David Sanger

Now, if we were being threatened with imminent attack by another country,

on our facilities here in the United States, we would consider that an act of war.

And it seems reasonable to think that if we're threatening that against Iran, that too would be an act of war and thus worthy of congressional participation.

They would.

And they might make life easy for the president by striking first.

Right.

That would be the easiest thing.

I mean, imagine for a moment, either because of a deliberate act or because of some military officer someplace who's getting way ahead of himself or even just an accident.

They take a shot at an American warship in the Persian Gulf, right, where the Abraham Lincoln is and so forth.

That could trigger something.

And so part of the difficulty of putting such a big force there is the opportunity for someone to make a miscalculation.

is huge.

And the difficulty of putting that force together at a cost of hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, and keeping it there is that it's really hard to disassemble.

And so if the president was going to decide not to use the force,

and not to attack Iran, he would have to make the case that he got an agreement, and not only any agreement, but an agreement that went far beyond the one that the United States and Iran reached in 2015 during the Obama administration.

That's right.

And you could argue that had he not pulled out of it in 2018, that we might not be in this situation today.

Because the fact of the matter is that while the deal was incredibly unpopular and certainly had some holes in it, and I wrote about those pretty extensively at the time and after, the Iranians were complying with it.

That's right.

Let's not underestimate their missile capability.