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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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It is Monday, so we are back with editor-at-large Bill Kristol, author of the Morning Shots newsletter. A lot's happened since Friday's podcast with Amanda Carpenter, which should be a reminder to you all to be checking out the Bulwark Takes feed on the weekends as news happens because we're at war with Iran now.
And Bill, I just want to kind of start with a state of play for people, if that's okay with you. You can edit or amend any of my assessment. I will be happy to. And also, you and JBL and Sarah and Mark Kirtling did an excellent early Saturday morning at 9, kind of first snapshot of where things were. And then you and I and Mark Kirtling did something at noon yesterday, Sunday.
And I've got to say, both of them were, I thought, informative and luckily informative. General Hertling's there so the rest of us can talk and he can actually explain and analyze. But no, I think both our analysis of what was happening on the ground and here at home, for that matter, domestically, which you particularly focused on yesterday, was good.
Look, it's a very impressive military operation. We took out a huge number of Iranian assets working with Israel. Very close collaboration with Israel. I mean, I may be a little surprised by that. Usually there's some attempt to maintain distance. It seems like it was a genuinely coordinated effort. Wiped out a large percentage of the Iranian leadership.
And really a nationwide campaign against military assets way beyond degrading key nodes of the nuclear program or taking out some missile sites. That was... What happened last summer in June, this was a real attempt to go after the regime in many aspects, I'd say. And if you look at this, just a map of the places we've hit, some of them were not nuclear. Many, most of them are not nuclear.
Some of them were, you know, ballistic missile sites. There were other forms of regime, places the regime had... Assets and weapons and coordinating structures. And so the military campaign is consistent with regime change as a goal. That's clearly has been Israel's goal. It's the goal Trump articulated late Friday night, early Saturday morning in his little eight minute address.
He's wavered back and forth on that goal since, obviously. In terms of the military effort, finally, it's gone well. But, you know, wars are wars, right? So we've lost four soldiers, sadly, and some planes and others. You know, Iran is not disabled anymore. Let me just give a quick rundown on that.
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Chapter 2: What are the current tensions between the U.S. and Iran?
Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain has been hit. U.S. Embassy has been attacked in Pakistan, Iraq, Kuwait. There was a mass shooting in Austin that... Maybe in response to this, the shooter was wearing a sweatshirt that said Allah, and I think it's a shirt underneath that had the Iranian flag on it.
Among the actions that we took, in addition to all the things you laid out, Bill, there was the tragic bombing of a girls' school in southern Iran. Many dead there. Just really a couple of the things geopolitically. Hezbollah has entered the war bombing Israel from inside Lebanon. Israel responded. Lebanese leadership is now trying to expel Hezbollah. So it's kind of a second engagement there.
Trump to Tapper this morning. Jake Tapper. He said, we haven't even started hitting them hard. The big one is coming soon. And then Pete Hegseth and Dan Cain had a press conference this morning we are coming to about get into. So that seems to be the state of affairs.
And as you kind of led us there, I think the most important question remaining here is what exactly is the goal of what we're doing? Like, what is the objective? Was it safety? Safety for us? Safety for Israel? Long-term safety? Short-term safety? Is it regime change? Human rights in Iran? Trump's legacy? Payback for them trying to assassinate Trump? Nuclear weapons only? It's not really clear.
And interestingly, this morning, The Daily Caller was originally Tucker Carlson's outlet, a very pro-Trump outlet. They got the second question to Pete Hegseth and Dan Cain because the Pentagon Press Corps has been totally eviscerated. We don't have any real journalists. But I guess kudos to Reagan Reitz, the Daily Caller reporter, who asked the question, what are our objectives?
I want to play you Pete Hegseth's answer for that. The president said yesterday in his video message that we will leave Iran when we complete all of our objectives. What are our objectives? And can you share more information on how the soldiers who were killed were killed? Well, I laid out the objectives, as did the chairman. They're completely nested.
I mean, Iran has an ability to project power against us and our allies in ways that we can't tolerate. So whether that's ballistic missiles and drones, so offensive capabilities, effectively their navy, which would attempt to set other terms and impose different costs, drone capabilities, which we laid out there. And ultimately, though, this tying it back to Midnight Hammer,
The president has been willing to make a deal. You can't have a nuclear bomb. Radical Islamists can't have a nuclear bomb that they wield against the world.
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Chapter 3: How is Trump's administration handling the war messaging?
He gave them every single opportunity. Then we precisely took it away. And even then, after that, they didn't have that. They didn't come to the table with a willingness to give it away. So ultimately, those nuclear ambitions, which never ceased, are something that had to be addressed as well.
So that's a discrete sense of what's being addressed here to ensure that they can't use that conventional umbrella to continue a pursuit of nuclear ambitions. Didn't seem to clear a lot up for me. Iran has an ability to project power in a way we can't tolerate. That's pretty amorphous. He mentioned their Navy and drone capabilities. A lot of countries have that. Their nuclear ambitions.
And he ends saying this is a discrete sense of what's being addressed here. Did you feel like you got a sense of what's being addressed here?
Before I address that, one foot out on your excellent update on the state of the war, I would say the one thing that's been a little striking to some friends of mine who follow this stuff with more expertise than I do is we have not decimated Iran's counter-strike capability in the sense that they're lobbing lots of missiles and drones at various allies at our own bases and at UAE and many of the Arab nations nearby.
So I hope they're all decimated in another day or two, but they may not be. And that does raise the specter of a wider war, obviously. So I thought the Hexath press conference this morning, it was really telling, refusal to be clear about, to even entertain the questions really about the goals.
But to the degree he entertained them, he was hard over on no regime change, no long-term strategy, frankly, just we're there to beat them up so badly. They don't think about messing with us again, I guess. I don't think they were messing with us a heck of a lot. honestly, in the last few years, you know, and they were pretty badly beat up in June. So there was no imminent threat from Iran.
There wasn't even much of a medium-term threat from Iran at this point. Unless you're Israel, again. Yeah, no, if you're Israel, it's a different situation. Even there, incidentally, they had done an awful lot of damage. So there was a plausibly coherent regime change strategy. Still shouldn't have been done without congressional authorization, a million problems with it, but it was plausible.
I actually, the Hexa thing really hit me because I think he's sort of totally undercut that. And I don't really see what the... coherent strategy is or the coherent rationale for the war or the defensible rationale for the war. And I hate to say this as someone who's, you know, supports an internationalist and even sometimes interventionist foreign policy and the use of force where necessary.
What are our servicemen and women doing over there? I mean, I mean, really, I don't mean that in a silly way. I mean, I mean, I honestly feel this like personally, what, what would you, would you tell someone whose son or daughter or spouse was serving over there? What national interest or American values are they serving?
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Chapter 4: What military strategies are being employed against Iran?
I mean, yeah, I mean, to my point, like there's been no presidential address and it's totally insane. Like on Tuesday, three days before they started the war, it was the biggest address that a president gives every year at the State of the Union. Like what gave one paragraph on this then has not given an Oval Office address since then has like randomly called up John Carl and Jake Tapper.
That is crazy. It's the biggest military operation that we've been involved in in a generation. The president should be telling people what the point is. And he's boasting to Tapper, the big one's really coming. I don't know what that means. But if you accept Hex's account of the goals of the war, it could end now, basically. I don't think there's any danger of Iran doing anything to us.
They'll take them so long to recover from the decapitation of their leadership and the decimation of so many of their military assets. Why are we continuing to fight? Now, I think there are reasons if you really want to try to help get a better regime in place there.
There may be reasons I don't know about in terms of some assets they still have that we haven't hit yet, but we could do that pretty quickly at this point. And so the whole thing is, yeah, incoherent. This might turn out okay. It might. Wars are unpredictable. You can get lucky. The whole regime could collapse, even though we don't want, we're not even trying to make it collapse.
It could collapse. Right. Anything could turn out okay. Like, look at what happened in Syria. We don't know if long-term Syria turns out okay. But, you know, the Turkish rebels weren't trying to even really take out Assad. Like, all of a sudden, like, the House of Cards just collapsed. Assad's gone. It's replaced with this old al-Qaeda guy. You know, is he going to be better than Assad?
Yeah, probably. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the U.S.-Israel collaboration?
So, yeah, I agree. I don't want to preclude that. But I'd say to the degree that we are talking about a serious, as you said, a serious war, by far the largest of Trump's presidency. Yeah. No congressional authorization, which by itself makes it much more of a gamble and it's Trump's own risk taking. And then no precise goal. Very hard to defend. I really do not believe that.
Here's Pete Hexeth this morning in case this clears it up for you. This is not a regime change war, but the regime did change. I don't know how we would splice that. Why is the secretary of defense saying that? I mean, he's supposed to be talking about the military side of it.
Presumably there is a secretary of state who might have a few views on what the broader, you know, conception of the war is. I see nothing of the president. The vice president has gone into hiding, I guess. So I don't know. The whole thing is. And he had Dan Cain next to him who was doing the military update, which was useful. But again, they took 13 minutes of questions.
Given the scale and scope of this operation, I'm not nearly up to, you know, what would be called for as far as responsiveness to a free people who want to know what's happening. There's literally a January 6th insurrectionist that was in the room today, Brandon Strzok. I don't know if you got a question.
Some other of these buffoonish kind of state media organizations that were asking them, like, how did it make you feel to kill Khameneas? And Kane was really being just like brass tacks about what has happened. It was basically all he did.
And then you have Hank Seth up there doing a Saturday Night Live performance of a defense secretary attacking media outlets, calling people stupid, you know, lethality. It's like, it's crazy. Just one more thing on the regime change. We'll kind of get through a couple of these other plausible explanations for what they're trying to do. Maybe Trump...
was revealing something to the New York Times and Michael Scherer. Maybe Trump really did want this to be a Venezuela-type thing where you bring in the Iranian Delcy Rodriguez, and then we're kind of the junior partner, at least, in some of the military operations. And Israel is out there with a different objective, and they're... taken out people left and right.
And I think that, you know, Israel might be okay with a period of uncertainty and like regime collapse. And that could be a sign that while the operations are cohesive together, the like mission might not be.
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Chapter 6: How does the situation in Iran affect U.S. domestic politics?
Four have died. I mean, others are wounded and others are now going into combat, returning to combat for more missions. It's so demoralizing that we don't have a serious objective. And essentially, you could have a much more limited objective, and that could be serious, but that would then imply a more limited war plan.
And there's no evidence, Mark Kirtling's made this point, that the actual planning, which is very impressive, is linked up to any sense of a broader strategic objective. Yeah. And the supporters are trying to have it all the ways, you know, I mean, to your point about like how I want freedom for the Iranian people.
I was also moved by some of the images like last night, our friend in Congress, Nancy Mace posts, like if you're angry that Iranian women may finally be free, you need to seriously examine your values and yourself. That's like, is that what we're doing? Like, is the effort here to free Iranian women? You know, because I don't know, like.
I would not have been totally hostile to that mission if there was a plan and there were allies and we had competent people in charge and the case was made to Congress and the American people. That's not an illegitimate thing to hope for. But the supporters of this are just trying to backfill any possible rationale they can. And some of them are talking as if
You know, this is a part of the freedom agenda. And like others are talking completely differently. And the president is saying different things at different seconds. So anyway, one other thing that they have put forth, according to The Atlantic, Trump told confidants that he believes his legacy could be defined by his overthrow of the regimes in Venezuela, Iran and potentially Cuba.
I think that there's a madman Trump element to this too. And I think, don't you think, obviously a huge being high in your own supply sort of situation in terms of his personal ability to run these things, the U.S. military's ability, which is very great, don't get me wrong, but it's not infinite and not, you know, can't do everything everywhere. There will be casualties and setbacks too.
There's a kind of megalomania now, I think, that's very dangerous actually. We're saying like the hot guy on the craps table. It's like this Venezuela thing worked. Let's keep pressing. Not really a way to run a country. We hear a lot from folks in the lab and people opposed to Trump is that everything we just talked about is all just kind of window dressing on the more true rationale of
which is advancing the domestic authoritarianism agenda. Tim Snyder, for one example, basically saying that the case that Trump wants us to rally to a war because it turns everyone who's opposed to the war into a traitor and that also maybe provides rationale for ā putting certain conditions or limits on the midterm elections.
Trump, he's kind of joking with Zelensky, but, you know, a lot of times Trump's jokes have a tinge of truth to them where, you know, back in the Oval Office where he's like, oh, you canceled elections during a war. Maybe that's something I should look into. You know, and then you have kind of the Epstein distraction sub-bullet to that.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential consequences of a prolonged conflict?
But whatever. It was a victory. I mean, and then that went to his head. And I do think he now looks at the world and where can I move all the U.S. troops and beat up someone? And in this case, it's a regime that really is awful. So people like me want to at least be instinctive. leave for it. And Venezuela was very bad too, actually. But there are actual trade-offs here, right?
In terms of we haven't done anything to help Ukraine, which is actually fighting in Europe against an awful invasion. Well, it's because he doesn't want to fight a great power. Right. So that's the key point, I think. This is the other part of Trump's psychology, yeah. That's right. I think that's key. And China, God knows if...
All the China hawks in the administration, their whole line about the Middle East, they hated people like me who thought the Middle East was important because it's all a diversion. It's all ridiculous. We need to have all our forces ready to fight China. Now all of our forces are busy fighting Iran, which is sort of an ally, sort of, of China and of Russia.
So it weakens Russia a little bit probably, which is good for Ukraine. Yeah. But also maybe distracts us and resources that could be given to fighting Russia, honestly. So, yeah. So maybe it helps Russia a little bit, actually. It doesn't weaken Russia. No, it helps in terms of, I think, yeah, as far as we're using things we can't help Ukraine.
I mean, we're going to move a lot of troops around and use a lot of air power and stuff. You know, maybe we should use some of it to help Ukraine directly, honestly. I mean, they were invaded by Russia. Iran is a very horrible regime. And what they did at home over the last two months is really ā
And for me, it would be a ground for kind of an intervention just because of their domestic slaughter of their opponents. But if you are on a more strict Pete Hegseth, America first, J.D. Vance, you only get to deal with countries when they cross borders. If then you can't deal with anything domestically. Isn't Russia the example of this? Iran hasn't invaded anyone very recently, you know.
Also, if you're talking about, you know, defending democracy and freedom, it's like, well, there's a free Ukrainian government that we could help, right? It's still not even clear who those people would be in Iran. You know, Pompeo over the weekend is pushing MEK, which has more support in Roslyn than it does in Iran, as best I can tell. And it's like, okay, I'm for it. But what's the plan?
And like Ukraine, there's a clear plan. You could move this type of assets there and have actually helped them. There's one more item on this, like the geopolitics and the incentive structures in the Middle East. This also ties directly to the corruption story in America, right? It's like, how can you disentangle it?
Is the fact that Saudi, you know, put in a billion dollars to Trump's son-in-law, did that give them more sway here? Yeah. You have to say maybe, right? Is the fact that Qatar is giving Trump a plane and the UAE and Qatar investing in these media companies that Trump is encouraging to be taken over by allies in America, is that part of it?
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Chapter 8: How are the upcoming Senate primaries in Texas relevant?
So, again, that's the kind of thing. When you go into something like this, maybe they're on board at the start, but... The case wasn't made to their populations either, like the Emiratis and Qataris and Saudis. It's just who knows, right? Like how ā especially if this escalates, how that ends up shaking out. And energy prices look like they might be short-term.
We'll see what happens, obviously. But I've been assuming they would settle down, but maybe they'll go up. I mean ā Look, you start a war, things start to happen, right? And Trump was to go bully these guys and then bully those guys. But I also should stipulate that that has second and third order effects of its own, as we're seeing here, right?
And the Saudis may be sort of spinning for now and just trying to pretend that, oh, we're very unhappy. But at some point, maybe they really will be unhappy or maybe other allies really will get hit in ways that we don't retaliate. And suddenly they're like, what the hell is happening here? You know, we encouraged Trump to do this. We thought they had a real plan. And now we're paying a price.
And what are we getting out of it? Right. Or there's uprising among the people. People get pissed. Like, why are we doing it? You know what I mean? Who the hell? I got it. You know, could there be protests in Kuwait, a UAE against us? Yeah. TBD on how that all shakes out. Just one more geopolitics thing was Iran also attacked British targets.
Keir Starmer has came out and said that we can use their bases. So again, kind of how this thing... trickles out, remains to be seen. You mentioned the energy prices. This is, I think about what the domestic impact is on the politics.
And this is part of the reason why I just, I just think that the idea that this is a distraction for Epstein, there'll be a rally around the flag as part of an old construct. You know, it's like the wag the dog was a movie in the 1990s. 1990s, people really did rally around the flag. And I just don't, I I don't know that that's true anymore.
We live in deeply polarized times and we weren't attacked. You know, maybe they'd rally around the flag if there was, you know, all the conspiracy theorists always talk about how there's a false flag. You know, this tech wasn't real. We did it to ourselves. Maybe there was a false flag attack on. on America, then maybe that would change. Maybe not. But I just don't see it.
In the polls right now, Ipsos is the first poll out. 27% support, 43% oppose. Means a bunch are still unsure. So events will matter. Among independents, I thought this was noteworthy. 19% support, 44% oppose. A bunch unsure. I think a lot of times people think about independents wrong. A lot of independents are kind of these...
know folks that don't pay a lot of attention aren't big fans of war aren't reading foreign affairs magazine you know and don't like have deep thoughts and all that so i thought it was pretty noteworthy how that among independents it was less popular only seven percent of democrats four and and you mentioned the energy prices uh it's just gas price only up about ten percent here but fifty percent in europe this morning again we'll see how that all plays out but i just think even if this goes well
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