Ben Rhodes

But don't suggest you're going to go to war and then pull back

in the middle of the crackdown.

I mean, the absurdity of this thing is this guy lives in a consequence-free world because nobody will ever tell him to his face that what he did was wrong.

But, like, the climb down was so clumsy.

He thanked the Iranian regime for not executing their own people.

And it was like one person was going to get hanged and then they called and were like, and by the way...

I this terrible regime.

But to the point about not capitulating, they did their crackdown in his face.

And then they had like someone called Steve Witkoff, probably a Rachi from the foreign ministry who's been around there forever and be like, hey, your threat really got to us.

We're not going to execute these people.

We're not going to hang them.

They killed potentially tens of thousands of people already, you know, and they're not releasing the political prisoners like now.

So to your list there, I think all those things mattered.

First of all, it bears in mind, we said, a lot of people said, when you move all this military assets to the Caribbean, they're not going to be there.

And you can't...

He didn't have a military option.

And the Iranians knew he didn't have military options.

They knew we weren't postured there.

We knew we didn't have a carrier strike group.

They knew that we'd be worried about retaliation and we couldn't provide the missile defenses to our bases or to the Israelis.