David Sanger

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.

The military suffered huge setbacks during the 12-day war with Israel.

The protesters are on the streets.

In which case, the president may be thinking about a preventative war, which is to say a war when you're strong and your adversary is weak.

That's different than a preemptive war when you see that your adversary is getting ready to strike you and you strike them first.

Preemptive wars are considered relatively legitimate.

But preventive war has generally been considered under the rules of just war to be illegal.

And it's interesting that in the State of the Union, he did not even briefly raise the question of whether Congress would give him an authorization to use military force, similar to what it provided to George Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq, much less a war declaration.