Daniel P. Driscoll

And I think if you look at Israel and if you look at what kicked it off, their righteous anger makes all the sense in the world to me.

I cannot imagine living with a neighbor who was inculcated from birth to hate me and want to kill me and wipe out my family and my society.

Like, that is a starting point.

If you just frame it from that and then let the narrative, like, let the rest of the situation play out, I think is informative of why they are acting so aggressively like they are to basically finally get rid of this threat to their homeland.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say at what cost, like, when does the cost become too big?

And I don't know that anyone knows what the answer is.

I am optimistic that, again, with the president, his near daily engagement in this topic, with Wyckoff out there all the time, with how much the president has built up the trust of the Israelis, that he is willing and able and willing.

historically has stood by them.

I think he is uniquely well-suited to bring peace.

I think fundamentally the problem is, I don't know if Hamas is willing to accept peace.

And I don't know that they could actually control their own people in a way to perpetuate peace.

And I think that's what...

fundamentally creates the quagmire of what does good enough look like to end the war?

I think this, though, to me, is much closer to a Pearl Harbor incident for them than it is to an Iraq or an Afghanistan or the United States.

No, and this is where human storytelling, I don't want to be intellectually fraudulent in my reply, but my understanding from visiting there and from friends who lived there and from people who were in the military there,

My understanding of the hatred and the proximity and the closeness and the ability for violence to be inflicted on the Israeli homeland again and again and again is just different from what we faced with the threat in Afghanistan.

distance of miles made it so that I think we could get to a place we felt comfortable as a nation going pencils down faster.

And we didn't, and we should have.

And I think we look back, and many and most people would say we should have set a mission, accomplished it quickly, and gotten back home.

And it was kind of abhorrent how we ran the thing.