They generally don't strap a suicide bomb on themselves and go blow things up. Right. So the leadership tends to have some reluctance when their own safety is involved.
Speaker: um You can look at Gaddafi. We blow up his tent. He decided to pull things back. um Beyond that, though, if we can't do it forever, should we make it a way that either they decide they don't want to or we can welcome a different type of Iran into more of an international fraternity, I guess.
Speaker: um Because if we can't do it forever, if they eventually get it, they will be a nuclear armed power that's our enemy. Right? um So we're setting that up. I'm afraid that we are setting that up now by we're just bombing them to push it back a little and not really doing anything.
Speaker: If you really want to keep them from getting a nuclear weapon, you need to follow up somehow. And we haven't figured out how to do that yet. And we're not even talking about it. We're making it explicit. We're not going to do regime change. Well, then what are you going to do other than set this up to happen again?
Speaker: And the more times it happens, the less comfortable I am that we can come up with a very restrained response from Iran and a very limited conflict. So I don't like the idea of keep pushing it down the road with the idea that they will never get a nuclear weapon because never is a long time.
Speaker: And the technology needed to make nuclear weapons is getting more and more basic. It's go to become more and more available as time goes on. You know, these complicated centrifuges I'm guaranteeing will become less complicated, less large, easier to hide.
Speaker: It will be easier down the road for somebody to get a nuclear weapon. If we just keep pretending we can, eh, we'll delay it for a while and then we'll see see what happens. I mean, it's really tricky, right?
Speaker: Because I do think there are merits to kicking the can down the road. Every time there there's a leadership change. So this is the second Ayatollah. He is fundamentally different than the first one.
Speaker: If you look at the Cold War with the Soviet Union, you know, it started off with Stalin and then you had Khrushchev and that was a very different dynamic. And then it was a very different dynamic with Brezhnev. And eventually the Soviet Union collapsed.
Speaker: You look at Vietnam and we were bitter enemies, but now we are on good terms with them. And they are skeptical of Chinese expansion. The world has a funny way of things. The world would just give you stuff and you just have to deal with it. And we look at, right. we We had just accepted. We're like, you know what? Yeah. Assad is a bad guy, but you know what? He won the Syrian civil war and we're going to start bringing him back into the fold.
Speaker: And now he's gone. And when you do this, kick the can down the road, strategy, frankly, you're just hoping for a good dice roll. but Sure, but I mean, i don't I'm not comfortable with the strategy of hope, right? here And if you talk about the larger geopolitical things like the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and things like that, these were accompanied by a strategy, right?
Speaker: um Our strategy in Vietnam didn't work out so well, but our strategy to with the In the Cold War, it did. we It wasn't just, well, let's sit around and hope and wait that the Soviet Union um will collapse. right We worked to constrain them and do things. We're not doing that with Iran.
Speaker: we We don't have a larger strategy of how to keep them from getting a nuclear weapon. that right the law yeah one ah One of the things that that the the situations that I kind of see as somewhat analogous is when the Soviets were trying to acquire a nuclear weapon.
Speaker: right They made it their goal. They wanted, it's the official goal of the Soviet Union to revolution throughout the world, right, to conquer us. and And so we were really threatened by them having a nuclear weapon. And we had a discussion at the time, should we take them out?
Speaker: So they can't get a nuclear weapon. We could have done it. We were the only nuclear nuclear arm power in the world. We could have killed a lot of Russians and stopped that and had regime change. um I think for the better, we didn't.
Speaker: It would have had some short term security, would have killed a lot of people, would have done a lot of environmental damage. But as it turned out, we waited and had a different strategy and that worked.
Speaker: But we had a strategy. That's what I don't see with Iran. I don't see a strategy. I see, hey, we'll do this. Okay, then what? Well, we push them back for a while.
Speaker: All right, if you've given yourself time, do something with it. Yeah, and i don't see the strategy from Israel either in that regard. No, and well, we talked about that before. Israel doesn't doesn't have a strategy to win any of these conflicts other than we'll degrade their capabilities and they won't be able to hurt us for now.
Speaker: And hope they surrender and just accept the fact that they got their ass kicked. Yeah. Which again, hasn't worked out for them historically in the past. Oh, I don't know. mean, look at Jordan, Egypt, Egypt, and I'm talking about the the terrorist groups.
Speaker: like Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. Hamas is not going to decide, yeah, we've had enough. They're just not going to. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a mixed bag. No doubt about that. And I think that's a good place to stop.
Speaker: And again, I want to go back to the theme of we need to be comfortable with uncertainty here. like it's You need to try to lessen the uncertainty. Right. But I understand what you're what you're saying.
Speaker: To quote the great Donald Rumsfeld, there are unknown unknowns.
Speaker: there's There's known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Yes. We don't know. We don't know. but We don't know. We don't know how the regime is going to respond in Iran. Maybe they become more diplomatic. Maybe they try and make a deal with China.
Speaker: Maybe they activate sleeper cells. We just don't know. In the show notes, we have a article linked by Lieutenant General Mark Hartling. And you know that's some food for thought there.
Speaker: So on that note, um I think we're going to let everybody know that with the fourth coming up, we're going to take a week week off and enjoy the fourth and be patriotic. um But we won't be jingoistic. We will draw the line at patriotic. um And so, yeah, we're going to celebrate the fourth in whatever ways we like to do that.
Speaker: And then we will see everybody in two weeks.
