government has a relationship with iranians, there are iranian-backed militias that are very powerful in iraq. those u.s. service members are on the front lines as targets, right? in any count of counterattack. well, this is why i don t quite understand the hastiness of the time frame. this is deadly serious business. i think if you want to put together a campaign, a strategy here against iran, what is your objective, number one. what are we trying to achieve. then you put together your resources and means of deploying them. it is unclear what we are trying to achieve against the iranians through this maximum pressure campaign, that s one. in this strike package, what are we trying to achieve and then how would we make sure that our personnel are protected after the repercussions of the strike. have we consulted with allies. have we done the groundwork to make sure that we will have escalation dominance to control the aftermath. it just seems like given the time frame there s no way
people in the administration that do. so you have to think who s advising mr. trump? this isn t a mysterious culturally perspective, it s the way a nation state would perceive a deal in the aftermath. when asked why didn t you meet with trump? meet with him for what? to do what? let s say we have the meeting, we shake hands and donald trump says, you know what, i agree with you. i ll lift these sanctions. then he goes off on air force one back to washington and he says to john bolton and mike pompeo, make the deal. and the iranians don t trust because they re hearing different things. you know, trump says there s no preconditions, i ll sit down and talk to the iranians any time and mike pompeo says when they start acting like a normal country. there is not the credibility for diplomacy, for peace, for de-escalation. it just doesn t exist. it s diplomatic malpractice actually what s happening right now. all right, thank you. that was illuminating. i appreciate it. next, what
the question then would be what would our response be? so it s important in making these deadly serious war and peace decisions is thinking through the consequences. one thing i don t understand on the timeline is the hastiness of this. there did not seem to be an imminent threat to u.s. personnel. there were not u.s. personnel in danger, so it s unclear even why the rushed timeline was apparent here over the last 24 hours. i am not someone who s spent my life or career at all making these sorts of calculations, presenting this advice to a president, but it strikes me that 150 iranians dead from u.s. strikes in response to the downing of unmanned drone would be an extremely serious escalation that would produce very serious results and consequences. i think there s no question. look, iran is a seriously problematic actor so we can all stipulate that. they have taken a series of provocations and reckless acts over the last month but you have
now he wants to sit down with them. last point is every action brings a reaction. what did they think would happen? and the bottom line is there are neocons who want war with iran. i m glad the president pulled back, but the whole thing is not gone. it s still there. no, it s not gone. and to the point is, chris, that all of the kind of zigzagging of trump about all of this all over the place actually matters tangibly to resolving things, because there is no credibility of any attempts for a deal or peace on the other side to the iranians because of who he is and how he has talked about this. there s also no sense of order, no sense of process. chris, you described it well at the top of the show. this is like a really bad action movie. you have a president who has made about 11,000 false or misleading claims during his
everything was hunky dory two years ago. they were abiding by the deal. they were buying boeings, airbus planes, mercedes-benz, all these businesses were going and the people were happy because the economy was getting back on track. there was a win-win so they were complying with the terms of the nuclear deal and it was good for the iranian economy. there were some tensions. we didn t like the fact they were supporting assad. they were doing other things the u.s. government didn t like. but we did like the fact that they were fighting isis in iraq but there was no crisis. no whatsoever. probably the low point for crisisness between those countries since the 79 revolution. absolutely. between 2015 and between president trump taking over and even the first six months of president trump being president, there was certainly no crisis. so everything was going well. we were abiding by this nuclear deal that we didn t like. we iranians didn t like because we had to give up a lot