Dr. Trita Parsi

Good to be with you.

I mean, obviously, this is absolutely terrible.

It's a violation of international law.

It's a violation of U.S.

law.

There has not been a vote.

There's not been a debate.

In fact, there's a vote scheduled for Tuesday.

It appears as if he almost wanted to start it before the vote.

So instead of that war powers vote becoming a deterrent, it became a deadline for him.

But also I think it's, you know, I have to admit that I was wrong.

I don't know if you remember, I wrote that piece in August of last year, predicting that the Israelis would start the war again.

And I thought that it would happen sometime before the end of December of last year.

Of all the scenarios that I considered, the one that I found to be the least likely is one in which the United States would be fully on board.

I was more worried that the Israelis would start something and drag the U.S.

into it or something along those ways.

But the fact that the U.S.

would be fully on board and take the lead on it is something I just thought that Trump would have enough of a care of the opinion in his own MAGA base to realize the political downside.

It's not as, you know, talking about any type of a moral consideration on his end, obviously, but a political consideration.

But even that seems to have been completely set aside in order for him to do this.