Rachel Maddow

Why do you think he has just started a war with Iran?

Is it because his heart bleeds empathetically on a human level?

for the protesters in Iran who have been killed by their own government in such huge numbers in January and February of this year?

Is it because Donald Trump really feels for the Iranian people?

Is it because his heart throbs with a passionate support for the right of free speech and the right of people everywhere to protest against their own government and not face violence because of it?

Is that what you think?

If so, good morning.

I hope you have slept well for this past decade in which you've been dead to the world.

But, I mean, just suspend disbelief for a moment.

Just suppose that the reason the United States of America has just started this war with Iran is...

Because, as the president said today in his weird prerecorded video message in a baseball hat and a suit jacket that the White House released at 2.30 in the morning, the president said in that stilted, strange statement, squinting at the camera with his eyes shaded by the gigantic white hat he was wearing, he said that he's doing this because he wants the people of Iran to rise up and overthrow their despotic government.

At his instruction.

And maybe they will.

Maybe they will try.

But Iran is a huge, complex country.

It is 92 million people.

That is more than triple the population of Iraq or Afghanistan when we started our disastrous regime change wars in those two countries two decades ago.

Iran has considerable regular military forces, but it also has a huge revolutionary guard force, which has effectively its own army, its own navy, its own intelligence service, its own special forces.

It also plays a huge role in the massive, suffocating, brutal domestic security services that are happy to terrorize the Iranian people in the best of times and to massacre the Iranian people in the worst of times, which they have done in the last eight weeks.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has massive economic interests.