Tom Nichols

The other day, I put up on social media a screenshot of Ronald Reagan, who went on television in prime time from the Oval Office to address the American people in 1986 about a one-night strike on Qaddafi, on a nation of 7.5 million people.

We have gone to war against 92 million people

with an eight-minute video of grandpa in his silly hat.

So again, my answer to the steel man case is, I grant you everything that this is a terrible regime, it should be gone, but you cannot defend the way this is being done.

And in the end, if the Iranian people

are again destroyed by their own government, that blood is gonna be on our hands because we baited them into it.

Then I'll get off this soapbox, David, but one thing that really bothered me is CENTCOM and the White House both saying, lay down your, saying to the Iraqi, the Iranian government and the Iranian security and military forces, lay down your arms, surrender.

Surrender to home.

There's nobody there.

They're not, to ask Iranian cops

forget about the IRGC or the real heavies.

Asking any local security forces to lay down their weapons, you might as well ask them to blow their own brains out.

It's ironic, right, that Hegseth says, we're not like these previous ones, but as you say, Rumsfeld on steroids.

Trump loathes Barack Obama, and yet his strategy here seems to be exactly what Obama did

minus a few more allies in Libya.

I'm having flashbacks now because these were the same arguments that I had and I'm sure you had back during the second Gulf War, where I did say, I admitted, I said, look, I don't know what comes after Saddam, but it has to be better than Saddam.

Chaos would be better than Saddam because of WMD and, you know, terrorism and all the things that I said.

And I admit it.

I said, you know, I can't I couldn't really imagine things getting much worse.

And then we made it worse.