Is There an End in Sight for the US War in Iran?

0:00Hello and welcome to Net Assessment, where we debate the hard choices facing America's national security and foreign policy communities. Today we're getting Chris and Zach's wish we're talking about Iran. Oh, it's our wish, all right. What are the two goals of the United States, Israel, and Gulf partners in this war? Is the situation in the state of Hormuz a challenge the United States and its partners can manage? If so, can they do it at an acceptable cost. I'm Melanie Marlow of CSIS here with Chris Preble of the Stimpson Center and Zach Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute. How are you? Hello again. How are you doing, Chris? You made my evening miserable the other night? Not me personally. The Tennessee volunteer is made Melanie's night miserable. But you, you reminding me, you know, like he sent me the official text. I did not watch the game at all. I did not watch the game and just for the record, we

1:00are at halftime and I have the game between the Vols and the Cavaliers is now on pause. So I will watch the rest of the game after this recording. Look, March Madness is one of my absolutely favorite sporting events. I did not watch any of it on Thursday or Friday because I was way too busy. I finally have managed to watch a little bit on Saturday and Sunday, but it's a great sporting event. It really is. It's awesome. All right. Is that how about you? I'm just enjoying the beautiful spring weather in Washington. As you both know, well, we only get like 10 days of spring before it turns into muggy, terrible and hot. Stop it. So you have to enjoy those 10 days as much as possible. Yesterday, I think it got to 72, but with the breeze, it was maybe 68 and it should not get any hotter than that all year long. It was perfect. Your kids must be enjoying it though, right? You must be enjoying having the kids outside. That is always the right answer. Very nice. Yes. That's great. Okay. Well, as I said, we're talking about Iran and Chris has the show. Chris.

2:04So we're talking about Iran and I wanted the conversation to start with a discussion around the costs of the war as it relates to oil prices. So we are focused first on Caitlin Talmadge's article at CFR online, foreign affairs online. The article is called the Hormuz Mindfield in the Strait. Iran holds the advantage and America has no good options. Just for reference sake, again, we're recording on Sunday, the 22nd of March, since the start of the war, according to an article posted at Yahoo News, the price of Brent futures has soared from $71 per barrel to about $110 per barrel. So that's a 54% increase on Thursday. Briefly oil hit $119 per barrel because Brent crude is easy to refine into gasoline. Gas prices tend to rise along with Brent, since February 20th, the article continues. The average price of gasoline for regular gas in the US has shot up by one whole dollar

3:07from $2.93 to $3.91. That's the single largest one month jump in the last 30 years in the price of gasoline. And I think Caitlin anticipated this. Again, she was writing this in the middle of this process. She anticipated this because, of course, about 20% of the world's oil transits the Strait every day. And the Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has spent as she writes decades developing military capabilities aimed at traffic in the Strait. It has never fully deployed them. She goes on because closing the Strait would interfere with Iran's own ability to export oil and would invite global economic backlash. But Iran has developed these capabilities as a tool for leverage against more conventionally powerful states, such as the United States and Israel. And in the event of a serious crisis or war, Iran now faces exactly such a threat. So in other words, this thing that they have been holding in reserve for the most part is finally being deployed because some numbers of the regime in Iran

4:11see this as an existential danger and therefore no reason to hold anything back. Talmud concludes, if Iran effectively mines the Strait, all US response options are sub-optimal. The United States should therefore she concludes focus aggressively on preventing Iranian mine laying in the first place and finding an off ramp from the larger war. If it does not, Washington should expect that ongoing harassment of traffic in the Strait will be, but one of a number of responses that Iran has long prepared and will now deploy. And I want to emphasize, I emphasize focused aggressively on preventing Iranian mine laying in the first place because I think that's really the crux of this question here. Again, I want to emphasize, I trust Talmud completely. She's one of the leading experts in the field. I would also really commend the work of my friend, Rose, very iconic who writes for defense priorities. Rose has had a piece in the New York Times. I'll include a link in the show notes to that as well. Rose's article

5:11Trump is making Jimmy Carter's mistake on Iran and oil. So that was published earlier this month, March 9th. And Rose also had a number of very well-informed lengthy posts on Twitter calling out people making certain incorrect assumptions or assertions as it relates to the vulnerability of tankers in the Strait, the actual width of the Strait and things like that. So again, Rose has studied this, Caitlin has studied this. And I think this is one of those moments in time where everyone wants to be an expert and not everyone can be. And there are a handful of actual experts. And I think that Klanik and Talmud are two of those people. But I wanted to focus first on this question that Talmud spells out. What would focusing aggressively on preventing Iranian mind laying in tail? And could it be done without a ground invasion? And you already sort of anticipated this question, Melanie, and your lead in, which is at what cost? What is the United

6:12States of America prepared to pay in lives and dollars to reopen the Strait or reduce the danger to ships that would encourage some ships to go through the Strait? What do we think that would actually entail? Well, I think the reality is there's probably nothing that we can do to prevent the Iranians at this point from using small boats, submersibles, missiles, mines, etc. to hamper shipping through the Strait. They've already done it. They've already done it. You can't turn that page back. Now, could you try and prevent them or convince them to do less of this in the future? Maybe. But I think this is where the Trump team has made a huge mistake, candidly. When we had a show almost a year ago, when the US first struck Iran in the Second

7:12Trump administration, I was of the view then that I didn't think escalation was that likely. I thought the US had a lot of escalation options that would deter Iran from, for example, closing the Strait. I think the problem here is that the Trump team used their best escalation option on day one, which was killing the Iranian leadership. And after you do that, what else is there? You've already gone all the way up the escalation matter. Whereas when Trump hit Iran the first time, I thought a broader escalation was still fairly unlikely. I think in this case, the Trump team has found themselves having already played their best card. And now they are scrambling. And I think we could be in a situation where the Strait is closed for weeks or months. And the effects on the international energy market are terrible. And this is just the beginning.

8:14They're going to get worse. So as Katelyn said, I think she's being generous with the word suboptimal. But it certainly seems like the administration has got itself in a suboptimal situation. I agree with pretty much everything Zach said of the options now that are really bad to make it less bad going forward. There's have to bomb the coast. I mean, they're just going to have to take out launch sites. They're going to have to take out C2. They're going to have to do jamming. They're going to have to stop the kinds of things that besides the minds like the drones and USVs and remaining missiles and remaining missiles and things like that. I mean, the drones and the water divers, like there are a bunch of other things that are still going to be a problem that, especially assuming that much of this could have already been laid. I mean, I'm just in mitigation at this point to try to take out places from where some things are going to get launched or people that are going to do some of the launching. But here's the problem, right? Doing that is too

9:18slow. This might be weeks or months of operations. And I think the reason the administration has apparently settled on invading Carg Island is, well, you've got to do something else faster. But do you think that that's what they've settled on? Yeah. And Carg Island, let's be clear, everybody. Carg Island has nothing to do with the straightover moves. Carg Island is many, many miles away from the straightover moves. I mean, that's where a lot of the tankers load up from Iran. But the United States could tomorrow seize control of Carg Island. I wrote about this. I explained why I thought that was a bad idea. And that's a separate discussion. But the United States could tomorrow take control of Carg Island. And the straightover moves could remain in its current, basically closed state. But the US would then have a coercive lever that it could try and turn up and down depending on Iran's response in the straight, which I'm not arguing is worth

10:18the risks. I'm just saying I think what we're seeing from the Trump team is basically an acknowledgement that as Caitlin wrote, the options for reopening the straight are not good. If the options were good, they would be doing exactly what Melanie said. They would be taking out all of the small boats, all of the mines, all of the missiles, everything on the coast. Have the A-10s and the Apache's up there? Yep. Everything on the coast. And they would reopen the straight and they would sail ships in convoys through the straight and they would do mine countermeasure. They're not doing any of that stuff. Instead, they're sailing what appear to be like a marine expeditionary unit in an arg to the Middle East. Right. Pretty clearly to do an operation against Carg, which I think is an acknowledgement as you wrote, Chris, that they don't actually have a plan for how to reopen the straight. I guess I'm not entirely convinced that that's what they're going for, because they're not going to be there for weeks. The airborne could get

11:19there maybe a little bit quicker, which doesn't make me feel any better about it, because I think there's also been talk about mobilizing the 82nd. But he very well could. Two very well respected individuals who are pretty much on board with Haiti Iran and generally in favor of President Trump and stuff, just have said they don't really see the upside of seizing it. And so that it might be good for PR or it might be good messaging or maybe leverage in the future that you're going to have to hold that. There's going to be a lot of people there. And then that's just going to be another target. And besides that, as we're seeing with what's going on in the straight right now, our friend Sal Macrulliano has said that I think that there's about 20,000 sailors or individuals employees of ships sitting there right now that are on the verge of running out of food and water. And that that could be a complication, but that you'd have to have people supplying those thousand people that are on the island. Unless you really have a good reason for doing it, doesn't seem like the best use. I think the problem with car as a point of leverage is a point

12:24of course, a leverage is again, if the regime thinks that it's back as against the wall and it is, they have no reason to hold anything back. They could just bomb it into smithereens themselves. The other problem, right, is that if what you're threatening is to hold at risk of Iranian energy exports, the fact that we just took sanctions off of Iranian energy exports suggests that maybe you're not so serious about actually doing this. No, it's a good point. Look, I'll put my cards on the table. I think if they were actually serious about this, you actually do need to have ground troops on the Iranian side of the straight. And you actually have to control that territory, which is extraordinarily difficult. It's an honest to God, ground war, and a fight that we haven't had in a very, very long time. I would like to say that this administration would never go that far, but I will not say that. I am afraid that they might actually consider doing that, putting ground troops on the shore along the street to try to reopen it. That's what right now concerns me the most.

13:24What else are they going to do? Well, this is where going back to Kaelin Talmadge's point, looking for off ramps is also, I think, going to be a problem because I look at the way that the Iranians responded to the killing of Qasim Soleimani and then the strikes against the nuclear facilities last year. In both cases, their response, their retaliatory actions were measured and broadly communicated in both cases. And I think the object of that retaliation was to limit escalation. And I think that the Trump administration and the Israelis interpreted those limited responses as a sign of weakness. And the Iranians believe that those have been interpreted as a sign of weakness. And therefore, even if the Trump administration was really interested in finding an off ramp, I'm not convinced that the Iranian government is interested in finding an off ramp. Well, I'm also not convinced that President Trump knows what he wants

14:29to do about this. And this has been very clear in the things that he has said. I mean, I just have a list of like seven different things that he has said, you know, the crews should get some guts. Pete Hegseth, the only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It's open for transit should Iran not do that. Such an insane comment. That is going to be the motto of the whole thing. It's a punch line of a joke. But Trump, the ship should go through the strait of her moves and show some guts. There's nothing to be afraid of. They have no navy. We sunk all their ships. Well, it's not true. Again, the problem. And then on laying minds, you know, the things that he says he's going to do, we're going to strike them. There's going to be consequences like they've never seen before. And all this and Caitlin brought up something in the article. It's just like slipped by, but it was something that I actually was kind of obsessed with. And it is this comment that the press made about the military or that we were not prepared for this. And a lot of people seized on that. And the first time I saw that quoted in the press, I think someone has had planned. And that's actually the one that made me

15:30more irritated. I am certain the military plan for this. There are plans for this going back 50 years. Okay, there are plans for this. Whether there was time for them to be sufficiently prepared for it is another question. And so I think a lot of people took great offense at that the military would not have crossed their mind. They did. But I think it's clear from a lot of things that you have to political on the one side, the military on the other. And we haven't really talked about how all of this started. And maybe if they'd waited a couple of weeks or something like that. But the military would have said, you need to be stockpiling stuff. You need to get allies on board. Right. And they say this stuff now about the allies and President Trump can't decide if we need the allies or if we don't because the war is already won. And we don't need people that come in, you know, just to get carried to the goal posts and that kind of thing. And so this is what is gravely concerning to me. I am sure Dan Cain and all of the services and

16:30Brad Cooper and everyone gave all of these options. But for whatever reason, and you know, if it's because all of the the leadership was sitting in that one room at that one time. I also, as I think I said last time, I don't think this is all Israel just dragging us into this war. That is not what happened. No, we have agencies. Yeah. We spent two months building up forces in the region. So it's not like Israel switched to. Right. Yeah. Yes. Yes. So I don't believe that. But they may have preferred to wait. But guess what? You go when the civilian leadership tells you to go and they did. And they focused on what Cooper and Cain have said day after day is the mission to take out defense industrial base, to take out the launchers, to take out the missiles. The political side says all of this other stuff. But the military has been focusing on that mission as much as they could. So I think it's important to note that we don't know what President Trump was told in the briefings before this operation. And we probably will never know because I'm not sure

17:36that there are great notes from a lot of the senior level meetings in this administration. But I think it is entirely possible that the intelligence community may not have relate him fully what their expectations are in terms of Iran's response. Sure. I'll totally jump on board that. And the reality is like having lots of friends in the intelligence community who basically told me that look after what happened to the DNI team after Venezuela, they were chasing and realized that like if the White House wants guidance on certain issues, they're going to ask. And otherwise they want the intelligence community not to sort of present problems for them. I think it's totally possible that when President Trump says that no one predicted this, that actually maybe no one really like walked him through the likelihood of the straight of hormones being closed. Now maybe he's just saying that because he says lots of things that are not true. But this is part

18:37of why you want an intelligence community that can tell you bad news. And I think the administration unfortunately has perhaps created part of this problem by treating the intelligence community as if they are a political portion of the establishment. Well, if you watch Tulsi Gabbard's hearing, I think that it's abundantly clear that that's what she is. So yeah, I agree that an intelligence community that fixates too much on the nature of the threat and trying to identify the nature of the threat that needs to be dealt with is not spending enough time talking about what happens after you take the action that people are recommending. I think that the intelligence community going back to the Iraq war in 2003 is called out often for the myths on weapons of mass destruction and the slam dunk and all that thing. But remember that the intelligence community was exactly right when it came to what they thought was going to happen in Iraq after the war started. They got that part right.

19:40And so it does concern me that if President Trump was not presented with that information from the intelligence community, then that is as important a failing as getting the threat assessment right or wrong. I want to get into the goals near the end. But before we get to that, there was also an article in today's New York Times. Again, we're recording on Sunday an article in today's New York Times by Phil Clay, who is a novelist and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war. And I was made aware of this article by a number of folks on Twitter. Some folks who I suspect are supporters of the war in some fashion. Clay calls attention to the way that this administration engages the language and the imagery of killing. And in a way that is not consistent with most professional visions of the military. And I've been appalled by these ridiculous memes and videos and cartoonish pictures of, I guess it's a bunch of bowling pins knocked

20:43over by a bowling ball wrapped up in an American flag. And then it transitions to an explosion of a real boat. This is serious business. And it is frankly disgusting to me to see the way that this administration and this Pentagon is reveling in the killing that is going on here. Because by the way, let's remember not every single one of these people is killed is guilty of anything, right? They cannot demonstrate that they are only killing IRGC members. They are not only killing regime elements. I don't know. I find it to be incredibly offensive. And it also, it is consistent with Pete Hankseth's language, even before he became Secretary of Defense. Michael Cohen and I wrote about this last year, about this focus on this this obsession with lethality as though killing is completely separate from actual emission. And I just find it really grotesque. And then when you hit a girl school in what the first 24 hours of the operation and kill,

21:47I don't know what the total number is now, but it was well over 100 when I last saw it. Yeah. Instead of saying, look, this was a critical operation. The president went out and explained to the public, the international public, the American public why we had to do this operation. And we are doing it as carefully as we possibly can, but it had to be done. Instead when you're posting memes sort of glorifying war, you have then no excuse when you have a huge error like this, which leads to over 100 deaths. And also when Pete Hankseth sort of campaigned and the idea of taking the gloves off and removing the legal constraints on American forces, again, this was I think 100% predictable. This is what people thought was going to happen. And shutting down the center for excellence, whose job was to minimize civilian harm. The previous administration had established an entire

22:50office focused on minimizing civilian harm. The Trump administration, one of their very first acts, obviously, it fired all the lawyers. Then they shut down the center of excellence. And I think precisely for that reason, it is harder to say, well, this was an accident and nothing could have been done about it. That's not true. Something could have been done about it. But the office that would have been responsible for monitoring these kind of targets wasn't there was shut down. So I mentioned this actually last week in my intro and the show because it was bothering me so much. And before Chris sent the article from Phil Clay, which is a lovely article. And I love that Lincoln's second inaugural. I can actually talk to you about it for an hour and 15 minutes because I used to do that. You give it lecture on it. But in political, there was a story that said that senior White House officials say wartime messaging focuses on, quote, audience engagement with videos reaching more than three billion impressions in four days. One adds, we're just grinding away on banger memes. There's an entertainment factor to what we do. And again,

23:51I just it's just grotesque. Absolutely grotesque. Yeah. Yeah. Like I would not want to be one of the family members of someone who had passed away and either through the friendly fire or through the enemy. And to see that be treated like that. And again, I will say also, I'm open to rules of engagement being changed. I have no idea. Like if there should be a discussion about a different circumstance in a different fight, I know that there are people who are less concerned about maximalist aims and things like that than Pete Hegseth. I think that that's a totally legitimate thing to discuss. But again, I do get worried then if in the way that you talk about it and then you get rid of everybody who might have some oversight, not everybody, but many of the people who had our oversight or input into it, then that gives me pause. And I just want to say one other thing. And I sent something to Chris about this. But the denial that is continuing about we don't know who hit the girls school. Right. At the Reagan National Security Forum when the secretary was giving his speech and he wanted to, you know, say something else about Mark Milley. And he said,

24:55my team counseled me against bringing something up about, you know, a righteous strike. And he said, sir, that's the phrase that was used by Mark Milley when the family, a family of Afghans was struck as a response to what happened at Abbey Gate. They called it for two straight days a righteous strike when they would have known within hours exactly what they struck. Right. Double standard. And weeks later, we're still. And I just want to say I told Chris that John Brennan did the same thing. Right. You know, he said, oh no, we are precise. We would never make that kind of a say. So it's not, it's not that, but it weighs differently when what you do is brag about how indifferent you are to death. Right. Exactly. I mean, in the context of the imagery and the language that you're, they're using, look, I also think that our obsession with precision ignores the fact that even as precise as we try to be, sometimes you get a target wrong. Sometimes you just misidentify a target. And you are exactly precisely hitting the target that never should have been hitting the first

25:59place. And sometimes things go astray. Right. Sometimes a bomb that is precise gets, you know, redirected and we have to account for that. Yeah. Yeah. When we're undertaking these operations. Sure. I want people to be able to give our military the benefit of the doubt. I want to be like that. And you agree it's hard to do that in this present moment. Yeah. Right now, given the atmosphere that the Trump administration has created, and again, not the fault of our military. It's the civilian leaders that have done this. All right. So I want to switch gears because I do think we still haven't talked about what are we trying to accomplish here? Melanie hinted and the problem is that we don't know what we're trying to accomplish. And I have to say that the administration and the Israelis have sort of been all over the map on this. And I heard from a listener after the show, the last show we talked about this. And this listener said, the plan is obviously regime change in all caps. Obviously, regime change. But the administration is not going to come out and tell us that because regime change triggers part of the base. And then the person went on the Iranians

27:03overwhelmingly want to topple the regime, but they need our help to do it. That's the plan. The plan is to strike the regime from the top down until enough thugs are dead for the Iranian people to do the rest. I'm guessing we'll go on for another week or two weeks before Crown Prince Reza Polavi. His videos have been obviously coordinated with the US Israel. He knows the plan and it's part of it. Makes his final call for popular uprising. The regime will fall. Polavi will lead the democratic transition, likely resulting in a restoration of a limited constitutional monarchy. The straight of her moves will reopen. It will be a new era for the Middle East and the world. Unquote. I'm going to take this person at face value. I'm going to presume that this person is speaking what they honestly believe to be true. That message was sent to me on the 13th of March and linked to a video that was recorded on the 11th of March. It's 11 days later since Polavi posted that video and is there any reason to believe truly that the regime opponents are within days of overthrowing the regime and installing Polavi as ruler. Do we actually believe

28:07that's true? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. They don't have weapons. They don't have weapons. I'm sorry. That is what it comes down to at this moment. Yes. They are not armed. Right. Their local leadership is not going to let them get away with that. It's not happening. And it's even worse than that as several people have written. Yes, but I mean like besides all the main bigger obvious things. Yes. Yeah, but if the goal was regime change, part of what's crazy here is you had an 86 year old leader who eventually was going to fall from power. And there was no clear path forward for the regime to change power easily. And actually in some ways the US has helped the regime shift power from their crazy old leader to a much younger generation. And because the attacks are still going on, people are nervous about going on

29:11the streets. So in some ways the administration I think has actually made things a bit easier for the Iranians. I mean the executions are still going on. Right. And if you actually cared about the ability of the Iranian people post regime, if you are actually concerned about their ability to create a functioning state, after you have killed all the thugs, who by the way are hundreds of thousands of people, right. This is a 92 million person country. Hundreds of thousands of people are either, you know, are members of the IRGC. And some number of millions are sympathizers. And you know, even if it's what 5% of the population, we're talking about a huge number of people. But if that was your goal, if you were trying to create a state that was going to be able to stand on its own and be a, you know, some kind of a constitutional monarchy, you would not be demolishing that state's infrastructure. You would not be wrecking that state's ability to sell oil and

30:14natural gas on the international market, which is so critical to its success. Okay. First, I've been like Chris, I've just been very busy with some other things. I haven't been following a lot of stuff as closely as I might have. The first time I have seen Polavi's name in weeks was yesterday, when I saw that he was begging the administration to not bomb the infrastructure, not to go through with the threat that the president made that if the straight wasn't open, that he was going to start bombing some power plants and desalination plants. Yeah. So that's good. Now, maybe at some point he does become kind of the interim six-month person. There may come a time when it is possible to overthrow leaders. It might be a slow process, but bit by bit. But I suspect that there would have to be a lot more layers of top leadership to fall before that happen. I'm not one of these people that's like, oh, well, you just do that. Another one springs up. I think there is something to getting rid of a lot of layers quickly. You are going to

31:15get younger people and maybe they're harder liners, but they're in some respects they might be less competent. They might be less able to deal with the economy. They might be less able to deal with both internal and external politics. There are things that getting rid of a bunch of people could be useful. On the other hand, if there's that much chaos, there could be real civil strife and those kinds of problems. But I don't dismiss getting rid of several layers of leadership. Right. But to get at those several layers of leadership, unfortunately, you're going to kill a lot of innocent people. You're going to do harm to a lot of innocent people. I'm glad to hear. I did not know that Palavi had actually issued a statement saying, don't destroy that because, again, you knock out the power grid. We see what's happening in Cuba. You got people who are dying in hospitals. You have people that are starving to death. I mean, like, this is what's going to happen. And what is the limiting factor? It seems to me, this is the challenge we have with the Trump administration is as the president famously told the New York Times editors, you know, a couple months ago,

32:16what is what constrains him his morality? Well, we're seeing that play out right now and it's not pretty. Yeah. Well, civilian infrastructure has the same physical reality as defense infrastructure. And they're both going to take a long time to rebuild. That's right. Zach, you seem like you want to say something. No, he doesn't. He's just shaking his head. He's not going to say anything. Here's what just I'm struggling with and I think we're all struggling with this. You know, President Trump obviously went into this as the commentator that sent you that email, Chris said, talking a lot about regime change, right? Like over and over and over again as an objective. But if you've seen his truth social in the last 24 hours, you will note that he's also said things like the following, quote, United States is blown around off the map. This is him saying this. There are lightweight analysts, David Sanger says that I haven't met my own goals. Yes, I have and weeks ahead of schedule. Their leadership is gone. Their Navy and Air Force are dead. They

33:20have absolutely no defense and they just want to make a deal. I don't. We are weeks ahead of schedule. I mean, like, how do you take any of this seriously? Like even if you're trying to get in the head of the president and defend his actions, he said regime change for day after day after day. Now he's saying he's met all of his goals, which is to kill the leadership to destroy the Navy and the Air Force and that now the Iranians want to make a deal, but that he doesn't want to make a deal. Why not make a deal if you have accomplished all your goals? I mean, like, it's just so clear from reading everything that he says and watching it that they got into this without any clear idea of exactly what they wanted and how to get out. And just one last comment on this, right, which is take the nuclear program. So I think there's some people whose view is, okay, if we just get rid of the nuclear program, that would be a win. Well, right now we've

34:25basically just done the same thing that we did last year, which is bomb a bunch of nuclear facilities. If you're going to get rid of the nuclear program, I would think the 82nd Airborne should be landing at Isfahan any day now to try and go secure nuclear material. See, part of me thinks that that's more likely than CARG. Maybe that's where we're going. But I also read that it would take up to 3 to 4,000 people to secure that, which is a big operation. That's a huge operation and you're removing radioactive material and you need like earth moving equipment and you know, all that sort of thing. And maybe, maybe that's the negotiating piece where you say we take that and we'll leave, blah, blah, blah. But go ahead and send us that. No, but I think like this is the problem, right? The American people are growing more and more skeptical of this. So already 60% of Americans are against the war. You know, the war, which the administration won't call a war, despite the fact that we renamed a department of war so that we could be straightforward about these things.

35:30So now 60% of Americans are against it. What happens when you've got ground troops in CARG or in Isfahan. And right now we know that there are a couple hundred of Americans who've been wounded, although that was not clear for a while. That number will go way up, way up if we put ground troops in. Oh, of course. You know, this is unpopular now. Watch what happens when you have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds more wounded. And when oil prices aren't hitting Americans even harder and the global economy even harder, I think the Trump administration has got itself into just an incredibly terrible spot. And there's no obvious way for them to get out of it. Yep. Yeah. One interesting thing to watch will be what the other Gulf countries do. Saudi Arabia, UAE, they're encouraging Trump to keep going. They want them to go. Now, how much are they putting into this? I think that they should be doing more if that's what they think should

36:33be done. But if more of these countries are wanting Trump to finish it. But then what do they think is the end state? And I'm sure that Trump is rolling his lies because, you know, as with everything, when you start out adding more people, you have to, and you know, everyone's going to have divergent interests. And again, what they're willing to contribute and they're going to be a drag or they're going to be a support on the other hand. You know, maybe that's how Trump gets out of it. And he says, well, I'll just leave it to them. You know, I did this much here. You can finish this off. But I will also say in the same press conference, Trump said, they hit Saudi Arabia at Qatar, the UAE, Quake. Nobody expected that. We were shocked. They fought back. And then a few minutes later said, I knew the straight would be a weapon. I predicted a long time ago. I predicted all of this stuff. I predicted a Muslim bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I wrote it in a book. And then the Fox News reporter Peter Ducey said, you said they hit Qatar. Saudi Arabia, UAE bar in Quake, nobody expected that we were shocked. Are you surprised that nobody briefed you ahead of time that might be their retaliation? Trump, nobody, nobody, no, no, no, the greatest experts, nobody thought they were going to hit. Now I, I said after the Trump Biden

37:39debate, the best thing Susie Wiles ever did for Donald Trump was put him in a body bag and stuff him in the trunk of a car for like a week. Nobody saw him. Nobody heard from him. And I feel like that would be helpful if he would not come out and make statements about, as Zach said, about regime change, about not regime change, about if he's picking the leaders about if we have to have total surrender unconditional surrender. The president tweeted last week five things that he wants, five goals. And to a lot of people, those would look like, okay, no defense industrial base, no ballistic missiles, no nuclear program, you know, that kind of stuff. A lot of people who aren't going to be like obsessed in Washington, like we are with this could look at that and be like, okay, fine. But he goes out and he confuses his own message. And it makes it very difficult. And I imagine difficult for both political and military leadership to focus on what they really want

38:42to be doing. Yeah, look, I think that even the the goals that you just mentioned Melanie are equivalent to unconditional surrender, which was something he tweeted out or, you know, truth out right after the war started. It's like, those are unrealistic expectations, unless you are prepared to kill a lot more Iranians and pry the weapons out of their cold dead hands. Maybe that's really what's going on here. And maybe the truth is Chris, I bet Donald Trump doesn't really want to kill a lot of people. I bet he doesn't really like that. Maybe, but then he should have control over the social media clowns that are celebrating this death and destruction on an hourly basis, like, you know, for all his supposed savvy when it comes to social media, you know, that Chris, I believe him when he says he doesn't really like war. And I've said this, I think he likes acts of war. I don't think he actually likes real war. And I think that maybe he realizes that he missed an off ramp 10 or 12 days ago. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know.

39:48And maybe we won't know. And I'm sure that he would love to have one, but he keeps tweeting things like I'm going to bomb your infrastructure. If you don't get out of the straighter removes in 48 hours, then what happens? You know, like, so then what's the next step? And that's why I'm saying if he could stop tweeting, if he could stop the talking, he would have a lot more freedom of maneuver in my view. Yeah, sure. Or at least optically, which is really a lot of what he cares about is what the optics of it are. Yeah. I just want to say around March 9th, I think there was a window as you were indicating Melanie for President Trump to declare victory and deescalate. And I actually think he would have been in a much better position if he had done that at that point. This was the day that the oil market started to go up very quickly. And he signaled that maybe we were kind of done with the operation. I think when we look back at this whole thing, there was a

40:50moment there before the Iranians had shut down the straight where perhaps he could have deescalated gotten the US out. He could have claimed to have killed him in a that he took out the new grand infrastructure. He took out a lot of the missile infrastructure. They'd hit some of the proxies. I think that was the moment to declare victory and get out. I think now part of the problem is that once they decided to keep going past that point without a clear end state in mind, it led to all of the messiness that you're describing Melanie. So I was having lunch with a friend of mine a couple weeks ago. And since our last show, since the war started, and he reminded me of my book, The Power Problem is like, if you have a really big hammer, everything looks like a nail. Like that's the essence of that book. And I think the problem that we're in right now is precisely that is that we have reduced our influence to the ability to swing a hammer. And we're swinging that hammer

41:52like crazy right now. And we're incredibly frustrated that it's not producing the end result that we want, which is for the other side to just roll over and play dead. That's how I see it. Okay. Well, then how about some grievances? The tradition of festivists begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people. Now you're going to hear about it. So my grievance, I already shouted out Rose Clinic once before it. I'm going to shout out Rose about something else. She's been in the news. She's been writing a lot because she is an expert on energy markets and the golf. But Rose pointed out that when she's quoted in the media, she's all often associated with defense priorities, which is identified as a restraint oriented or restraint leaning think tank. And she said, why aren't other experts identified in the same way? Now, some think tanks don't have a clear ideological disposition, but many do. And it seems like a pretty basic rule for any journalist quoting someone is if there is a clear ideological predisposition

42:53or a pattern of comments or behavior that suggests that someone is a proponent of the war or an opponent of war, that seems like a relevant kind of thing that she mentioned. And so as Rose said, double standard suck. I think she might as a double standard stink because she's probably more clean spoken than I am, but the point stands, so I'll include a link to Rose's intervention there on Twitter, which got a little bit of love from others in the restraint community, but not a lot of love from people not in the restraint community. Okay, Zach, I briefly mentioned this already, but the fact that the United States is now taking some sanctions off of Russia and Iran at the moment is pretty remarkable, especially when so many people who are supportive of the Trump administration told me that this Iran operation was a brilliant way to sideline China and Russia, China, oh, by the way, which is going to be buying huge amounts of now discounted Russian and Iranian

43:55energy. I understand why the administration is doing this because we are now in a genuine energy crisis that they were completely unprepared for, but the fact is that for everyone who said President Trump had this brilliant strategy of going after Venezuela and Iran and maybe Cuba next so that we could isolate China or isolate Russia. Look at what's actually happening. The US government is doing the exact opposite. Yep. Okay, well, Mike Ravens is for Code Pink, Jeremy Corbin, that horrible podcaster Hassan Piker, who I've never listened to, but for some reason, like the last three months, he's always in the news. And these political tourists, well, as Jamie Kurtchick said, these despicable political tourists will shake hands with regime apparatus, bask in the Caribbean sun, take selfies at the shake with our monument, and then return to a free country, leaving the Cuban people to rot in the communist hellhole. So, I mean, seriously,

44:56Jeremy Corbin, who I just said her to think came so close to the reins of power. I'm not joking. He took time off of being unable to manage his new political party in London to see the practical results of what his policies would be in Havana. The Cubans, as Chris mentioned before, they're without electricity right now. They don't have cars. I saw someone say their cars are all from the 1950s, like it was a good thing. I just, yeah, it's adorable, isn't it? So retro. So retro. No meaningful employment, no good education. And now they have to listen to Jeremy Corbin. Haven't they suffered enough? The other thing I would like to know is I saw a lot of pictures of them partying and these individuals were all at the only hotel in Havana that had any electricity. I wonder how many of them got invited to share a bed with some of these very, very seriously committed individuals. Okay, Chris. My add-it goes to Judge Paul L. Friedman of the

46:01Federal District Court in Washington who ruled on Friday that the Pentagon's restrictions on journalist covering the Pentagon had acted contrary to the Constitution as Judge Friedman wrote. Those who drafted the First Amendment believe that the nation's security requires a free press and an informed people. And that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation's security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now. I would observe just as an aside, that we somehow managed to fight and win wars like World War II without the kind of restrictions on the press that we are invoking today. And not like everything that the United States was doing in World War II was published on the front page of the New York Times. So I'll include a link to Charlie Savage's story in the Times, but many other news outlets have picked up on this as well. So Kudos to Judge Friedman. Okay, Zach. Well, didn't get a lot of attention this week, but the Prime Minister of Japan

47:05briefly came to Washington. She did really no side events other than a meeting at the White House, which saved a Pearl Harbor reference by the President of the United States was largely an eventful look. This was not the giant success that I think some in Tokyo had initially hoped it might be a couple of months ago. But to get through a meeting at this moment without having any damage done actually was I think a pretty successful visit. I would call this a high risk, no reward kind of situation, but there may not have been a reward, but the risks were avoided. So I think Prime Minister Takiichi should get an ad for having made it through 24 hours in Washington and the US Japan Alliance is still standing strong. I like her a lot. She did great. I was tackling people saying, oh, it was such a horrible faux pas. I thought at least he didn't

48:07throw up in her lap. So we're showing our age. We make that reference. There's not a lot of people that are going to get that reference Melanie Yikes. Okay. George H. W. Bush did that to the Japanese Prime Minister. I think 1992. Yes. He was having a bad day. Yeah. Poppy was having a bad day. Yeah. Okay. I have to add is the first is I can't believe I'm saying this out loud to Sean Penn, whose politics are mostly my politics, but I got to say he's been a big supporter of Ukraine from day one. And over the weekend, it was the Academy Awards. And I actually had to look this up because I didn't even know if I'd seen one movie that was nominated for Best Picture. I have seen F1. That is the only of the 10 movies I have seen. So I need to do better. But he was so bad. I know. I know. Honestly, I listened to it while I was like sorting a box of papers, but okay. So I need to do some movie watching on the flights I have coming up. But he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for one battle after another. And he actually won. But he was not standing

49:14up on stage, preaching at America to be better. He was actually out being better. He was not there collecting his, I'm not joking, $346,000 goodie bag that the top nominee's got. So you can tell what I think of most of the stars that are always up there lecturing the rest of America. So although I did think Jesse Buckley was pretty cute. So. And then my other, well, she was talking about her kid and her husband and, you know, that was sweet. And then for John Burns, the New York Times correspondent, Foreign Affairs and War correspondent, I mean, what a life, you know, those 40 years covering wars all around the world and being in the stories that he was in the New York Times obituary is clearly very good and very thorough and talks about some just amazing incidents that he lived through. And then I just want to read one thing. As he ended his career, the obituary tells us he took issue with journalists of a newer generation who professed what Burns wrote in

50:14our time has become common for young reporters to give us their moral code. And he does their reason for choosing the profession that they aim to create a better world. It's a handsome thing, but one that can foster a missionary complex, a hubra, even that can favor a blindness to inconvenient backs to the advantage of others. So I thought that was a lovely obituary and what a great writer. So what do you have coming up? So I am happy to report that aside from this war that has occupied much of my attention, some of the other projects that I had are finished. I'm glad that they're done. I was happy to do them, but they are behind me now. And so I'm looking forward to finishing some of the things that I put off for the last month. I do want to give a shout out to a good friend of mine who is apparently a very avid listener of the show. Dave, you know who you are and one of these days you will meet Zach and Melanie because they're both delightful people. So great. Okay. Zach, what do you have coming up? We have spring break between now and our next show.

51:15So I'm excited to see whether the TSA or ICE people who are supposed to be manning the checkpoints at Dallas are actually going to be there and whether we're going to be able to go where we're supposed to go. Oh, good luck. Yeah, good luck. Yeah, I hope that we can get a deal on that soon. Well, I am starting to hit the road again seriously. I think I'm going to be home for six days in April. I know, oh, Zach, don't worry. I don't have any long flights to Japan or Hawaii or anything like that. Strictly, strictly domestic. In my defense, it rained the whole time. I was in Hawaii, guys. I don't care. That doesn't make it better. Perfect. That's nice try. But what I'm immediately doing is I got a new phone. So all of my passwords and notifications are everything on the step. And as Chris and Zach know, right when the show was starting, my two and a half year old, a few Macs called and we heard it because I had adjusted the notifications to not ring. So now you're going to call Mac. So very first thing I'm doing is calling Macs. Yeah,

52:18what he really likes to hit the red button when we hang up. But okay, well, thanks for listening to this episode of Net Assessment. If you enjoyed it, please rate us an iTunes. You can follow us at CA Proble at Zach Cooper and Prof Marlow. We also want to thank University FM for producing us and until next time, be well.