Robert Evans

He does not have a very porous office.

There's not a detailed, here's what was happening.

People haven't written a dozen books about being inside his office at this time, right?

Because that's just not how Saudi Arabia works.

You'll get bone-sought if you do that sort of thing.

You will.

Yeah.

I'm left to assume that even these much more knowledgeable analysts don't have a great deal of detail from inside MBS's office, so to speak.

And this is one of the most frustrating parts of the story to me because there's not really a – I don't have a good answer as to why did you think this would work, man?

He'd grown up and he – there were good reasons to think a guy like MBS who seems to be relatively smart should have known this was a bad idea.

He grew up watching the US fail in Iraq and Afghanistan, right?

Like you saw this fail.

Yeah, so he doesn't pay attention to the fact that this never hasn't worked in recent memory.

He doesn't pay attention to the fact that Gibbon's dysfunction was spurred on by the Iraq war.

The Houthis attacked former President Saleh for having supported the U.S.

during the early years of the global war on terror.

Somehow MBS seems to have convinced himself that using a mix of air power and mostly foreign troops, he could win a quick and overwhelming victory against a group he thought was nothing more than an Iranian cutout.

This would be proven disastrously wrong.

And without any more detail behind the scenes, I'm left concluding that Mohammed bin Salman made a really bad decision because he was arrogant and too intellectually lazy to realize he was making a mistake.

Most sources do seem to agree that he was the deciding and leading voice in Saudi Arabia going to war.