B (83:32)
I mean, dude, this is such a fucking mess. This is such a mess, dude. I mean, this is just too ridiculous, dude. And the, you know, the thing is that a lot of people, you know, I've spent a long time at this point being against this war. Cuz this war has been telegraphed since, you know, the Bush administration wanted to do this shit. And at leave for like 15 years I've been publicly opposing this war. And one of the reasons why so many of us oppose this, and it's a shitty way to be vindicated, but is that, look, Iran is just not like any of the other opponents in the global war on terrorism. It's a different beast entirely. And you've seen this already only three weeks in. We never dealt with any of this with any of the other countries. You know what I mean? We had what the Pentagon calls escalation dominance in all of those other wars, which is all essentially like, it's just like meaning, like, if you do this, we do this, if you do that, like we're prepared for everything. It's kind of like escalation dominance is a lot like, you know, like in jiu jitsu, where you see really high level guys who basically put you in a position where you can make one of two choices in either way, you know, like, okay, you can, you can give me your back and I'll choke you, or you can push off me and I'll arm bar you and you know, like, whatever option you have, I'm going to get you. We don't have that with Iran. And Pentagon's been open about this since at least 2007. And the fact is that as we're already seeing, they can target ships in the Strait of Hormuz, they can target our assets, our bases, our embassies in the region, they can target our allies. And this is a big problem. And so like, it seems like Donald Trump got into this thinking it would be like Venezuela, it would be quick and bloodless and easy and he could claim victory. Now that it's not gone that way, it seems like he's kind of scrambling for what the off ramp is here. Now at least I give Donald Trump as angry as I am with him, like, at least it is true that he's looking for an off ramp, it seems like. And he did this with the 12 Day War, right? Like he started the war, he saw an off ramp and he took it. The problem here really is that, that this war changed the calculation from the Iranian perspective. And that much is clear so far. After 9, 11, all the countries in the Middle east and North Africa, all the ones essentially, they all waved the white flag, all of them. Saddam Hussein welcomed UN inspectors in. He was trying to do anything he could to not meet the fate that he ultimately met. Gaddafi denuclearized, got rid of chemical weapons, Bashar Al Assad got rid of all his chemical weapons, like they were all just like, we don't want it with you, you know, And Iran was very much the same way. They got into the jcpoa, they allowed an inspections regime in to come look at their nuclear facilities, all of that. And even up to the 12 Day War, when we dropped the bunker buster, as in Israel, bombed a whole bunch of regime targets, they still in their response, called ahead, made sure there'd be no U.S. troops there. They hit the side of a little base there and then they kind of went like they gave Trump an off ramp because they didn't want it, you know, they didn't want it. They don't want to die like Muammar Gaddafi. They don't want to, you know, have their country destroyed. So for self preservation reasons, they showed restraint. The calculation this time clearly already from the Iranians was that we can't do that again. We, we have to give you a bloody nose and a black eye. We have to make this cost as much as possible for you, otherwise you guys will just be back here in another five months doing it again. And they're probably right about that.
