Anne Applebaum

It's very hard to know how they relate to reality on the ground.

And, you know, there is some reporting for reality on the ground.

Actually, there was a great piece in The Atlantic today about how Iranians are suffering and how bad the economy is and how people are cut off and don't have access to food and all kinds of other goods.

There's also a story about the U.S.

may have possibly having hit a water disaster.

Those are real stories.

I mean, I actually, when I read about what's happening to Iranians and I read people who are trying to do reporting from Iran and to get information from inside the country, which some people can do, that's stuff I believe.

It's strange how that piece of the war, you know, what the population is feeling is almost of no interest to the people who are running the war, which is very strange given that the original justification for the war was regime change.

In other words, we're doing this in order to

change the government of Iran so that Iranians have a better life and so that the protesters who've periodically trying to shift the government can have some success.

I mean, that was the first justification.

And it's almost as if that just dripped away.

We don't even speak about them as real people.

I mean, Trump talks about destroying them as a civilization, whereas actually these are mostly pretty ordinary people.

I'm guessing most of them not religious fanatics, most of them probably not supporting the government.

except for a small faction just trying to get through this.

And there seems to be no interest in them or no curiosity about them on the part of the Trump administration at all, which, by the way, is a big difference from Iraq.

Right.

Forget about all the justifications pro and con for the Iraq war.

There was never a moment when the Bush administration wasn't talking about Iraqis and, you know, trying to shake them for Iraqi women and women in Afghanistan.