David Remnick

And, you know, he was very straightforward about military capabilities, but also gave him every sense of the risk.

It was made very plain to him that the Israelis at Netanyahu had no reason to have confidence in the notion of regime change.

How would that possibly happen when the regime is so brutal and they just killed tens of thousands of their own people and would not hesitate for a second to do it again?

And this is an opposition that is rich and runs very deep, but it's not an organized opposition.

It's not like

You know, Eastern Europe in the late 80s, that doesn't exist because of the brutality of the regime.

There's no Gorbachev figure.

There's no dissident movement that doesn't get crushed.

It is a horrific, a horrific picture.

But Donald Trump chose to believe what he wanted to believe, and he stumbled forward.

And for all the reasons we know, both characterological and political, and now we're in the situation that we're in,

And the Iranian regime persists.

Well, it's an old saying by Aeschylus in ancient Greece that the first thing that goes out the window when you commit war is the truth.

This president never even pretended to make a case about this to the American people.

He was in the midst of negotiations, ostensibly, and it's quite possible, according to many analysts, that when the Omani foreign minister came forward and said,

the day before the attack began, that these negotiations were progressing in a halfway decent way, that there was a colossal misunderstanding between the Iranian negotiators and the American negotiators, and this all could have been avoided.

Not without trouble, not without prolonged negotiation or deception and a prolonged process, but anything is better than what just transpired and what may transpire further.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.