Richard Miniter

Yes, the farm workers that I talked to, right?

And this is years ago, and this is, you know, a dozen maybe, right?

But I also want to make it clear that what I said about that exhausted realism...

Yeah, the one way to guarantee a war with a democracy is to attack it and to kill a lot of civilians.

So I think when historians write the story of this time in the Middle East, they will see October 7th as a profound miscalculation by Iran.

And the debate will be, is this something that Hamas did without something that it did specifically at the direction of Iran?

Because it, to use a phrase from another war and another enemy, it woke a sleeping giant.

Israel's political will to go back into Gaza would not be there without October 7th.

And if you look back at 17th century American history, it was these Indian massacres of whites that provoked tremendous military responses and pushing back

of the Indian peoples, the Native Americans, what Brits used to call red Americans, or red Indians, further back west.

It was and it was a gradual coarsening of relations and a lack of sympathy for those because of those attacks.

Right.

So the Trail of Tears did not cause a political pushback in the 19th century America because of the decades of attacks.

massacres some exaggerated by propaganda uh that occurred and october 7th had a similar effect on israel the idea that many people who would not have voted look good suddenly said well these are the crazy people who actually defend us and so no other response was really possible

And the fact that Iran couldn't see that the one way to galvanize the Jewish democracy was to attack it.

And this may turn out to be an enormous miscalculation.

Well, that's right.

There's two clocks ticking, one in Washington, one in Tehran.

The Iranians are betting that the alarm clock in Washington goes off first, that the World Cup, the 250th celebrations, the declining poll numbers of the Republican Party, the declining poll numbers of the president, the fear of the midterms eventually cuts in their favor and they survive on the terms in which they want to survive.

Trump loyalists are betting that the alarm clock goes off in Tehran first, that they're shutting in oil wells, they run out of storage capacity, they can't make any more money.