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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by Dispatch contributors Mike Nelson and David French, and Dispatch Editor in Chief Jonah Goldberg. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the Trump administration's military campaign against Iran, nearly one week in, and the administration's general failure to articulate the why and the why now. We'll also discuss the administration's goals for the campaign and where we can expect to be in five weeks, which is what President Trump said this war might take. Before we get into today's conversation, please consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com join and if you use promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Let's dive in. Gentlemen, welcome. David. We are not quite a week into this campaign against Iran. And I think the big questions over the first several days, beyond sort of what we're doing, what we're striking, and what comes next have been two different questions. The why question, why is the United States doing this? And very closely related, why is the United States doing this now?
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B
Yeah.
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A
What's your answer to both of those questions?
- [01:44]
B
Yeah, those are really good questions. And I think you've got really the why and the why now are relatively easy to articulate compared to the other questions like why not go to Congress, what's the strategy, et cetera. So the why, I think is one of the easiest questions to answer around is that Iran has been an enemy of the United States, a violent enemy of the United States ever since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Ever since the hostage crisis. It has been engaged in both through proxies and directly in what you might call a generations long low intensity conflict against the United States. It views US and Israel as essentially as the Great Satan and the Little Satan and has acted accordingly. And so it is an enemy regime that has acted on its intent. It has killed hundreds of Americans, hundreds, including Iranian backed militias using Iranian supplied weapons, killed men I served with in Iraq and Diyala Province in 2007, 2008. And so this is an enemy regime. And it is also a regime that is completely bent on exporting a violent vision. It tried to surround Israel with sort of an anaconda of terror and it's probably the last remaining regime in the world that doesn't have nukes that you would want to get nukes. I mean, who's above Iran in the I don't want to get nukes category? So from that standpoint, the why is pretty easy to articulate. Why now is also relatively easy to articulate. And that Iran is on the back foot. It has sustained a series of catastrophic military defeats both through its proxies. Its proxies are now substantially weaker than they were before October 7th. And directly after the 12 Day War, for example, Iranian air defenses were degraded to some degree. Iran was very vulnerable. So you can very quickly articulate a reason why and a reason why now, and I'm sure we'll get to this later, is then there's this other thing. Why not, in these circumstances, go to the Congress of the United States? Why not prepare the American people for this kind of action? Why? There's a lot of other questions, but I think that why and why now are two of the easier ones to answer.
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A
So, Mike, the why question, I agree with everything David said. I think he's exactly right. And it's an argument that could have been made in May of 2025, before operation midnight Hammer. It's an argument that could have been made and was made by people, mostly Republicans, but some Democrats as well, going
- [04:21]
B
back every year for the past decades. Decades.
- [04:25]
A
Yes, exactly. And it's been a very, I think, compelling argument. The why now. I would posit that David just gave a better, more coherent, more succinct answer to the why now? Question than we have heard from anybody in the administration to this point. The why now Question seems to have been incredibly vexing for the President of the United States, for the Vice president, for the Secretary of State, for the Secretary of Defense. Basically, anybody speaking on behalf of the administration, they have confused the why now Question. So let me ask you two different ways. What's your answer to the why now? Question? And if you had to give us the administration's answer to the why now Question, what would you say? How would you describe it?
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C
Well, I agree with you that there seems to have been a failure to at least align the message, and I think is an extension of that, the understanding of the why now? It was something that probably seemed fairly obvious or was taken as a given by many of the administration officials, and then they've each gone their own way, like Fleetwood Mac, to explain their own version of why now. But as David pointed out, we are at the culmination of the Iranian regime for the first time being at the lowest point in its power. After they greenlit the attack of October 7, their regional proxy networks were largely taken apart by the IDF. The 12 day war directly attacked them, affected some of their internal capabilities, and culminated with Midnight Hammer where we destroyed their physical capability for researching or developing a new nuclear weapon. And then we saw in January that they were facing domestic upheaval that brought the question of Iranian interaction with the United States into the forefront with the President's statements that he would support the protesters. So there was this period, this sense that Iran, this great adversary of ours for almost five decades, is at their weakest point and it is at the most favorable terms for us to deal with this problem. There was also a point where we looked at or what has been reported since, going back to that kind of backwards explanation of the why. Now there was also the potential for that low point to end and for them to start to increase some of their deterrent capability. Previously the regime had enjoyed a primary deterrent which was their regional proxies. If anybody struck the Iranian regime, then Hezbollah would rain rockets down on Tel Aviv. Well, that threat has been removed. They were researching a nuclear weapon primarily as an interlocking deterrent, that the two would be mutually supporting. If they had the nuclear trump card, then they could continue their regional efforts. If anybody struck at the nuclear program, then the regional efforts, like I said, would attack. Now they've been, or recently they have been increasing their short range attack capabilities both through their short range ballistic missiles and the increased number of the shahed drones that they've done. This was causing a theater wide problem where the number of drones and short range ballistic missiles were outpacing our interceptors. And as we've seen, the administration from both the White House and the DOD have laid out destruction of that short range capability. That theater based capability is one of the objectives of Epic Fury. So I do think it was the nexus of these two things at their lowest point before they start ramping up their deterrent capability, that it becomes advantageous for the United States to take deal with the problem. Again, that all makes sense, but none of that had been presented prior to, and it's still somewhat messy. They are cleaning it up, but it hasn't been cleaned up yet in the way that either David or I have.
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A
Yeah, Jonah, weigh in on those first two questions. But what's the explanation for why? I mean, those are both again better answers than we've gotten from anybody in the administration. Compelling answers. I think the kind of answers that if you presented them to the United States, maybe not to Congress, but if you presented them to the United States, you might be able to rally people to support this. Because those are good answers. Why haven't we heard that or heard that in a more compelling way from the administration?
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D
Yeah. So I agree entirely with David about the why question. The why now question, I would reframe it a little bit. What David was saying was the objective case for why Iran has it coming and we should eventually do something about it. Right. Which is an argument, again, you could have made almost any day that ended in why for decades. Right. The why now thing, I'll get to it in a second. I think the other argument is sooner rather than later, which is what gets to. What Mike was talking about is the development of the ballistic missile stockpile in effect, was getting Iran perilously close to having the ability to prevent the possibility that you could take out the nuclear program. So that created a sooner rather than later dynamic that I think was fueling a lot of things that was also fed into by the protests and Trump's ill conceived social media posts saying, take over your country and then a bunch of people get killed, which was embarrassing for Trump. I think maybe I missed it if someone mentioned it. I think part of the why now thing was this intelligence that said basically the entire Iranian Legion of Doom was meeting in one place and could be taken out. And they were like, we gotta jump on this. That said, the question of why, I kind of disagree with the characterization that we haven't heard these cases from administration officials. The problem with this administration and its defense is that we've also heard all of the other arguments.
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B
Yeah, right.
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D
And so if you have a good reason for why you're doing things, but you also listen, you also offer another reason which is not so good. Another reason which is entirely implausible. Another reason which is good but may not be factually correct. It makes it sound like none of the reasons you're saying are good. Right. And if you listen closely to what Rubio has said in the full context, it's a pretty good explanation. But I think we can talk about Israel later. But he particularly buttered the stuff on Israel. Trump, meanwhile, like I think we talked about it in Slack the other day, but he is literally, he spent the day, I can't remember if it was Tuesday or Wednesday, but he spent a day just like going through his phone calling different reporters or taking calls from different reporters and giving them different reasons and different objectives for what he is doing. And this is a thing that I particularly the Schadenfreude of watching, you know, hardcore maga, people freaking out about this tendency that people like us have been noticing for a decade is that, you know, I invoke this essay by this guy, Harry Frankfurt, all the time. The full title is on bs Spelled out weird title.
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A
It's a weird title.
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D
It really is. Part of the point of the point he makes about BSing is that lying pays tribute to the truth, right? When you lie, you know what the truth is and you want someone to believe something else. When you're BSing, you don't care what people believe. You just want to get through the moment. And that has sort of been Trump's approach to all sorts of things for 10 years. As he just says, what gets him, you know, that's the core of why he says we're going to have perfect healthcare plan in two weeks or everything else that he's promised in two weeks. It's just to get through the moment. And because they laid out no case in advance, the effort to retroactively impose an argument by resorting to that tactic of offering every explanation possible feels really deceptive. And it's one of the reasons why it is catnip for conspiracy theorist types whose whole practice is just to take whichever dot fits their narrative and connect it to whatever other dot fits their narrative. And so the second you start saying anything that feels nefarious or villainous or whatever, they pocket that and they don't care about what the other explanations are. And I think they just royally screwed up the messaging on this in a way that I don't think Trump has the skill set to fix, at least not with words. The only way that this gets fixed is if a broad consensus of people think the Operation Epic Fury was a clear success.
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C
Well, I think one of the things that we have to look at is already this has obviously and objectively been a tactical and operational level success. We have degraded Iranian capabilities that will take years, if not decades, for them to recover. And their political leadership has been attrited in ways that we're still trying to assess, but by offering a series of different explanations as to why, and then as an extension of those, a series of objectives that are some very discrete and clear and some very nebulous. It affords the administration the capability of whenever they decide that the operation is completed, saying it's complete, that it met all its objectives and that it was a glorious success. The President's statement, his eight minute recorded video on Saturday morning suggested that we were going whole hog for Regime change, they've walked that back. So without that objective criteria, it's easy to say whatever we do is the thing that we sought out to do in the first place.
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B
You know, part of this reminds me, I think, and I would be interested to see if any of you guys disagree with this. I think what's actually happening is the Trump administration has decided we're going to just exert maximum military pressure right now. We're going to blow up everything we can blow up. We're going to destroy everything that we can destroy. That's the short term tactical objective. And then, you know, as Mike just said, if we just decide to stop, well, then we can declare success because we've blown up a lot of stuff that it will take Iran a long time to, to recover from. And if there's an uprising that occurs, bonus, you know, if we're so successful that the place devolves into civil war, well, that's less than ideal. But there's still less a threat while they fight each other. I mean, I think they're kind of looking at it as worst case scenario. We've just blown them back by in their capabilities for some time. And here's the cautionary tale to that. That reminds me a lot of sort of the pre October 7th mowing the lawn kind of philosophy that Israel had with Hamas. Israel could go in and it could blow up whatever it wanted to blow up. It could degrade Hamas substantially and did in wars in 2008, 2014. And there was created this sort of sense that you can just sort of keep them at bay. You can keep them at bay by just degrading. And that seemed to be working until October 7, at which point it was the worst disaster in Israel's history. And that's what kind of concerns me is if you are not kind of concerns me, really concerns me in addition to a lot of the problems that are related to not going to the American people. That really is not a technicality, guys. It's just not. It's not just a mere constitutional technicality. But at the end of the day, what we're dealing with is extremely violent, comprehensive version of sort of mowing the lawn. You haven't defeated Iran, you really haven't. You've degraded it. But what happens in two to three years when there's a gigantic terror attack? Right. You know, when we hit Libya in 1986, it was a while before Libya got its revenge. We did not actually destroy the Gaddafi regime for a long time. And the, you know, we had the Lockerbie Pan Am bombing that came years later. And so we can unquestionably degrade Iran. Unquestionably. What I do question is just that mere fact, just the mere fact of degrading Iran and the whole, the greater context, is it going to be worth it? And that's even putting aside all the issues we have around the constitutional process here.
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A
I want to get back to the President's video and his case. For what? David, just for clarification purposes, what do you mean by mowing the lawn?
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B
Yeah, it's a phrase of, I can't remember the origin exactly who it came from, but it essentially means like as Hamas gets stronger, you cut it back down to size and then Hamas would recover from that attack and it would get stronger again and maybe sort of start firing more rockets or engaging in limited offensive operations or. And then you hit him again and you trim the lawn again, so to speak, you knock them back and lower their capabilities. Now this would be more like, well, we're talking about the level of destruction we're inflicting on a large, on parts of the Iranian state. It's very substantial. But at the same time, let's not overstate it. This is a huge military, terror, paramilitary apparatus. We have not inflicted large scale casualties on that apparatus. We have degraded a lot of capabilities. But this is a country that was willing to run its youth through minefields in the Iran Iraq war to win that war. Like, this is a regime that is willing to expend lives at a level that would shock us ourselves. This is not taking out like a strongman in, in Central America or South America who's maybe mainly oriented, interested in the profit motive. This is taking on a regime that has a lot of elements of apocalyptic death cult about it. And that's a different kind of beast.
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A
So, Jonah, going back to you, I want to spend one more beat on this case for war. The fact that in my view there really wasn't one and what one we got was diffuse, self contradictory and sometimes just flat wrong. There's nothing wrong with making a sort of multifaceted case for war. I think that's what the Bush administration did with Iraq, primarily focusing on weapons of mass destruction, Iraq, support for terror and sort of the human rights case and all of those, it seems to me, were valid at the time arguments to put forward. What I think we're getting from the Trump administration is in some ways different because it's picking and choosing arguments based on either the question posed to them or what's most convenient. There doesn't seem to have been much discussion beforehand on, hey, everybody, this is our case. And when you go back and watch the video that Mike referred to, the President of the United States claimed that there was an imminent threat that required taking care of. I don't know anybody who thinks there was an imminent threat from Iran. And when you ask Marco Rubio or others in the administration the why now Question, they struggle with this idea that there was an imminent threat. So can you address that, the imminent threat question? And if it's just wrong, isn't that a real problem with the case for war? And then to Mike's other point on the regime change question, we have had mixed messages from the beginning about whether that's an objective of this campaign. Isn't it a problem if the President of the United States and his top advisors can't tell us whether they're trying to change the regime in Iran?
- [19:33]
D
Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff going on there. I think there's a lot of evidence. And not just. You don't have to just point to words. Right. You can point to the fact that there really does not seem to have been a plan for getting Americans out of the region. Right, right. That's evidence. The fact that Kash Patel did more of his lawfare stuff and fired 10 FBI agents who were. Who ran the sort of counter intel program out of D.C. like, at the moment we threw rocks at a hornet's nest in Iran, you know, is a sign that there wasn't a massive amount of coordination. There are a bunch of those kinds of things. As you go down the list. The fact that they're not all on the same page on their messaging alone, regardless of what the quality of the messaging is, is evidence that this was rushed. That said, there's another complicating factor here, which David Crowley can speak to better than I can. But just as a political matter, we're getting a lot of the technical term for it is profoundly stupid word games about whether or not we're at war. And that's in part because of the debate over the War Powers Resolution. Right. So Mark Wayne Mullen, he's not alone. There are a bunch of guys who've done this who said, look, we're not at war with Iran because Congress didn't declare war. And the upshot of that being that no matter how much it looks, walks, talks, and sounds like a war, it's not a war unless Congress says it is and Congress doesn't want to call it one. And there's a similar problem with the imminent threat thing. The imminent threat thing is the power that the president, in these arguments, can invoke to get around going to Congress. And so they have to come up with some claims, like Gulf of Tonkin type thing. Right. They have to come up with some claim of an imminent threat politically, or it makes this fight in Congress more difficult. And I think that's part of the messaging problem, is you've got people saying, clearly a bunch of Republican congressmen were at the run of the midterms and who do not want this thing and weren't asked for and didn't ask for it being put in this position where the last thing they want to do is vote either way. Right. I mean, like Hillary Clinton, her vote for the Iraq war was a big problem for her that hung around for a long time. And a lot of these guys are thinking in those terms. I will say, and this is a minor thing, but I just think it's really funny. So Chesney McBro, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth goes crazy about how we are calling it now Department of War. I'm the Secretary of War. We're all about war. War is what we do do here. And then the Republican official position is, this isn't a war. This was a defensive operation in response to an imminent threat. So for all of this talk, and Trump has gone to war and all this BS about the war stuff, they're falling back on the position that the Department of War wasn't doing war stuff. It was doing Department of Defense stuff because they were defending us rather than warring. And it's all really dumb. But I think that's part of the reason why it's so, like, Steve, you very much like to hear coherent answers from politicians, and this is why you can't have nice things is like, this is a perfect storm in a bunch of different ways for why you're not gonna get coherence from the top down.
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B
They were gonna go with special military operation, but Putin had already trademarked that one.
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D
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He already had the T shirts printed.
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B
Exactly.
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C
I think one of the problems with the war versus non war, while it might be largely semantics from the view of the administration and those like Mark Wayne Mullen who get caught with the awkward answers trying to defend it, it does go to what is our overall objective. Right. So the White House has released now, as part of the cleanup, four primary objectives, two of which can be accomplished by the military and two of which are political considerations or decisions or accommodations short of a total war. And they are destroy the short range missile capability, destroy the Iranian navy, prevent their support to their regional proxies, including EFP use, which is a weird complaint considering it hasn't been a factor since 2011. It's like complaining that they need to release our embassy hostages. And then the last one is that they can't have a nuclear program. So as I said on Saturday, all four of those can be accomplished if we topple the regime and also free the Persian people in the process. But short of that, those first two, the DoD can absolutely and is in the process of accomplishing those first two, but the last two require someone to agree to them, someone in Iranian leadership and establishing what is the viable or acceptable version of those agreements that we will take in order to stop the campaign. So, number one, if we are waging total war, which is to destroy the political entity that is the Iranian regime, that is one thing, and that is absolutely fully more expansive than the President's article. Two powers. But the other one is we have to articulate what those last two objectives really look like and then also communicate what the conditions are for some Iranian to stand up and say, I agree to these.
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D
Can I just make one additional point on that? I had Ken Pollack on, longtime student of Iran, back on the Remnant. He's sort of been my Iran guy for a long time. And one of the points he made is that in America, the debate, is it a military operation, is it this, is it, that it's not really a war, no ground troops, we're not, you know, and then sometimes we're going to do regime change, sometimes we're not, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's a lot of like, caveats about whether or not this is a full blown war. Part of Ken's point is regardless of where we end up coming out on that domestically for political purposes, Iran believes it's a frigging all out war. Like they don't think when you turn the Supreme Leader into a fine mist and then try to say, well, we're not really in an all out war regimes when the talk of regime change means all out war for a regime. Right, they don't care. Oh, you're not at war with the Iranian people, just the regime. Well, that sucks because we're part of the regime and they're going to respond that way. And so there are things that a desperate regime can and will do that are so asymmetric, particularly if you're already an evil regime, that we're still talking about the politics on this. But when David talks about a terrorist attack. You don't need a lot of terrorist attacks and they don't need to get anything vital domestically. They just need to it's the vibes that you care about. That's why it's terrorism and not war. Right? And I don't think that this administration has thought through any of those kinds of consequences in a way that, you know, I think the military operation, I agree with Mike entirely that the strictly grading the military operation, it's been already extremely successful and impressive and all that. But like, like the Iranians are under no obligation to just fight this war on America's terms.
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A
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B
I mean, it's not a regime change war so far because the regime is still in power. I mean, the thing to think about it is this is not exactly the same as say, Venezuela, where you might could arguably say, like if you take out the head of the, you know, the head of that party and that regime, this is not, you know, yes, I know there are revolutionary elements. And you know, going from Chavez to Maduro, this was a revolutionary style movement. It's nothing compared to what this Iranian revolution has been for decades. Right? So they have an entire security infrastructure. It's no more regime change than if, let's suppose, you know, you that show Designated Survivor, do you remember that with Kiefer Sutherland, you would knock out everybody and then like the Secretary of Agriculture or whatever becomes president. That's not regime change. It's still the constitutional government of the United States in operation. It is still, the Islamic revolutionary government is still in operation. Now it's scattered, it's disorganized, it's been damaged. But this is not regime change. It's regime damaging. It's regime harming. The regime has been hurt, without question, but it has not been changed. And you know, I am fully in support of decapitating terror organizations. I do not shed a single tear for the death of Khomeini. But we have been decapitating jihadist organizations for a long time, and we still have jihadist organizations because we're talking about here isn't so much a cult of personality as a movement with a rotating cast of characters at the top of it of varying degrees of effectiveness. And ruthlessness, but, well, not really. Varying degrees of ruthlessness, varying degrees of effectiveness. And so this sort of idea that we've already achieved a regime change. No, not remotely. And there's another thing that I also want to caution people about. It is entirely possible that Trump two, three, four weeks from now, let's suppose the Dow is sort of struggling, oil prices are going up, the American people who are already, were not appreciative of this war, were are souring even further. It looks like the midterms are in real, real trouble. And he goes, okay, it's over. Doesn't mean it's over because Iran, it takes two to end this thing. And you know, imagine after Pearl harbor and after, you know, the Japanese ran wild in the Pacific for a few months after Pearl harbor, they then go, timeout, cease fire, this thing's all over. We would have been like, do not consent. Right. And the thing with Iran is if this regime doesn't change, let's suppose they do agree to a ceasefire temporarily. Does anyone not think that they are sitting there trying to concoct the most spectacular kinds of revenge style attacks that they're trying to immediately get back up off the mat and hurt us as much as possible for as long as possible. And again, I don't raise these things to say that therefore we should never attack Iran. I raise these things because you have to rally the American people to accept this risk. And you. And when we talk about terror, what's really important about walking into a war with Iran? It's not just risk for the military, it's obvious risk for the military. But just think about the thousands of Americans stranded and the failure to evacuate. We have been very fortunate, for example, that a drone hasn't gotten through and hit like a crowded airport terminal full of Americans trying to get home. You know, so he's asking American civilians to bear at least some additional extra risk as a result of all of this. Well, no, no, he's not asking. He never asked. He just did it. He just did it. And if this isn't a war, nothing's a war.
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C
Right?
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B
Like there, this is a war. I mean, come on, there's no way this isn't a war.
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D
We're fighting alongside Israel, which says they're at war.
- [33:45]
B
Yes.
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D
Like what are we, the Red Cross?
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B
Yes. And then also spare me the idea that no modern president goes to Congress. HW got an authorization and Security Council resolutions for Desert Storm. W got authorizations even after 9, 11, he could have immediately gone in self defense. Boom. And he did, but he also got an authorization Iraq war. He had OLC opinions telling him he could go to war with Hussein without Congress, which is bonkers town to me. But you know what he did? He got Iraq resolution and he got Security Council resolution. So spare me the idea that modern presidents. And I will remind everyone that Donald Trump is talking to a Republican majority Congress in the House and the Senate. He had the whole body in front of him for the State of the Union and he spent what, three minutes on it. Three minutes. He could have at that moment said, I am going to be asking you for an authorization. And think how much stronger our hand would be if you had actual congressional authorization before this, had an actual effort to rally the American people. Our hand would be stronger. He has set us up for a greater risk of failure by launching an unconstitutional war. Let's just be straight out about it. This thing is un constitutional.
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A
So, Jonah, that leads me to this next question and I think it's worth a moment on whether Donald Trump, and I'm talking here specifically about the person, Donald Trump, the man, the president, the commander in chief, made this decision largely for strategic reasons. As I would say many of his supporters have argued in the days since, or as we know from looking at the reasons, Donald Trump makes lots of decisions for primarily personal reasons. As you survey the reporting that's come out since he took this decision to go to war, there are good sort of tiktoks about this in the New York Times. Axios had a very good one. Where do you land on that? And what do you make of the people who have made an argument sort of ascribing to the President deep strategic thinking on what this is likely to mean for the United States and its sort of positioning geopolitically?
- [36:01]
D
Yeah. So you know the Latin phrase cui bono? I always like the Italian version of che paga. But anyway, it basically it means who benefits or who pays. Right. And like this is one of the major gateway drugs to conspiracy thinking is you take an event and then you retroactively say, well, these people benefited from it, so they must have been responsible for it. Right. You can't be 9, 11. And there are a thousand different things like this. Right. There is a sort of a geostrategic analog to this in the world of sort of high end foreign policy punditry, which says these are the ways that this is good for America. So therefore the President must have intended these things to happen. Sometimes that's true. Right. I think Trump, to his credit, very much likes and admires Israel and thinks they're a valuable ally. And I think this has sort of demonstrated that they are. I think Trump at a sort of lizard brain level, thinks demonstrations of strength and power and ability are good for America in this three way battle for what's the hottest country right now that Trump always likes to say, right?
- [37:12]
A
Yeah.
- [37:13]
D
If you're a ally of Russia and China and then you watch what Israel and the United States pulled off, you're like, maybe we should gravitate back towards those guys. Right. And so I'm willing to give Trump some modicum of credit. That's part of how he kind of sees the world. Where I get off the Trump train on this is the idea that, oh, there's this four bank shot kind of theory about how this is the way he's pressuring Putin without actually having to say the words. And this is really a way to sort of help Ukraine. I don't buy any of that stuff. Right. And you hear people, it's weird. It's like I've now heard four or five people I respect, or at least pundits, types who come from different ideological places, all pointing out that, like Trump watches Mark Levin on Friday nights and Mark Levin is like the only guy who prior to the war was saying we need to attack right now kind of thing. I don't know that I do not watch Mark very much, but. Or on Sunday night, whatever it is, whenever he's on, check local listings. And the point I'm making is that, and I think that there are people in the administration who are fairly serious thinkers. You know, we've had this conversation about the national security strategy, which did not mention Greenland. And then three weeks later he's talking about how he's not ruling out use of force for taking Greenland. Right. So I think there are a bunch of people subordinate to him who are pretty good at constructing arguments, rationalizations, strategies, things to steer him in a direction that I think is worthwhile. I think Rubio is the king of that. But I think Trump had no granular strategic vision about any of this. He thought Venezuela was great. He loves these sort of big displays of force that don't involve things on the ground. I just want to get back to something David said. I don't make a lot of predictions. The debate is going to pivot so fast. We're going to stop hearing about endless wars and then we're going to start hearing about how he didn't see it through and he bugged out too early. It's going to happen. I Guarantee you in like three weeks, if not sooner. You know, Trump doesn't want endless wars. Trump's terrified of endless wars or forever wars. He buys the whole quagmire. Iraq, Vietnam. Don't get stuck in their stuff. He wants TV ready wars with clear, antiseptic endings. And if he doesn't get that within three weeks, and if the stock market goes bad or a refinery in Dubai really blows to hell, or a plane goes down, or a bunch of American troops die, heaven forbid, I think he's gonna start looking for the exits. And then all the people praising this are gonna be the ones left saying, wait a second, you gotta pull the band aid all the way off. And I think it's gonna catch a lot of people in the Democratic Party on the left by surprise that the debate is gonna change out from under them almost immediately.
- [40:01]
A
I guess. I wonder about that last point you make. Will people question him or challenge him if things go. Let's just say things don't go as well as they've gone over these first few days. You have. You know, our friend Mark Thiessen wrote in the Washington Post that this is sort of the new Trump doctrine. He just goes in and sort of blows people up and then moves on and takes out threats. Moves on. We don't really have to think about it anymore. I'm not.
- [40:28]
D
Sounds a lot like the Clinton Doctrine and the Obama Doctrine.
- [40:31]
A
Well, I mean, you know, there was so much discussion of the Pottery Barn rule in the context of Iraq. The Pottery Barn rule, I guess it originally came from Tom Friedman. Colin Powell used to cite it. It was basically, you break it, you own it. And I think if you look at the way that Trump is approaching these things, it's like, no, we'll go break stuff in Pottery Barn, then we'll go next door to Restoration Hardware, then we're going to hit our house and just continue to blow stuff up. But if that's the way that it's being sort of framed unapologetically, how much does this wash back on him? If things don't go well, we've got sort of a caretaker regime kind of hands off in Venezuela. We've talked about the kinetic action. The Trump administration has taken sort of on one offs in other places for sort of counterterror reasons. But how much does this wash back on him, Mike? If things do go badly, he still will, to David's earlier point, have taken care of or significantly degraded a real threat that's been a real threat for a long time.
- [41:40]
C
Well, I do think the President would, you know, if you were to pose that question to him. And I don't mean to speak for the President, but based on his statements, I think he would wholesale reject the Pottery Barn idea, that he would say, it's not our business. And it goes back to Jonah's point about some of the comments he made about Iraq and Afghanistan. And then more specifically, in a few of his lucid moments, I guess the Secretary of Defense has eschewed that idea, saying, no more nation building. We're not doing that. We're doing precise, lethal, all his bro y catchphrases. I think that the model that the President should be worried about is Libya. That we may not have sought to do regime change. It may have started out as R2P, responsibility to protect. It resulted in the deposing of Gaddafi and there was no aftermath or plan afterwards. We had the celebrations. Hillary Clinton saying we came, he saw, he died is not too dissimilar than watching the Secretary of Defense yesterday morning talking about quiet death. Right. They're the same high fives in the short term, but what comes afterwards will be viewed as the responsibility of those who caused it to happen. And one of the things we're doing, while I support unconventional warfare and the use by, with and through proxy forces, there is the potential, if we try to use, as has been reported, Kurdish forces or ethnic minorities exclusively to fracture Persian society, that can have effects that we're not necessarily anticipating unless we're going to use those in some kind of limited fashion. So I do think, number one, the President rejects the idea that he's responsible for the aftermath, but someone who is paying attention to history and has his ear should be advising him that he will be held responsible for what happens if the regime collapses and there is no follow on plan to help shepherd order in the aftermath.
- [43:31]
B
Well, and to build on the Libya point, which I'm so glad you raised, Mike. Yeah, there's a difference here that in Libya we actually thought we had some local allied forces. There were. This was an active civil war with ground forces on either side. And we were intervening on essentially one side of a civil war. And quote, our team won, but our team wasn't that much of a team. It wasn't really ours to begin with. So the hour and the team were kind of both off and it turned into this chaotic situation which helped contribute to the migrant crisis which is destabilizing Europe. And so, you know, you had the migrant crisis from the Syrian civil war which destabilizes Europe. You have the migrant crisis From Libya, which destabilizes Europe, can we handle another massive migrant crisis? If there is a civil war in Iran, is that something the world is ready to handle? I mean, so again, when you go back to the why and the why now, we didn't talk a whole lot about the why not. Has it just actually been the case that for decade after decade American presidents have been just feckless and weak compared to Donald Trump? Or have they considered the why and the why not and on balance, determined that the why not was the stronger case? And I would say there's a couple of compelling reasons why that may have been right, like time will tell. But a couple of the compelling reasons are, as we've learned, you can't really dictate outcomes unless you have really kind of two circumstances. One, sufficient force to topple a regime and replace it and maintain that replaced and protect that replaced regime. So maintain and replace. We thought we had enough forces when we went into Iraq. We didn't have the right force structure or strategy until the surge. The other alternatives, if you don't want to go all the way that far where you actually are in position to dictate the outcome, well, then you have to compromise with a treaty. And the compromise with the treaty carries cost with it. Cost of the compromise, similar, like dictating outcomes comes with the cost of dictating the outcomes. What Trump is trying to do here is try to generate a positive outcome without putting himself in control of the process. It's like taking a bat to a Jenga tower and then really hoping that whatever is constructed in the aftermath is something in our interest, in our favor. But we're not going to be constructing it. It's good luck, guys. And that third way, that's why I compared that to mowing the lawn, but it might even be more dramatic than that. It's creating a vacuum. It's creating a vacuum. And I can see ways that will go well. And I can see a lot of ways it would go well.
- [46:11]
C
We tend to assess risk in two different ways in military operations. Risk to force and risk to mission. And you're supposed to kind of balance both. But if you diminish risk to force, in other words, make it less likely that American troops are going to be in harm's way, you also lessen control in the outcome. Right? You're using a little bit of. You're seeding some of your decision making to factors outside your control. And we saw this, the Obama administration did this in the early days of OIR inherent resolve. The fight against isis, where US Forces were held so far in reserve or in the rear, that we had limited ability to influence the outcome of our Iraqi and Syrian partners. And in his defense, President Trump and Secretary Mattis kind of loosened that and allowed some of the created greater control, but it increased risk to force by trying to have it both ways. It's a recipe for lessening control and having less understanding of what the outcome that you're going to bring about is. Also.
- [47:04]
D
So I want to be clear, I'm not being a hypocrite on this. I said earlier that they've offered every possible explanation and they've offered all these different goals, and people get to pick the ones that they think are damning, whether they're true or not. I may be wrong, right? I think I probably am wrong to some extent. But you can construct the case that they went into this, given just some of the things Trump has said. You can make the case that, that they went into this thinking that this was going to be another Venezuela and they're going to get some puppet up there, some Delsey Rodriguez, and then they were going to get the oil. And the reason why I say that is, first of all, you can go back, the quotes from Trump about taking the oil go back a really long way. We stopped hearing about it. We didn't hear anything about it in the operation with all the stuff about blowing up boats off Venezuela. And then when it was successful, it turned out, oh, it was always all about the oil. Right. So there's that part of it. But then Trump has said, I think in the New York Times interview, that their model is sort of like the Venezuela thing, which again, Venezuela was not regime change. And if you are talking about putting, I mean, it is amazing, the great snipe hunt for the moderate ayatollahs, which has basically been on the background on my TV since I was 10 years old, they were gonna find some moderate, right, that they were gonna put in there who could be a pliant, cooperative person. And he actually said in one of the interviews that they were thinking of doing this or he intimated that they were thinking about doing this. But the problem is they killed all of the people they thought they might be able to work with. And so, first of all, the Venezuela model is not regime change. And when you go around talking about how you're doing regime change, when you're not doing regime change, that has all sorts of knock on consequences. How are the Saudis gonna feel about that? How are the Israelis gonna feel about that? Right. The way that they went all in on this, okay, we're finally doing this. And then he's like, nah, not really. We're actually gonna find Khamenei's son. He's gonna learn his lesson, and he's gonna. I had a great conversation with him. He's gonna be great. He's gonna be great. He's just like Delsey. But moreover, throughout Europe, throughout America, there are some truly wonderful, courageous human rights organizations and groups that have been cheering all of this because they thought we were finally liberating the Iranian people. There could be a massive political blowback if Trump cuts and runs, leaves the Ayatollah regime, essentially, the revolutionary regime, essentially intact, although probably more answerable to the Republican Guard. I think, ultimately, whatever this ends up looking like, if it's not democracy, it's going to be basically a military dictatorship instead of clerical dictatorship, at least in fact, maybe not in appearance, but if they didn't have a plan about getting Americans out of Dubai, the idea that they had a plan to deal with the political blowback for a bunch of our European ally governments, for Americans who thought that we were doing something great, if they start hanging people from construction cranes a year after all of this, I mean, there's just a whole bunch of ifs that just don't know, but they don't necessarily all look great.
- [50:20]
B
I remember April 9, 2003, like it was yesterday. And that was when the statue was toppled in Baghdad. People were celebrating, and you had, at that moment in time, a lot more reason to be optimistic about the future than you have right now in Iran, because we had about 180,000 troops on the ground. We had a lot more ability to dictate the outcomes that followed. The Iraqi regime had seemed to just melt away. Like, just melt away. And so there was a lot more reason to be optimistic about the outcome there, you know, and then many years later, Mike and I are over there,
- [50:54]
C
and I was there on April 9th.
- [50:56]
B
You were there on April 9th? Yeah. Mike was there a lot. A lot more and more often than I was, certainly. But April 9th was the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. And the enemy always gets a vote. And one, just last thing I want to say. When you start pushing violently at strategic parts of the world, other great powers have interest there. And I really, over time, if you're talking about seriously diminished natural, you know, liquefied natural gas going to China, if China starts to see its self interest being impacted here, then how do they insert themselves into this in A way that serves their interest. I just don't think we're at a point where China looks at us and is super intimidated by us. I don't think that they're in that position.
- [51:40]
A
We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. I mean, I think, David, you touched on one of the really central questions in this what next discussion. If the Trump administration pursues something along the lines of the Venezuela model. And you know, as we pointed out, the president himself said, yeah, there were some people we had identified as folks we might be able to work with. They're all dead now. You know, we try to find sort of friendly factions or these elusive moderate ayatollahs Jonah mentioned. How will the Iranian people regard that? It seems to me, you know, this is an Iranian populace that has just watched this regime slaughter 30 plus thousand of its own people within the last two months. On top of the brutality of the regime toward its people going back decades, is it really the case that the Iranians are going to be happy after Donald Trump's promises, after suggestions that he will eliminate the regime? Are they going to be happy with a regime that doesn't present quite as great a threat to the United States but presents every bit as great a threat to the Iranian people? David,
- [52:59]
B
I mean, these are great questions. I will tell you one thing that really doesn't help us with the Iranian people is if we bombed and still being investigated, but it's looking more and more like we actually did hit that girl school, which is that's one of the worst civilian casualty incidents in a generation. It's horrifying. Horrifying. And the longer you bomb, the more you destroy. And the longer you're bombing, even with precision weapons and built up areas, the more you're destroying the infrastructure of the society. Let's not forget that authoritarian governments are very good at using external attack to rally support. And if you create a situation in which the regime, the dissidents to the regime feel disappointed, like there is not actually help coming other than the non stop rain of bombs, then I do wonder if this authoritarian regime can follow the Stalin playbook, can follow, heck, their own playbook from the Iran Iraq war where they really use the attack by Iraq to solidify the backing for the regime. I do wonder how much they will do that. And if they do have that support, we know they're willing to sacrifice as many lives as they need to sacrifice here. And very much like say Stalin in the, you Know, in World War II, he was willing to sacrifice whatever, North Korea willing to sacrifice whatever. And I don't think that has fully sunk in with us quite yet. And so I do worry about backlash. But I think at the time being there are regime, there are dissidents, especially in Tehran, who I think would leap in an opportunity to try to replace the regime. But I also think that we don't need to make a mistake and think that the regime is universally loathed everywhere, decade after decade. There are definite elements of this society that still really like this Islamic fundamentalist regime. And many of them really don't like the urban educated. You know, some of these urban educated dissidents. You know, it's a dynamic that reminds me a bit of like Tiananmen Square in 1989. You had a lot of the educated younger protesters encountering people, the Chinese army, who are coming from all over the country and aren't necessarily down with the same issues and are not necessarily don't have their trust in the regime shaken. And so this is just a lot more complicated than liberating France in 1944. It's much more complicated than that.
- [55:27]
A
We've decided today that not worth your time is in fact, not worth our time. And I want to end with an exit question. President Trump has said that this war, non war, might last four to five weeks. Starting with you, Jonah, as you look forward to where we might be in four to five weeks, what's a good scenario? What's a scenario in which we should be happy about this and optimistic about the direction it's going and what should we be looking for that might make us really nervous that this could spiral and that some of the outcomes we've discussed here today might be more likely than not.
- [56:06]
D
So you're talking about on the merits rather than politically, right?
- [56:09]
A
Yes.
- [56:11]
D
So on the merits, not a lot more American casualties would be really great thing. And that's possible. I mean, we've been pretty dour here. But like we should give credit, the American military has operated amazingly and has made, you know, I do not like the chess thump thing from Pete Hegseth, but the basic point that as a military operation, this has been really astoundingly well executed so far. And whatever shortcomings it has are political ones imposed on it. And I think the best plausible scenario, I mean, the best possible scenario is regime is chased out. You know, they're all put on trial democracy, you know, Iran becomes aligned with Israel and the west and everything's hunky dory putting the hunky dory one aside, I think five weeks, the Trump administration finds a bunch of people in the IRGC who are not necessarily religious fanatics and are interested in briefcases full of cash in a villa in Switzerland, and they agreed to switch sides and flip. And so the infrastructure of repression, which is less religious than some people think, goes away. Right. And the besieged gets put down and whatever. And there's something like a stable transitional government, whether it's Pahlavi or somebody else going in as a symbol. I'm not a huge Pahlavi fan, but, you know, possible. And it looks like we got in. The oil starts flowing relatively quickly, and there's not a lot of terrorism in the short term. David's point is there are some people who are now working on a plan for five years from now, and we should just think about that. But something like that. What is a really bad case scenario is we give a bunch of weapons to the Kurds. I'm a bit of a Kurdophile. I like the Kurds. But Turkey says, are you frigging kidding me? You're going to arm the Kurds? I hate the Kurds. Right. Or you get something like a real civil war in Iran. You get some terrorist operation or military operation that makes reopening the Straits of Hormuz a major engineering endeavor. I could see, you know, there's dirty bomb stuff. We know where the plutonium is and all that kind of thing. So, I mean, I don't know that Iran implodes in five weeks or could implode in five weeks in the way I'm describing, but I think you have to have a concern about that. And then there's just a lot of stuff in the middle. One other thing I just think is really worth, as a political matter, mentioning, and I'll talk more about it on the Remnant. But Trump is often given these opportunities to save himself. Events come in that rescue him from himself. The Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs under IPA were garbage. And rather than say, ah, I don't have to do this terrorist stuff anymore, he said, all right, I'm going to take this other law that doesn't apply and raise, you know, drop huge tariffs at a moment where everyone's talking about affordability, he has to talk about how he's raising taxes on Americans and making things more expensive again. Similarly, if you were a real Nixonian mastermind, the scenario, and truly cynical and evil in a lot of ways, the scenario you would most want is for Democrats to win the argument about the war powers resolution and cut off the war prematurely, so that when the chaos unfolds in Iran, you get to say, we were stabbed in the back by these people who don't care about American security, who left the Iranians to get massacred. We were fighting for freedom and democracy and cheap oil and all the good things. And these San Francisco Democrats screwed us just like they did with making us bug out in Vietnam. And that would be a brilliant, evil, but brilliant argument going into the midterms. There's just no chance that Trump would seize on that kind of opportunity precisely because he just hates the idea that Congress can tell him to do anything.
- [60:17]
A
Mike, same question to you.
- [60:20]
C
So I think Jonah covered a lot of the things, a lot of the possible outcomes that I think are within the field of view. One thing I think that we have to consider is four to five weeks from now, we could have accomplished and are probably very likely on pace to accomplish those first two goals that the White House laid out, destroyed their missile capability, hopefully with Ukrainian help, defeated the shahed drone threat and have put the Iranian navy at the bottom of the Persian Gulf. At that point in time, we run out of targets on those two lists and are just making the rubble bounce. And we are trying to exert pain, to cause coercive pressure for them to decide something. But they haven't done that. They haven't agreed to that. So then what is the next lever we go to, or what are the terms that we accept? Where does the campaign shift if we have destroyed those first two capabilities, but they haven't agreed to the last two objectives that we've asked for? One other thing I'll point out about the Kurdish course of action. As Jonah pointed out, our Turkish allies will never pass up an opportunity to create dilemmas for us and act as our best frenemies when working with the Kurds. And we should remember that President Trump lost his first secretary of defense over this very issue when he resigned in protest after Trump withdrew support for our Syrian Kurdish partners. And there was the Turkish invasion in northern Syria, which caused us problems for CENTCOM when I was there. So that might be a viable option. But if we're not thinking through how we're going to manage the Turkish willingness to interdict and cause problems for us and what Turkish or Kurdish involvement in a Iranian revolution looks like and how it's tied into a larger framework, we're just inviting more chaos that the president's going to have to deal with later.
- [62:05]
A
I think we can expect to hear a lot more from Turkey in the Coming weeks. David, final word to you.
- [62:11]
B
Yeah. You know, when I'm. When I think about what might unfold in front of us, I am reminded, and not in a good way, of 1991 and the aftermath of Desert Storm. So if you look at what we did to Iraq in 1991, it is orders of magnitude more damage to the. The Iraqi military, Orders of magnitude more casualties inflicted on the Iraqi military. We had Gulf War, ceasefire, accords. We had no fly zones. We had all of this. We had absolutely hammered the Iraqi military. And then what happens? There's a perception of a. Enough of a power vacuum for an uprising. An uprising occurs, Shia uprising, Kurdish uprising, and it is put down in a humanitarian disaster of absolutely horrifying proportions. Just horrifying. There was no appetite in America for us to go in and physically invade Iraq to protect these Kurdish and Shia protesters. It was horrific. Now, finally, we had no fly zones. We were able to finally protect some Kurds and all of that. But think about between 91 and 2003 and the invasion. Saddam was able to do a lot of bad stuff in those 12 years again after having a much worse defeat inflicted on him than so far we have done to the Iranians so far. And so that's a very recent reminder of that. You can accomplish a military mission. And I think desert, you know, pushing Saddam out of Kuwait was vital. We had to do it. Absolutely had to do it. But you accomplish a military mission, you do inflict massive amounts of damage on an enemy, only for him to turn around and slaughter people at a scale that was horrific, and then continue to use whatever remaining resources that he had to be a thorn in our side, including trying to kill a President of the United States, George H.W. bush, including becoming the primary financial supporter of the second intifada. And in Israel, including harboring terrorists, including not complying even though his WMD program wasn't what we thought it was, he wasn't complying with UN resolutions regarding his WMD program. And so this thing can turn even in the event of a significant military defeat, which Iran is suffering right now. Just a double exclamation point. What Mike and Joan have said, our military is very capable. It is performing its mission very capably. And I wish them nothing but continued success in their mission. But again, we've seen a similar kind of movie before, and we know that it can turn out very negatively when we're not controlling the outcome.
- [65:00]
C
If I could very quickly, just to David's point and to Jonah's earlier piece about blowback the results of the crackdown on the Shias and the Kurds resulted in Northern and Southern Watch. As David mentioned, we placed the forces, the air crews that were flying those no fly zones and those protection missions in Saudi Arabia. That was the inciting event in the fatwa and the declaration of war from Al Qaeda for why Al Qaeda was making war on us and led to September 11th. So everything traces back to that route of us failing to anticipate the crackdown on the Shias and the Kurds in 1991.
- [65:35]
A
And George H.W. bush had summoned those uprisings, explicitly called for them in much the same way that Donald Trump did in late December and early January. Thank you all for a terrific discussion. We will be talking about this quite a bit, obviously, as events proceed, and we will have you back in four or five weeks to revisit your answers here and to sort of check in on where we are. Thanks for joining us. If you like what we're doing here, there are three few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtabledispatch.com that's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure, thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.
- [66:39]
D
The wrongs we must right, the fights we must win, the future we must
- [66:45]
B
secure together for our nation.
- [66:48]
D
This is what's in front of us.
- [66:51]
B
This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.
- [66:58]
D
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- [67:27]
B
Terms apply.