Tom Nichols

Because if he does put boots on the ground, I think that we're heading that way.

I mean, he's talking out of one side of his mouth about negotiations and sending, you know, the 82nd Airborne Command structure over there now.

I think that would be a politically disastrous thing to do.

um but again I I'm not sure I mean I guess we're in kind of heated agreement about it it would be great if somebody could step up and say this is a war that was started by one man on his own authority and his own whim um but it goes beyond that because I think that's gotta be the last word we got we gotta get we gotta get we gotta run thank you both thank you all I appreciate it uh I want to thank

Absolutely.

No one should be shedding any tears for the mullahs.

And, you know, we should all be hoping that now that we're committed to this, whatever this is, I suppose one of the things we should talk about, but if it's regime change, that this goes well.

But not only am I worried about the history of regime change, I mean, I supported, as you did, the Iraq war, you know, and as we saw that, you

business.

But I'm also concerned about the competence of this administration to pull off something of this size.

And I think because of the people who are in it, the president is the president, but I wish he had a better team around him.

So yeah, I'm concerned.

I hope the Iranian regime transforms into something else, but I'm very concerned about this team trying to do it.

You know, you and I were alive during that war and paying attention.

And one of the things that I heard constantly, especially from the officers who were coming back to us, you know, from their assignments and coming back through the Naval War College, is that it was...

completely the other way around donald rumsfeld would pretty much throw the secretary of defense at the time would throw you out of his office if you started talking about phase four and what comes after and nation building and all that stuff he don't want to hear any of that stuff he was more like hegseth maybe than hegseth wants to admit he wanted to prove that a transformed small force could knock over the what was at the time the fourth largest army in the world

Right.

That, you know, that we could go in and we did that in 91 and then we knocked over that army and then we came back in and that we could do it again with this kind of Jedi force.

That's all Rumsfeld was interested in.

So the idea that somehow these previous wars, we spent all this time, you know, chin pulling about what comes next and the mistakes that happened were because we didn't do that.