Eric Swalwell

The fact that we even decided to talk to them about a ceasefire or that we haven't until the last 48 hours attempted to put our ships into the Strait of Hormuz.

indicates that the Iranians are not as defeated as the Secretary of War has been claiming.

It's just not the reality.

They are able to meet us on every escalation rung and they're able to give as good as they've gotten.

And so the idea that we were going to be able to go in with a set of demands, like get rid of uranium enrichment,

was a non-starter, especially because for the regime in Iran, and I don't want them to have nukes either, I think that's a horrible outcome, but it's going to happen now no matter what.

The Iranian regime has wedded itself to the idea that it has to at least possess the capability to enrich to weapons-grade uranium as a sign of deterrence against the U.S.

and Israel, and also as a symbol of legitimacy.

And I would remind everybody that

in 2003 there were many people who believe saddam actually had wmds nuclear weapons because he was telling the world he had them and the reason he was saying that was because he didn't want to appear as weak because if you're weak in that part of the world you lose legitimacy and you're ripe to be overthrown ironically of course it ended in his overthrowing anyway but the point is in iran something similar there's a similar calculus so unless we're going to so decisively defeat them in combat which we haven't and we probably won't

then that means they're not going to come in a conciliatory manner.

They're going to come and meet with us as wanting to be seen as equals.

We cannot demand they give up something like uranium enrichment because it, for them, is essential to their vision of being seen as legitimate in the region and powerful and having a deterrent against us.

Well, that's a great question.

Obviously, he's implying that this is where it needs to go.

And just to be clear, there's a lot of debate among real historians today as to whether those two nuclear bomb drops actually ended the war

or if it was really the threat of the Soviet Red Army.

By this point in the war, the Soviet Red Army had defeated the Nazis and they were repositioning Zhukov's famous forces that defeated Hitler.

They were sending them back to the Eastern Front to basically take on the Japanese.

They wanted to invade northern Japan and do to Japan what they did to Germany, split it in half between us and them.