Mark Halperin

Roll S1, please.

Now, there was skepticism about that war from the beginning.

Some of it cynical, some of it healthy.

But Cronkite, because he was so trusted, really crystallized the support.

And it helped lead to the end of the war.

It could have also caused people in the government to say, you know, let's think anew.

Let's think about the mission and whether we're executing it right.

What I'm going to tell you today is not meant to undermine the effort.

It's not meant to say it can't succeed.

But there's some real questions right now that have come up just in the last couple of days that have people using words like quagmire, have people using words like unprepared that are really dangerous.

Now, what's going well, if we believe the Pentagon and there's no reason not to believe the Israelis, a lot of Iranian capability has been destroyed.

Naval capability, command and control capability, missile capability.

The leadership has been decapitated.

There's plenty of the core mission that's going well, but there's some things that are undone, some things that are backfiring, some things that aren't working.

And that's what I want to walk you through here on this snapshot of the moment.

The real danger here, in some ways more profound than just the military battlefield action and whether America is a victor in this battlefield,

is the credibility of the United States.

The United States has now said with Israel as its junior partner, we're gonna achieve these missions in Iran.

We're going to vanquish Iran's capacity after decades to do harm to the United States and other countries in the region.

That is a righteous mission.