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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here, just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Monday, Dr. Janice Stein is here. How did Trump lose the war in Iran? That's our question. You'll hear her answer coming right up. And hello there, welcome to one Monday, and that means welcome to yet another week.
Chapter 2: How did Trump lose the war in Iran?
As we approach the final days of May, we'll be in June soon. And we're only about a month away from the break for the bridge, the annual summer hiatus. As in past years, we'll be gone from near the end of June until Labor Day. We'll be back a couple of times for special Good Talk episodes in July and in August.
And there will be an encore every Wednesday through the summer of some of our best programming from the last year. So I hope you'll stay with us for those. But we still have a month to go, and today's an important program as it always is when Dr. Janice Stein from the Munk School at the University of Toronto joins us. which she will be doing in the next couple of minutes.
But first, our regular housekeeping that we do on Mondays, which is basically to give you a sense of, well, what the question is for your turn for this week, for Thursday. And it's, well, it's what we do always on the last week of the month now. We started in January. It's been very successful. It's an Ask Me Anything program. So you can write in and ask me whatever you'd like to ask.
I may be able to answer it. I may not be able to answer it, but I'll certainly give it a try for those of you who are selected. Now, if you followed the AMAs, the Ask Me Anythings of the past few months, you realize that we have a lot of letters come in. So I'd get your letters in early. Some from past shows that didn't get on, we still have, and we may use some of those.
But if you have a fresh idea on Ask Me Anything, please send it in. But please also remember the basics. You write to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. You include your name, and you include the location you're writing from. All right? This is important. You have to have the answers in before 6 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. All right, that's really important. 6 p.m.
Eastern Time on Wednesday is the cutoff. And finally, I guess the most important condition of all, you have to keep your letters short. 75 words or fewer is the rule. All right, and I tell you, most of the best letters are much less than 75 words, or much fewer than 75 words. Okay, so those are your rules.
Think about it, and if you have a question for me about anything you might want to ask me, go ahead, about my career, about my past, about the way we do podcasts, about my feelings about this, that, or the other, go ahead and ask. The worst that can happen is I'll say, you know, I can't answer that question. But I'll give it a try. Ask me anything this week on the bridge. Okay.
Why don't we get to it? There's a lot in this conversation with Dr. Stein this week as we approach what appears to be the imminent end of the war in Iran. You know, the war that Trump lost. The Trump war that Trump lost. Let's hear the discussion. Here it is with Dr. Janice Stein from the Munk School at the University of Toronto.
So Janice, both sides say they're close to a deal, but clearly there's no deal yet, at least as we record this conversation. You know, I've read a lot over the weekend about who says what about where they are, but what are you hearing? Why don't you lay the groundwork for us?
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the framework agreement in the Iran conflict?
So for them, too, this is a wake-up call. Much more important, Peter, The political relationship that they had, the one between Netanyahu and Trump, I think is not what it was when this war started. Netanyahu told Donald Trump, this would be short, this would be fast. Those stories that were leaked that we haven't talked about, about Ahmadinejad being the, I mean, they defy belief, frankly.
And there was some kind of, apparently there were conversations with him. He hates Ahmadinejad, hates this group of people. He made that clear when in his last days of presidency, and that's why he's been under house arrest, more or less. So it's a credible storyline that they would think of doing this.
But what the benefit would have been, I mean, this was their Dulce Rodriguez that Donald Trump was hinting at in those early days. I think their credibility, the Israeli credibility and the Mossad credibility, is so damaged with the Trump administration that it will be impossible for them to restore. There's no question.
And this administration was the most friendly administration to that, to the Israelis. That's imaginable. There's no successor Republican nominee or Democratic nominee that would give... Israel the room for maneuver. Anything like the room for maneuver that Donald Trump has given. This is a cold wake-up call for the Netanyahu government.
You know, when the Ahmadinejad story came out in the last week or 10 days, like you, I was like flabbergasted. Come on. When this guy was the president of Iran, he was Seen as the most evil man in the world, you know, by the Americans and their relatives.
Yeah, fanatical, fanatical.
Right. And now suddenly he was the ace in the hole. He was the guy who was going to be their puppet when this war ended. It made no sense unless the whole thing about his positioning 10 years ago Was phony, that it was staged, and then, in fact, he was in their back pocket all along, which is as unbelievable as what we're looking at now.
You know, I don't think he was then. I think what happened is he hates these guys. He hates Khamenei. He hates Khamenei's son. He hates them. And he's been out of office. He's been under house arrest. They knew how much he hated them. And I think his hatred for them is what made him become, frankly, what he was. But it's obvious an asset. Let me put it this way.
He hated Khamenei more at this point than he hated the Zionists, as he would call them, the Israelis. But if you're going to do this, Peter, if you're going to do this, you break out the plan dependent on this. You break out your asset before you start the bombing, right? You make sure he's secure. You make sure that there's a force around him. It was so... And he was so ham-handed, frankly.
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Chapter 4: Why do the Iranians appear resilient despite the war's impact?
How long did it take Donald Trump to realize he lost his one and pull the plug? It's really quite interesting because normally what happens, what happens, why do leaders stay the course even? And Lyndon Johnson was the famous one. And even Richard Nixon and the great Henry Kissinger took three years to stop it. It's because of what we call sunk costs.
If you've ever played any game of cards for chips or money ā You put your chips on the one hand, you'll lose them. You don't leave the game because you've already got those sunk costs you've lost and you're convinced that if you just stay a little longer, if you just do a little more, you can get it back and maybe even do a little better, right?
And that's probably the most powerful explanation we have for why leaders invest more in a war and keep it going even though it's clear that they've lost it. I have to say that this businessman dealer figured out quite quickly that he'd lost it. And it's three months instead of how many years in Vietnam or how many years in Ukraine.
And that's what he keeps saying. You'll never hear those words come out of his lips, though, that they lost the war.
Of course not.
Bottom line is the Americans are getting pretty good at losing wars. Significant wars, you know, whether it was Vietnam or whether it was, you know, Afghanistan or Iraq, now Iran. I mean, what are the wars they've won? Grenada? Yeah. Venezuela? You know, these were not seen as potential losses.
In part because all those wars were, and we're going to come back and talk about this, about regime change.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so was this at the beginning. No matter what he's saying now, that's all it was about was regime change.
Of course it was. And how long does it take to learn that you can't do regime change out of the barrel of a gun, Peter?
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