Ben Rhodes

And can I say one thing about that?

And the New York Times said that many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable.

So, you know, yeah, this is what we've done.

And I think like just to your point earlier, too, that.

you do one thing, it's going to lead to continued escalation, continued escalation.

You and I were talking about this earlier before the show that it just feels like mission creep becomes an inevitable thing when you think that some type of military operation is just going to be quick, one and done.

It never is.

And so I just want to hit one more aspect of this war that we haven't gotten to, but which is incredibly important, which is, of course, the

civilian harm that's being caused, the normalization of the targeting of civilian infrastructure from both sides too.

I mean, the list of non-military targets that have been hit is very, very long.

We spoke a lot about the girls' elementary school, the start of the war.

Iran's Ministry of Science says that 21 universities in the country have been damaged by strikes.

And Iran has, by the way, threatened to retaliate by hitting American-affiliated universities in the Middle East.

Then, of course, we've spoken about all of the attacks on energy infrastructure.

And we've seen hits on water desalination plants, Amazon data centers, airports, ports, steel, chemical, and aluminum factories.

I mean, this is both sides too, right?

It's not just like only one side doing it.

But we also then were able to speak with somebody who is in Tehran currently because we're

You know, one of the big problems is we've been hearing so little from people.

Yes, we see so little from the people who are living through this in Iran, who understandably, I think, have very complex feelings about it.