Jake Sullivan

When you were there, does each president have... Is there, like, a little, like, Iran?

Like, there's a library.

And I'm assuming it's done alphabetically, but...

So Iran, and then obviously Iraq, probably thicker book.

But they sit next to each other.

And doesn't it say, when you pull it out, the work of 30 years of analysts, here's what's going to happen here, here's what's going to happen here.

Don't they game this stuff out ad infinitum?

Ad infinitum.

So that's so and he knows that the president must know that.

Well, what was interesting is there were a number of newspaper stories in the days leading up to this war because we could see it coming from weeks away as we built up for it.

Where it was military officials, including the most senior military officials in the Pentagon, basically being quoted on background saying we have misgivings about this because of the potential response we could see from Iran.

But President Trump did not listen to that.

And my supposition for why is because he was on a high from the 12-day war last year and the Maduro rave, and he basically thought, Iran's weak.

I can do this.

They're not going to respond.

They didn't respond last year.

They're not going to respond this year.

And it wouldn't just be the military, but the intelligence community would have told him,

You start waiving the possibility of regime change in Iran, these guys are going to rightly consider that existential, and they're going to do whatever they can to respond.

You know, I said earlier that the United States doesn't know why it's in this war, and I really believe that because they've given nine different explanations, the administration.