Congressman Adam Smith

I think it is important to frame the conflict in Iran.

And essentially, you know, the president has said all manner of different things, but putting apart what he said and you can see what happened.

It's very clear that when he started this war, he was convinced that a three, four, five week bombing campaign could essentially break the Iranian regime.

either hopefully overthrow it or put them to the point where they would capitulate to whatever we want.

That's what the president thought.

That was really stupid.

Okay.

And anyone looking at the military reality of who Iran is and what an air campaign can and cannot accomplish would have very quickly concluded that.

But he did that.

He stepped out into the street and the truck kept coming.

And now he's standing there like, now what do I do?

And that's where the blockade comes from.

Well, we'll leverage them that way.

I won't walk down that road, but that is unlikely to be successful as well.

So he has weakened our position by giving Iran basically the freedom to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Because Iran can argue to the world, hey, we're doing it because we got an existential threat coming out.

So if they tried to do this without us attacking, then the rest of the world would have been far more sympathetic to our position.

Now we're kind of screwed.

All right.

And we need to negotiate the best settlement we can negotiate.