Phil Stewart

The Pentagon reporters haven't been in the building for, except for these very staged press conferences, and the Pentagon reporters haven't been in the building for the Venezuela operation or since last fall.

So it's a very problematic situation for the press corps.

One of the things that we've learned is that he was briefed primarily on this high risk, high reward scenario where, yes, Iran could stage, you know, basically a mass casualty event where it strikes, you know, a U.S.

base or strikes a U.S.

ally and kills large numbers of Americans.

And conversely, there was also an opportunity, according to these advisors, to really reshape the geopolitics of the Middle East in a way that could be legacy burnishing for the president.

So if the campaign were to stop, say, today or tomorrow, and the Iranian state was able to rebuild and restructure in an organized way and have a replacement for the Ayatollah, perhaps a hardline cleric or someone with religious authority,

potentially you could imagine a scenario where there was very little change.

But the reporting that Reuters has done in the past weeks suggests a much broader potential campaign, planning for a campaign that would not last hours, but potentially weeks.

It's important to emphasize that

For President Trump, this is the riskiest, again, operation he's ever carried out.

This is a much more lofty project with very ambitious goals that are, and it opens up a very unpredictable scenario for the United States and the entire Middle East.

So we'll all be following this hour by hour for as long as it takes.

I think it's really important here just to focus on what President Trump himself said were the goals of this campaign, which are extremely maximalist.

He says that the U.S.

is going to annihilate Iran's navy.

It's going to wipe out

It's missile industry.

It's going to prevent Iran from ever having a nuclear weapon.

It asks the Iranian people to rise up and take over its government.