Rory Stewart

And so it begins.

You recall my concern that starting a war is easy, controlling it, ending it much harder, if at all possible.

The Iranian regime is evil, yet I'm taken aback about the hubris and ease of the decision to attack.

And so,

I kind of feel there's a lot in that, that, you know, when this happens, Trump, he stands up there with his USA baseball cap and he kind of, you know, just talks as though he literally owns the world and he's carrying it on his own shoulders.

And he doesn't really know what's going to happen.

Bizarrely, when the news broke this morning this was happening, I'd been in bed wallowing in self-pity with man flu.

And as you do in bed, Rory, I was reading the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine.

And I was actually reading a piece by this guy about Iran.

He was called Benham Ben Taleblu.

And he's the senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which I think opposed –

the JCPOA, so he's probably, you know, very, very anti-Iranian.

But he set out, it was a really interesting, thoughtful piece, and it was setting out how America, with the support of the Iranian people, could bring down the regime, okay.

But as I read through it, I thought, God, this is bloody complicated.

This could go any which way on the route from A to B. Yeah.

Well, on prediction, while we'd be talking, Rory, our hardworking, dragging them out of bed early in the morning to set up a live podcast team, we'd be doing a bit of polling of our listeners and viewers.

Will Trump be successful in establishing regime change in Iran?

Our viewers and listeners think no, 80%.

Yes, 20%.

Will there be a full-blown war?