Dave Smith

I realized how I had gotten things wrong last summer during the 12 day war was that I guess I and I always said, in fact, I believe it's it's on record.

But it was when Zach and Liz had me on their show and they said, what's the number one concern about this?

a second President Trump term.

And I went, oh, well, Iran is the number one concern.

Like he's a real hawk on Iran.

And Liz said that he won't attack.

That's not exactly what she said.

She's better when I'm around.

But so I guess like, and maybe you could take us through a little bit of this history here, but I guess this is the thing that I kind of got wrong.

So I know that because I've learned this from your excellent work as well as some other great writers that,

Okay, so at the end of the Bush administration, right, what was it?

I think it was in 2007 or 2008, maybe even, when there was really the push to go, when Cheney was trying to push W to go to war in Iran.

So it was in 07.

And essentially, it was a bunch of stuff like all right around that time happened, where...

The CIA came out and said, like, they're not working on a bomb.

Like, they're not trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

And then the actual military, like, convinced George W. Bush that, like, yo, we cannot do this.

And there was all types of concerns over escalation dominance and retaliatory attacks and, you know, a lot of the stuff that we're seeing playing out right now.

And I suppose...

that I really did, you know, get trapped in a little bit of like, this is the end of history moment there, where I just, I got, I think I got a little married to the narrative that, hey, the fucking clean break, you know, Israel serving neocons, they had this plan for getting these seven regime changes, but...