John Kiriakou

That's answer number one.

Answer number two is, over the course of decades,

the CIA has been demonstrably weak in developing human intelligence inside Iran.

It's what we call a denied area where we can't just, you know, walk out of the American embassy in Tehran and, you know, target some Iranian government official for recruitment because there is no American embassy in Iran and there hasn't been since 1979.

And so we rely on

liaison services, which really means Mossad.

Now, if there's one thing Mossad's really, really great at, it's targeting intelligence, because they'll recruit every Afghan refugee in the country and give him $10 a month to just tell them where the generals live, where the nuclear scientists live, so they know where to target the cruise missiles.

On the other hand,

The intelligence that they get on the day-to-day operation of the Iranian government, on the policies of the Iranian government, largely come from Iranian Jews who live in the West,

or from the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the MEK, which until the Obama administration was a terrorist group listed on the State Department's list of international terrorist groups, which had murdered an American ambassador in Tehran in the 70s and attempted to murder an American general in the 70s.

But now we're friends with them because they hate the Iranians and they're taking Israeli funding.

Well, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq has a vested interest in the United States going to war in Iran because they want to lead Iran.

And so, you know, we got ourselves into this with bad intelligence and bad policy and no exit strategy.

One final point.

The president, it was my experience at the CIA that the people who most wanted to stay out of war,

were the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

Those people who have seen war are the least likely to want to go fight it again.

And so what President Trump did over the last year was he fired all the generals

on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and replaced them with his own hand-picked people who were perfectly happy to accept Israeli intelligence and go to war in Iran.

I mean, what's his way out?