David Sanger

You can't say it today.

Fascinating question because the president has offered four different rationales for the current military buildup there.

One of them, the one you heard about the most in the State of the Union address there, was the nuclear program.

But the precipitating reason for the buildup was that the president promised to come to the aid of the protesters who had been on the streets.

And he talked about that a bit last night as well.

And he said that there had been 32,000 protesters killed.

during the uprisings in January.

And while there is some dispute about the numbers, that's roughly correct, it seems.

And so that would be a second reason to come to the aid of the protesters, although in most parts of the world, the president has not been particularly concerned about the fate of protesters who are going after authoritarian regime.

The third reason he's offered, Terry, has been to stop the support of terrorism with Hezbollah and Hamas.

But the fact of the matter is the Iranians are pretty broke right now.

They can't spend the kind of money that they did before.

And Hamas and Hezbollah are not really in shape right now to be conducting large operations.

And the fourth reason he's mentioned were the missiles.

So he sort of jumbled those all together in the State of the Union address.

But he didn't really explain at any point what his objective is.

Is it simply to set back the nuclear program and the missile program, what the Israelis call mowing the lawn?

Is it instead to topple the regime?

to basically seize the moment because Ayatollah Khamenei is at his weakest point.

The economy is reeling.