David Frum
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Yeah, I didn't use the word incompetence.
I talked about lack of understanding of Iranian society.
Because let me test a hypothesis on you.
which is phase one.
Let's suppose the military objectives, military track of this war is going well, that the United States and Israel are destroying the things they wanted to destroy.
They obviously are having great success finding the people they want to find and eliminating them from the chessboard.
Maybe the mistake was a lack of understanding, a lack of study of the American side of the equation.
When beginning in 19, whenever the serious study of the Iran, of Iran, Iran war began in 1979, 80, the assumption I would guess would be that Iran would have done something really bad, capture American hostages and detain them for a year and under horrible conditions or something else really bad.
And the president would go on TV and explain to the American people why the United States was going to war with Iran.
He'd go to Congress and get a vote from Congress.
Congress would give it because Iran had done something bad.
And then there would be a month-long air campaign followed by whatever phase two was.
And everyone would understand.
You're fighting in the Middle East.
In the Persian Gulf, there's going to be economic hardship.
And we would all bear it because Iran had done something so very, very bad.
mistake here was what if there was no reason to go to war that week and the american people's pain threshold was literally zero so none of the obvious moves that iran would do closing the straits interfering with the price of with the shipping oil none of them was there any appetite for in the united states and the united states then had to conduct whatever phases of this war there are
Without any ability to take not only casualties, but even any economic hardship.
That may be the missing piece.
And that's not the fault of the war gamers, because they all assumed, right, the reason the president gave us the go order was something bad had happened that we had to respond to.