Robert Malley

The marginal gains that the U.S.

can make now by continuing the war are not enough to justify a resumption, which doesn't mean that he won't do it.

But so if he wants to claim victory, he could have done it.

It becomes a little bit harder to do it now, given that so many weeks have gone by and very little additional has been achieved.

And as I think our listeners know, Iran, if the war were to end tomorrow or next week,

would still claim that it is standing, that it controls the Strait of Hormuz, that it still has a formidable capacity of missiles and drones, and it still has at least some nuclear knowledge and some nuclear capacity.

So victory in the terms that the president more recently has presented it, which is the total surrender of Iran, that is not achievable.

If you want something that in his mind he could claim is a military success,

As I said, it was achievable before.

He could still claim it now.

I think it has less credibility because of all of the damage that the United States has incurred, the rest of the world has incurred economically and in many other ways.

All of that, I think the historians are going to say, are going to repeat what I said at the beginning, which is the war was unlawful, unnecessary, unjustified, and did not even accomplish the goals that it purported to achieve.

Well, I mean, I think there's a difference and there's a similarity.

The difference, of course, is that you do not have hundreds of thousands of American troops, which they did in Vietnam, who have not invaded Iran.

You don't have the

hundreds of thousands of wounded and killed on the American side.

So it's not comparable to that extent.

What is comparable is the huge asymmetry between the metrics that the U.S.

likes to point to.

How many bridges have been blown up?