David French

That was never realistic.

If we'd had to debate about the war going into it, that would have been exposed as completely unrealistic.

And look, I have always been an Iran hawk.

I served in Iraq.

There are men I know

who are friends of mine, who were killed by Iranian weapons.

I loathe this regime.

I loathe it.

But my hatred of Iran does not relieve me from the requirement to engage in critical thinking, does not relieve me of the requirement

to think about the best interests of the United States of America, the constitutional processes that the constitution requires, the interests of the global economy, the role of our allies, what we could realistically hope to achieve while maintaining deterrence against China and Russia in an increasingly unstable world.

All of those are things that should have been so carefully thought through before we engaged Iran in a conflict.

And obviously none of that happened.

So first, I do not want to in any way minimize the

what our military actually accomplished tactically over the month or so of the war, that they did do a remarkable job sinking

A very antiquated Navy, but a Navy that was still capable of menacing traffic through the Gulf.

They destroyed a very antiquated Air Force, but again, an Air Force that was still capable of menacing its neighbors.

More significantly, they did seriously degrade, but did not destroy the ballistic missile capacity for Iran.

And they did destroy a lot of Iran's capacity to build weapons.

They did accomplish that.

From a standpoint of a war fighting capability, Iran has less war fighting capability right now than it did a month ago.