Saagar Enjeti

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That helps us so much as well.

But Ryan, we were talking, speaking of independent journalism, just before we went to air here, you think Jeremy, Jeremy Scahill, your colleague over at Dropsite, might have been the first to get some of this, at least in the Western press, get some of what's happening right now in Iran.

Stars and Stripes is reporting this as well.

Oh, shit, shit, shit.

Yeah, there you have... What's up on the screen is just within the last half an hour, U.S.

officials have confirmed this to the New York Times.

Yeah, and this is exactly, I mean, I don't mean this in a papian sense, but this is exactly why when you, even with the best of intentions, say we're doing a two-week bombing run, this is a limited airstrike campaign, this is a Middle Eastern version of the Maduro raid.

As much as you can want that to be the case, when events like this happen,

It's the escalation trap.

Again, not in a Papian sense, but in the sense that this is how you end up getting trapped in escalation against your intentions, which is that now you have potentially an on-the-ground search and rescue mission, which can potentially wrap in even more lives, but it's on the ground.

And on top of that, you now have the—what's the right word for this?

I don't want to say the pride, but I think that's probably how Donald Trump and Pete Hagseth will see it, the pride of the United States on the line where a fighter jet has been shot down by enemies and potentially more American deaths.

If we don't think this is going to lead to escalation that could draw us into a ground campaign, I was saying yesterday on SiriusXM, we don't know.

Trump gives a speech and says two to three more weeks.

of bombing, bombing back to the Stone Age.

But exactly, historically, the way that these things can grow and grow and grow and metastasize into conflicts that are bigger than people expect is just by steps like this on the ladder.

This is exactly what people were warning about.

It's in the New York Times.