Pod Save the World - Iran retaliates to the Soleimani strike

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Tommy and Ben talk about the fallout from Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. What do we know about Iran’s ballistic missile strikes on bases hosting U.S. troops in Iraq? How are the Iranian people responding? Why is Trump threatening to commit war crimes? Why does the rationale for the strike keep changing and what can Congress do to stop the war from escalating? Then they discuss Kim Jong Un’s announcement that North Korea will abandon constraints on its nuclear program and how climate change has led to catastrophic fires across Australia. Then Middle East expert and former Bush, Obama and Trump aide Brett McGurk joins to discuss when the Soleimani assassination means for our relationship with Iraq and our efforts to fight ISIS.

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. This is Tommy Vitor. So we have a couple pieces to this show today. Ben Rhodes and I recorded at a normal time at about 1 p.m. on Tuesday. And we talked about all the fallout from Trump's decision to assassinate an Iranian general named Qasem Soleimani. We talked about how the Iranian people were responding, why Trump is threatening to commit war crimes, why the rationale for the strike keeps changing, and what Congress can do to stop the war from escalating. We also talked about Kim Jong-un's, a that North Korea plans to abandon constraints on its nuclear program and how climate change has led to catastrophic fires across Australia. And then our guest today is the Middle East expert and former Bush Obama and Trump official named Brett McGurk, who talks about what the Soleimani assassination means for our relationship with the Iraqis and our efforts to fight ISIS. And then shortly after we finished, reports came in that Iran had retaliated and actually fired ballistic missiles from Iran at two. two bases where U.S. service members are living and serving in Iraq.

So what you are going to hear first is an updated conversation between me and Ben about that most recent news about Iran's retaliation. And then we'll go to the rest of the show, which frankly all is still relevant and all is important context to understand what's happening. And then you'll hear the Brett McGirt interview. One quick housekeeping item. We got some big news here, Crooked Media. The Wilderness is back for 2020 in season two.

Our friend, John Fabro, is going to look for the path to victory in 2020 by talking to voters and strategists and organizers and candidates and key battleground states that are going to decide the election. Check it out. The season one was fantastic. Season two should provide us a path forward for the 2020 elections. Listen to the wilderness today. The trailer is out and subscribe to the wilderness wherever you listen to your podcast. So here is Ben and I talking about this latest Iranian response.

Ben, it's 530 Pacific time in California right now, and we just learned that Iran fired more than two dozen ballistic missiles at two bases in Iraq where U.S. troops are currently operating. This is in response to the assassination of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Kuds Force former commander Kassam Soleimani, who was taken out by U.S. drone strike on Friday of last week. These bases are called al-Assad and Erbil. A few things worth point. out, you know, you probably heard before that U.S. bases in Iraq get targeted by a rocket or mortar fire. But what happened today is quite different. Ballistic missiles are far more accurate. They're far more lethal. They can have a bigger payload.

They're more technologically advanced. And this is also the first time I can remember since the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s that missiles have been fired at, you know, bases in Iraq or certainly a U.S. base from Iranian territory. So that's a significant development. According to Iranian news sources, Iran's Supreme Leader personally oversaw the operation. The IRGC put out a statement that said, quote, the fierce revenge by the Revolutionary Guard has begun. This happened sort of in the middle of a night Iraq time. There's some speculation that it happened at the exact same time as the Soleimani drone strike.

And so I guess we should say, like, you know, we're all praying and hoping that everybody was safe and sheltered. But, you know, this was absolutely predictable and what anyone who had studied Iraq, would have expected them to do. Yeah, Tommy, I mean, I think I'm I'm struck by a few things. First, for the Iranian government to launch ballistic missiles from their territory at U.S. military targets and to announce it in this fashion is quite a brazen response. This is not them acting through proxies. This is not them using Shia militia or Hezbollah to carry out reprisal attacks. So this is a significant act of war by Iran in retaliation to what was an act of war by the United States. And we're at a very dangerous precipice here because in addition to launching these attacks,

the Iranians have made all kinds of threats that if the U.S. responds to these ballistic missile strikes, that they will then take action against Israel, potentially against the UAE, against U.S. troops and other parts of the region. So, you know, we are really at the precipice here. And you're right. I mean, this is entirely predictable that there would be an Iranian response of some kind against U.S. military personnel or facilities in the region. And I would add that this isn't necessarily the end of the response,

even if the U.S. doesn't respond because then the Iranian proxies could still carry out attacks in the weeks to come. I just think that we have the available option of de-escalation here, of trying to open up a diplomatic channel, of trying to end this escalatory cycle. It's very obvious where that leads. It leads to we respond, they respond, we respond, they respond, and that will not end well for anybody. A war between the United States and Iran does not end well for anybody. And so right now I think we should be thinking about, obviously, the U.S. troops in harm's way, diplomats in the region, trying to protect them, secure those facilities, but frankly, I hope, try to find some way

to de-escalate this situation, because it's been obvious at every step down this road where escalation leads. It leads to right where we are today, which is life and death matters. You know, this is not a reality show. This is not, you know, Donald Trump showing how tough he is. This is whether or not people are going to die. And I hope that that type of thing. of reason and rationality prevails. Unfortunately, the two leaders that we're counting on are Hayatoa Kamenei and Donald Trump. Yeah. And look, I've been binging cable news and I know you've been on it the last couple hours and Twitter since this happened and it's making me really worried because this is not just about like coverage. You know, we all know that Donald Trump

takes his cues from TV coverage and if he thinks he looks weak or if he sees some fucking lunatic like Seb Gorka on Fox News saying that we should welcome the Iranian attack on American basis because, quote, now there can be no question that Iran is a threat to American national security? I mean, what, like, insane circular logic is that? I mean, I just, there, everyone is reflexively saying, oh, Iran just escalated. Trump must respond. No one is talking about de-escalation. And by the way, it doesn't help that our nation's chief diplomat is this belligerent ideological hack, Mike Pompeo, who is chomping at the bit for war. So, like, who, like, where is the channel? Who is starting talks to try to calm things down or help end this diplomatically?

My hope is that, you know, the U.S. military knows where this is going to go. And clearly part of the objective of the Iranians is to drive us out of Iraq. You know, this feels coordinated with the Iraqi parliamentary vote kicking us out, which Iran surely had something to do with, with the Iranian statements saying that the U.S. has to get out of the region and then this attack. And the U.S. military knows that an escalatory cycle would lead to a lot more lives lost. And so my hope is that the U.S. military steps in and prevails upon Trump that this is not the right course of action. I would say, you know, others will counsel like now is not a time to talk about these things. It is the time to talk about these things. Of course it is. I reject that categorically. The way in which this country gets into wars is that people, political leaders, bully people into silence and say, now, it's not the time to ask these questions. Now it's not the time to raise these criticisms. Well, look, Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump, all these guys have been taking one step after another, beating their chess on this maximum pressure campaign, pull out of the Iran deal,

pile sanctions on the Iranians, pile threats on the Iranians. This is where that leads. This is where that goes. This is why these people should not have ever been elected to be in the positions there in the first place. And again, I hope they sober up here and make the right decisions. But now is actually the time for people to be raising their voices. Because once this thing escalates further, every step, every step of escalation, it gets harder to deescalate. And so now's the time to kind of put an end to this cycle. Otherwise, who knows where it leads. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I totally agree with you. Now is the time to make the case that Trump's incompetence is what got us here. Trump's incompetence is putting troops at risk in Iraq right now. And the idea that he was some dove

as compared to Hillary Clinton that was written about during the campaign is absurd, was absurd then, and we need to dispel it because he runs around saying he's going to end wars in the Middle East while sending tens of thousands of more U.S. troops to the region.

And we just can't let him sell an image of himself that does not exist because that might mean that he gets to continue to make these decisions. Yeah. I mean, and the tragic reality is

this is, you know, out of our control. I mean, this is out of the control of the United States government. Who knows what the Iranians might do next? And so Trump is already having to confront the harsh reality that their real world consequences to the things he does. You know, I saw one report in the Times, Tommy, I think it was Maggie Haberman, that one of the reasons why Trump got so enamored of military strikes like the one that killed Qasem Soleimani is the lavish praise he got from pundits when he launched that strike into Syria, which, let's be

clear, accomplished nothing. Nothing. Syria did not stop at skimical weapons attacks. This is why this kind of reward cycle for war and for hawkish posturing is part of the problem. And right now, we need to give ourselves the opportunity to get off this escalation path with the Iranians. Otherwise, there's just going to be more loss of life and more harm done to U.S. interests.

Yeah. And just the last thing I want to point out is just how unbelievably awful. this is for the Iraqi people right now. I mean, they fought a horrific war against Iran for most of the 80s. They dealt with the Gulf War in the 90s. They dealt with sanctions. They dealt with Saddam Hussein's reign. And then the Iraq war has decimated their country from 2003 until today. And now they are literally stuck in the middle of a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran. Yeah. And we should note that there are many Iraqi troops serving on that base alongside American troops and other coalition troops. and those Iraqi troops laid down their lives in the fight against ISIS so that ISIS couldn't come to the United States and attack us.

And so we shouldn't just be praying for American troops. We should be praying for the Iraqi troops who've already suffered so much in this. And I hope and pray that there's no Iraqi loss of life here either or other coalition partners. I mean, Trump has put a lot of people at risk. And obviously the Iranians have put a lot of people. at risk. And this needs to stop because it's just going to drag in more people. Because the way the Iranians respond, it's Iraq now. It could be other countries later. It could be Lebanon. It could be Israel. It could be Saudi Arabia. It could be the UAE. This is potentially a very complicated,

widespread conflict that could morph into terrorist attacks and other types of actions in different countries. It's time to hit the brakes. Yeah, time to hit the brakes. Now, I should just say that we don't We don't know, as of right now, if there are any reported casualties. It's not worth repeating the rumors that are out there about either U.S. or Iraqi casualties. But, you know, we hope everybody's safe. I think that's sort of it for this update portion, but definitely stick around because we are going to talk about the reaction from the Iranian people, what this means for our relationship with the Iraqi government, what it means for the fight against ISIS. So a lot of really important pieces of this puzzle yet to be discussed.

So Soleimani, as we discussed, was a lot of the war. leader of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Kud's force. He was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike outside of the Baghdad airport last week. Over the weekend, in response, hundreds of thousands of Iranians came out into the streets to mourn Soleimani's death. It's been worth noting that a few weeks ago, thousands of Iranians were in the streets protesting the regime. And Trump officials were cheering them on and hoping it would lead to a regime change. But the strike on Soleimani seems to have united the country against the United States, including more moderate citizens. I was listening to an NPR reporter talk about interviewing a woman who was a travel agent who said,

I never come out to these things, but they killed Soleimani. It harmed our pride. The New York Times reported that people were chanting, revenge, revenge, and quote, no more negotiations. It's time for battle. That doesn't bode well for future peace talks. Tragically, there are reports that more than 50 mourners were killed in a stampede at Soleimani's funeral in his hometown, 200 injured.

Obviously, no one wants innocent people hurt like that. That's awful. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that another. other, 5,000 sailors and Marines have been deployed, which means we've sent an additional 10,000 troops since last week, last week. Iranian leaders vowed revenge, and they vowed to respond directly by attacking U.S. military sites. Trump has threatened to target Iranian cultural sites in response, which is a war crime.

The Iraqi parliament voted to expel us from the country. Trump threatened to sanction Iraq in response. Yes, I said Iraq. He threatened to sanction Iraq. and he demanded that they pay us for the bases we used to invade and occupy their country. So very cool. Ben, let's take this piece by piece. So I guess maybe we start with the Iranian reaction from the Iranian people.

So again, like the Trump administration's so-called maximum pressure strategy of sanctions and diplomatic isolations was designed to get to negotiations that they said would lead to a stronger Iran nuclear agreement than what Obama got because everything is about Obama. Yeah. But when you assassinate their leaders and you threaten to blow out a country's cultural sites, it turns out that people don't like that. And you have average people then chanting it's time for battle. So I'm trying to figure out. Do you think these guys, like, didn't understand what the response would be like in Iran,

or they just wanted to kill Soleimani so badly that they didn't care? Because there's no doubt that we've set back any diplomatic efforts indefinitely. Yeah. No, and I'd add to your list that Iran announced that they were no longer going to abide. Oh, my God. any of the limits under the nuclear deal, which, you know. Please elaborate on that. I cannot believe I forgot that. No, no, no, no. Well, so much. But, you know, so, you know, we've seen very concrete consequences already. You know, the Iraqi

vote to expel our presence, the suspension of counter ISIS activities, and the Iranian government coming on saying that they will no longer abide by any of the limits under the Iran nuclear agreement, which means we're back in a place where Iran is marching steadily towards the nuclear weapon because those limits restricted the centrifuges they could operate, the nuclear, you know, the stockpile that they could accumulate in all manner of activities related to their nuclear program. You know, I think on the Iran question, you know, because of this strike, Soleimani, it's both the importance that he had as a figure, but also he was kind of a hero. Even people who didn't like necessarily everything about the hardline factions in the Iranian

government, Soleimani was seen as this guy. who put himself at risk to defend the nation, a lot of hagiography of him back in Iran. He had a good PR guy. Yeah. And so this was like a legit, I mean, there were millions of people in the streets. And, you know, I saw some of the armchair Iran experts in the U.S. You know, say, well, they were probably forced out in the street. You cannot get that scale of a reaction without there being something genuine behind it.

And so I think what you've seen is that that consolidates Iranian politics around a hard-line approach, which basically means the negotiations. there's not going to be another nuclear deal with Trump, right? So stated objective of this policy, maximum pressure that they call it, has failed. Like they left the nuclear deal, tried to ratchet up the pressure, ended up killing Soleimani, and now Iran is out of the nuclear deal and will not negotiate with Donald Trump. There's no way that they're going to negotiate with Donald Trump. And so their policy has failed. And the only question is what comes after this. And I think that we cannot underestimate the Iranian response because the government is not.

being cautious in what they're saying. They are vowing revenge. They're vowing to attack U.S. military facilities. They wouldn't say these things and put themselves that far on the limb without doing them. And if you look at the public, you know, anybody who's studied Iran or knows an Iranian it's a very, very proud nation and a very, very sovereignty conscious nation. And so I do think that even moderates or, you know, people in the Iranian society who have beef with the government, they don't like this. And not only do they not like it, they want to see their government respond. And so I think it does indicate that there is a political imperative in Iran now to respond. And when you set that chain of events off, you know, you have to be worried that essentially

we are all watching this play out. And the two people who can potentially de-escalate the situation are Ayatoll Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran and Donald Trump. And that doesn't give you a lot of faith. Yeah, and our current Secretary of State is more excited about war than almost anyone. So let's stick with this threat to bomb cultural sites for a second, not because you and I are, you know, some weenies who really want to go to museums and Tehran someday, because I think it tells you something very dark about our president. So the good news is that when asked if the U.S. military was prepared to strike Iranian cultural sites, the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, said the military would, quote, follow the laws of armed conflict, which is a nice way of saying no,

because there's just no question that bombing a mosque or some cultural site would be a war crime. The Hague Convention requires sparing buildings dedicated to religion or art or science and historical monuments as long as they're not being used as a weapons depot or something like that. And the War Crimes Act domestically makes it a felony under American law to violate the ban and it's punishable by up to life in prison or execution if you kill someone in the process. So again, I don't know that we fully internalized how scary and messed up it is. President of the United States openly and repeatedly talks about committing war crimes, right? During the campaign, he talked about bombing the shit out of like ISIS family members and things.

And waterboarding people. Yeah, and waterboarding people. He just pardoned a bunch of war criminals. And then, you know, his lackeys like Mike Pompeo try to pretend that he didn't say what he said. This literally happened on Fox News Sunday this weekend. But we all have eyes. We can read the tweets. And so destroying cultural sites, if that's what ISIS does, right?

There's no. That's exactly what they do. It's stupid. There's no, there's zero military advantage. gained by blowing up a church or a mosque, but it enrages the entire population and will make them want revenge. It just speaks to how stupid these guys are. Yeah, I mean, first of all, it's grossly offensive. Secondly, it probably helped consolidate the Iranian response. Totally. You know, these guys like to talk about winning over the Iranian public and separating them from the regime.

Well, threatening to bomb their cultural sites is a way to galvanize the Iranian nation to want to fight a war against the United States. And probably Shiites around the world. You know, you read my mind. I was going to say Shiites in Iraq, some of those cultural sites in Iran are very important to Shia Islam and would be cultural sites to Shia and Iraq too, right? So we're just expanding the list of enemies we have. I think the other thing that, you know, watching this, we wrote these rules, right? Like, remember in school, you learn about the Nuremberg trials where we prosecute the Nazis, you know, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague, like the United States are. America tried to set up a world after World War II where there were certain things that were

just completely out of bounds. And the fact that it is our president, who's now the one threatening war crimes, it shows you how far we fall under Trump. And what we lose that is intangible in terms of any claim whatsoever to moral leadership in the world now that Donald Trump is and has been president, you know, even after he's gone. And, you know, Tommy, it triggers for me the debates we used to have in the Obama administration about American exceptionalism, when the Republicans would claim that Obama didn't believe in American exceptionalism. Well, what the fuck is American exceptionalism if it doesn't mean that we don't commit war crimes, right? Torture. I mean, the whole point about being quote unquote exceptional is not just that we have

a military that can kill people. Any government in the world has a military that can kill people. It's that we do things a different way. And so we ascribe your different set of values. It's we abide by the law. And so we're watching in real time, you know, the loss of seven years worth of moral standing. And people shouldn't be surprised. If Trump says he's going to waterboard people and bomb the shit out of people in the campaign, well, when you end up in a real crisis,

this is what happens. This is why you don't elect someone like Trump in the first place. Yeah, and it makes our troops less safe. I mean, look, no question. Neither of us is arguing that the U.S. military has been perfect through the history of the country, right? I mean, there's well-known atrocities have happened in Vietnam, you know, torture and Iraq, right?

Abu Ghraib. But the reason you try to publicly reckon with those challenges and create rules and restrictions and punish people that did them is in part to show moral leadership and to try to prevent U.S. service members who are taking captive from getting treated that way in the future. Yeah. Yeah. And you're right to point out the pardon of essentially a Navy SEAL who had committed war crimes. That's the other side of this coin. It's the same story. Like you cannot understand Trump without understanding that the same guy is threatening to bomb cultural sites is the guy who thought it was okay to pardon somebody who his fellow Navy SEALs said had committed war crimes, had shot or killed, you know, young civilians opposed with corpses.

Trump thought that was okay. So, of course, he thinks it would be okay to bomb multiple sides. Get him out on the campaign trail. The other really troubling thing is how the explanation for the assassination of Soleimani has changed. So the White House, you know, their chief spokesman has been Mike Pompeo, the chief liar, has been Mike Pompeo, and he's been all over the map in explaining why they took out Soleimani. So the legal basis for the strike was that this was forced protection. That's very important to know.

They said there was an imminent threat against U.S. personnel in Iraq and that taking out Soleimani would disrupt it. But I have spoken with multiple people who have seen the classified rationale that was sent by the administration to Congress explaining this intelligence. And they say that there's nothing imminent about it. It's sort of standard stuff that you'd see about Soleimani in coordination with these Shia militia groups. So you've also seen Trump administration officials quoted in background in the newspaper saying the same thing. And there's also been no explanation of how targeting Soleimani specifically would disrupt that plotting, even if there was an imminent threat, right? I mean, he's not going to wear the suicide best. So again, that imminent argument is key to their legal basis for the strike.

And I do think we should care about the legal basis for the strike. Now, meanwhile, the Washington Post has reported that Mike Pompeo has been pushing Trump to take out Soleimani for months. The New York Times, even more troublingly, reported that the Soleimani strike was presented to Trump on a menu of potential response options because it was so. crazy that it made the other options seem reasonable. Now, that's some shitty work by DOD and the Joint Chiefs, if it's true, but we should be worried about it. And Pompeo has been lightly pressed on this intelligence case. It happened. It's a generous way of saying it. It happened on the Sunday shows that happened today. And he's just spinning like crazy. He's saying, well, Soleimani is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Syria and

destabilizing Lebanon and all these issues that are just not imminent threats. They're just building this like resume of bad actions against him that have nothing to do with their actual legal case. So Ben, like I guess here we are how many days, three four days after this thing started. And we still have no idea why they did it, but we do know that they're probably lying about the intelligence. Yeah. No, I feel confident sitting here, you know, on day five after the strike that this is bullshit. And I wouldn't say that likely because I've been in the White House and been in meetings where imminent threat intelligence was presented, if it was that clear cut, you wouldn't need five days to, you know, figure out your story to brief to Congress. Like, if you actually had intelligence that suggested

that if we don't do X, Y will happen, which is what the definition of an imminent threat is, that doesn't take five days to put together, right? And when they're asked about this question, not even press, when they're just asked, they'd give no detail whatsoever. They say, well, there was a threat against facilities or, well, look at who Soleimani is. No, that does not mean. you had an imminent threat. And the reason this matters is, yes, that would be the only plausible legal justification, but it's also the only plausible political justification for potentially starting a war and putting at risk our Iraq presence in Iranian nuclear program. So, you know, I think we have to learn a lesson from this because in the first couple of days, you know,

people are acting as if these guys are on the level. So it was like, you know, quoting Donald Trump saying this was to prevent a war, not to start one. quoting Mike Pompeo saying hundreds if not thousands of Americans would have been killed if we didn't take this. That is a lie, right? It can be true that Qasem Soleimani has traditionally supported armed proxies who have targeted and killed Americans. Absolutely true. It is an entirely different thing, though, to suggest that there is an imminent threat, and if we don't take him out, then Americans will be attacked. That appears to not be true.

And the best reporting I've seen on this from Rukmini Kalamaki, which, by the way, tracks what I've heard from some people who've gotten some of these briefings, is that there was no imminence involved whatsoever. There was a sense that the Iranians are aspiring to attack our facilities, which is not new, that Soleimani was involved in that, that he might be meeting with the Supreme Leader about something. That is not the same thing as saying it's an imminent threat. So what we have learned is that in a matter of huge, huge consequences, potentially war and peace, this administration is willing to lie just as brazenly as they lie about hurricanes or sharpies, you know, and that is troubling.

And frankly, should inform the media coverage of this way more than it does because these guys continue to get the benefit of the doubt. People continue to act like they're a normal administration, and frankly, they're not. Yeah. So to your point, there's been some amazing reporting about this strike against Soleimani in the days that followed, right? Rikmini Kalamaki's piece was great. Helene Cooper, another New York Times reporter, the Pentagon's done great work.

The Times and NPR and others have had reporters on the ground in Tehran. Good work is happening. I am here to beg the journalists that get access to Mike Pompeo to stop being so fucking deferential to him. Like Chuck Todd, Margaret Brennan, George Stephanopoulos, when he comes on their shows,

he is allowed to lie in filibuster and he is condescending and dismiss it to their question. And like, they need to just, burrow in on him about the questions of imminence. Or when he tells Chris Wallace, no Trump didn't tweet about bombing cultural sites, throw the thing up on the screen. Press him on that. I just don't get how he gets away with saying these things. Or he gets away with saying the potential retaliation from Iran would be a little noise. I mean, I talked about this with Chris Murphy on Potsave America, but like Mike Pompeo specifically would have called for Susan Rice's head if she said something

like that. And you know what? There probably would have been some justification for that because it's glib and dismissive in an absurd way to talk about the potential attack on Americans. It has been really troubling to see the way in which a lot of the media has handled this. There's no follow-up. I mean, I saw Pompeo this morning, you know, get asked a question of threat, and by the end of it, he's talking about how this is all Obama's fault and how Obama basically gave Iran a nuclear weapon and appeased the Iranians. and now they're getting tough. And it's like, the next question wasn't a follow-up to that.

What do you mean? You said Iran and nuclear deal that did X and Y and Z. What are you trying to accomplish? It was like, let's move on. And just letting these assertions put aside the criticism of Obama. Like, to your point, the assertions that, no, Donald Trump didn't say what you just saw a tape of him saying. And there's no pushback.

And it's just on to the next thing. And don't think that most Americans are reading past the headline or looking past the tape of the Secretary of State talking. Like, this is, like, not just a rock war redux. It's even worse. Like, in the Iraq war, at least you had a white house press secretary answering questions every day. Like, at least you had access to these officials. Trump and Pompeo, like, blithely go out there and make these categorically false statements. And that frames the way in which this story is being covered and these things are being discussed. And it's like we have learned nothing from 15 years. And the double standard, it's not like these reporters can't do. this during the Iran nuclear agreement. I mean, President Obama gave like a news conference. It went over an hour where he was pressed on the finite details of what the inspections regime were or how many centrifuges there would be. Like, has anybody even fucking asked Donald Trump what was the Iran nuclear agreement? Could he even verbalize? Could he, could he, could someone ask him to name

two cities inside of Iran? Like, it's actually relevant to just try to extract. from these people, whether they have any basic understanding of the war that we're about to get into or the country that we're about to invade. There's this kind of blanket deference given to Trump and Pompeo, even though they relentlessly lie to people. And I just don't understand what the incentive is, whether is the press afraid of these people? It's not like they can be treated any worse than they already are. Ben, I remember being pressed on why the U.S. military didn't capture Osama bin Laden. instead decided to kill him. And I'm not saying that to complain. That's how it should be. That's how it should be. No, I'm not complaining. Just do, do your, do your jobs. Let's talk about

a clear-cut case of someone where there was justification and legal authorization to, to take out a target. I mean, Osama bin Laden's your guy. Okay, so we're going to get into the Iraq piece of this more with our guest, Brett McGurk. But I do want to talk with you about this bizarre letter that was sent to the Iraqis and then leaked. So, uh, journalists. were just briefly stunned on Monday when the Washington Post published a letter from the commanding general of U.S. forces in Iraq to the Iraqi government that said that U.S. forces will be relocated to, quote, prepare for onward movement in that we, quote, respect your sovereign decision to order our departure. So people were like, holy shit, this is a big deal. At first,

you had anonymous defense officials trying to say that this was actually a notification that they'd be like moving a lot of materials around the country or something like that because the ISIS mission was paused. Then the chairman of the joint chief said the letter was a mistake. It was a draft that shouldn't have been sent. It doesn't mean we're pulling out. So, Ben, you know, we've all accidentally, you know, emailed the wrong person or forgot the BCC. I've sent statements with typos to literally tens of thousands of journalists on the White House press list. I can't remember anyone ever accidentally sending a letter to another country saying we're withdrawing troops. I mean, someone's either lying here or something is just deeply

broken in the policy process. Yeah. I mean, what's interesting about this whole episode is that a lot of the stuff that people have been kind of warning about the Trump administration, you know, their fitness to handle a crisis. We now see the, in reality, as they actually deal with the crisis. There's, there's two or three totally insane things that seem to happen every day, you know, sending a letter to a foreign government basically signaling that you're withdrawing for that country and then coming out and saying that you actually didn't mean to send that letter. is one of the, I can't think of any precedent for anything that crazy. Do you see Marco Rubio is blaming reporters for covering it?

What are you doing, Marco? By the way, it came out first in like the Shia Iraqi press. Like the Iranians had it. The AAH, one of those militia groups. The Iraqis got the letter and gave it right to the militia, right? But to step back, why is this happening? Normally you would have a very vigorous process to vet these types of communications. And we've probably bored some of the world those in talking about process and deputies committee meetings and principals committee meetings.

But this is why you have that. That matters. You have them so you make sure that every T is crossed and every I is dotted and everybody's on the same page. And maybe that someone has proofread the letter and put a signature on it because the letter didn't have a signature before someone hit send on a computer. Right? And so not only is there no process whatsoever. They don't seem to be coordinating inside the government. But also, let's look at the fact that we have a collection of amateurs and grifters in these positions, right?

I didn't really like the whole committee to save the world thing in the first couple of years where you had Mattis and Tillerson and all these people, Dina Powell and McMaster, leaking about how they're preventing all these horrible things from happening. The reality is, though, let's look at the team we've got in place dealing with this crisis. You've got Donald Trump, again, who probably couldn't find Iran on it. a map, you've got the national security advisor of the United States whose principal qualification for getting the job was it a year ago he was trying to get ASAP Rocky out of prison in Sweden. Like that's the guy who's coordinating this process, right? Then you've got a defense lobbyist at the defense department. Pompeo's buddy. Not exactly a strategist. He's someone who's focused

on how do you profit the most from running a defense company, right? It's been a pretty good week for defense stocks. And then you've got Mike Pompeo a profoundly dangerous idiologue. Yeah. And serial liar and more competent liar than Trump, which makes him that much more frightening. These are the people making these decisions. Is it any wonder that those people would produce this kind of chaotic process? Yeah. Like, look. And ASEP Rocky, let's be clear, did not get out of prison. The guy, O'Brien, like, it's not like he delivered on that one either. I mean, he did eventually. but after we went to the normal process here. Like Obama's 2009, Afghanistan Review,

I think he chaired 10 meetings. It took dozens of hours. Some people said it was overkill. But boy, at least we vetted some important decisions before they were made. I mean, it really is unconscionable for Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defense,

to just fly to Mara Lago and get Trump to sign off on killing Qasem Soleimani at the resort without talking through the possible ramifications. And again, like, this is why that we were all concerned that they seemingly hadn't prepared because, like, they clearly were not ready for the reaction among rank and file Iranians that happened. And also, there's reports that Iranian Americans are being stopped and profiled for questioning

at the border. That is a few steps from internment camps. Yeah. That is some serious, serious stuff. Yeah. These are Americans, right? And it gets back to, I think, what I believe, which is that Trump didn't know what he was doing when he killed Sylvia? He didn't know how serious the consequences would be. I think he saw an

option. He likes the idea that you kill a bad guy. And so he takes a strike. And nobody in that room was strong enough to say, actually, sir, we know that's on your options paper. But if you do that, there'll be all these consequences. You know, one of the theories around when the planes took off, you know, a few months ago, and he ordered a strike, planes took off, and then they turned around. One of the theories I heard is that General Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was a holdover, Obama appointee, got to Trump and said, do you? you know what you're doing? Do you know what you're starting here with the Iranians? Nobody clearly did that in this case. He has nobody around him will be like, sir, you have to stop.

Like you have to stop talking about war crimes. You have to stop tweeting threats. You frankly should not have taken the strike against Soleimani. But nobody around Trump is going to do that because the people left around him is this kind of gang of sycophants and idyllogues, right? And that, to me, Obama used to get this criticism. He's micromanaging the Pentagon. And he would say to us in private, if it comes to decisions, about life and death, like, I'm going to be all over it. I'm going to be... What you're elected to do? Yeah.

To your point about, you know, where's the offerant? Where's the diplomacy? So it's just worth pointing out that Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, was going to come to the U.S. to address a UN Security Council meeting about the Soleimani assassination. The Trump administration has blocked his ability to travel here. That violates an agreement that dates back to the founding of the U.N., the United Nations, that requires the U.S. to permit foreign officials into the U.S. for U.N. business. I'd also add that it just looks incredibly weak and pathetic to not let this guy come say his peace.

I mean, I'm no fan of Zarif, but like he can't speak to the United Nations. What precedent are we setting here? Yeah, we're so afraid of what he has to say, right, that he can't come. And I think the other thing it'll do is it'll totally isolate the United States. No other country would support this position. No. Because we get this enormous privilege of hosting the U.N. And so like everything we've done with Iran, like we're doing something that is meant to isolate them. Zerif can't come here.

But actually all we're doing is giving them the high ground in international public opinion and isolating ourselves. Yeah, I mean, and Europeans are already pissed to this. Okay. So there is some hope here. Okay. Democrats in Congress can have agency and they want to block President Trump from escalating the war with Iran. And there's a couple ways they can do it. One is with what's called a war powers resolution.

So a little background here. So the very 101 is the Constitution divided. the power to wage war between Congress and the president. Congress can declare war and they put together and they fund the armed forces. But the president under Article 2 is the commander chief of the armed forces. So Congress has not really lived up to its side of the bargain here. Congress hasn't actually declared war since we declared war in Romania in World War II. When Harry Truman sent troops into Korea in the 50s, he called it a police action. Millions of troops fought in Vietnam without a declaration, and that was true under Kennedy and Johnson. And so in 1970,

Congress passed the war power's resolution to try to claw back some of their authority. And one part of that resolution says that if the president deploys troops without congressional authorization, that deployment can only last 60 days and Congress can tell the president to end the operation before then. So Senator Tim Kane of Virginia put forward a bill that says Trump has introduced American forces into hostilities with Iran without authorization and he has to stop within 30 days if this bill has passed. I believe that's what Alyssa Slokin is going to put forward in the House. Bernie Sanders and Congressman Rokana introduced an even stronger bill that says the Congress

won't fund any offensive military action against Iran. That's stronger than the war power as resolution. It makes a stronger case in court. And that legislation, an identical version of that, had bipartisan support when it was attached to the NDAA, a big Pentagon funding bill back in the day and then got stripped in conference. Ben, I know you've worked directly with members of Congress. on this kind of legislation and ways to constrain Trump on Iran.

Can you talk through what you think is meaningful and important and what people should do about it if they're listening? Well, yeah, I mean, the reality is that Congress, you know, the Trump people are on very tenuous ground here legally because what you would normally do is, you know, any manner of terrorist organization that has any connection back to al-Qaeda has been generally tied to that authorization for the use of military force

that was passed after 9-11. There is no such possible connection to Iran. One of the reasons you might have seen Mike Pence with some crazy, totally false theory about how Iran was connected to the 9-11 attacks is they may be recognizing that they have no legal basis for what they're doing. And let's be clear,

not only have we killed Soleimani, but we've deployed almost 20,000 troops in response to the Iranian threat over the last year. So what is the legal basis? for what they're doing and why they're there. And so both of these vehicles get at that, one through just making clear that there is no legal authorization for them to be there, and they could extend the fight over that because Trump will disagree with that. And another to say, essentially, we will defund this. And I think what Democrats should do is press on both

of these fronts as hard as they can. There's not a legal basis, and that Congress won't fund it, and stay unified on that. And frankly, make the Republicans take vote. Because basically a vote against that is a vote for war with Iran. Like the Republicans de facto are authorizing or voting to authorize a war with Iran if they don't assert congressional privilege and authority in these matters. And frankly, a lot of those Republicans know they don't want to end up owning a war with Iran. And I think what people can do out there is demand that their members of Congress take action to prevent a war between the United States and Iran.

call your members of Congress and say, you support both of these efforts to, on the war powers front, to make clear that there's not authorization, and on what Bernie and Roe Conner are doing, to make clear, again, that there's no authorization, and frankly, there shouldn't be funding for any of these efforts. Because I think it will have a political consequence. You know, if people make clear that we're watching this and you don't have blank check authorization, it may seem like the politics are there right now for Trump, at least in the Republican Party. But we've seen in the Iraq war, like people don't want to own that. And so put the question and force the vote on these Republicans.

And I think you can either win over their support and then set up the battle with Trump or at least get those Republicans on the record, essentially voting de facto for war with Iran. Yeah. And look, these guys, the administration has been making, they've been arguing that somehow the Syria deployments were in part due to the need to check Iran. So I think you could have made a war power's argument back then. But the concern is that Trump might veto it. So that's why this funding issue is so important.

Ben, before we move on to North Korea, do you remember how mad conservatives got when Obama said it was the Iran nuclear deal or some sort of war with Iran? You remember how that was seen as so unfair and partisan and outrageous? And we're called anti-Semites. Yeah, anti-Semitic, yeah. Which was, that's the one that really got Obama's blood boiling, as he said to me at the time,

because the theory was that it was a trope about Jewish, influence and he remember him saying to me like well what would john bolt you know dick cheney these guys is not about religion it's about the fact that number one the same people who got us into war in iraq or agitating this on Iran but his basic point was if you have an iran nuclear deal in place it avoids a war if we pull out um it leaves you with no option other than an unconstrained iran pursuing a nuclear capacity or war and they went berserk Mitch mccanell i remember taking to the sunday shows their favorite form and saying how disingenuous and mean-spirited it was to suggest that there's only two options in nuclear deal or a war and that there was very clearly an alternative path.

Well, here we are. They pulled out of the nuclear deal. It started this pathway of escalation, tit for tat, tit for tat. And now, I would argue, we are in a war. It may not look like, this may not end up looking exactly like the Iraq War with a massive invasion. I hope it doesn't. Me too. But it's some, as Obama, actually, Obama's words are very well phrased, some form of war. Yep. We are certainly in some form of war.

Absolutely. Iran is going to respond, and then we're going to respond to that. And it could escalate in lots of different ways. And so he tragically was proven right. It was between the nuclear deal and some form of war. And I think it's fairly obvious which of those was a better place to be in. Yes. Yes, it was. Okay. Let's talk about North Korea. And again, I just can't believe we're just now getting to this topic. So in a new year speech, which I'm sure we all watched because it's more interesting the ball dropping, Kim Jong-un announced that North Korea would no longer rebound by its self-imposed moratorium on nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic

missile tests. They also threatened to show off a new strategic weapon sometime soon and, quote, shift to shocking actual action and make the U.S. quote, pay for the pains of the North Korean people. So that is very cool. Basically, Kim is, trying to pressure Trump into lifting sanctions on North Korea, even though he has taken no steps to denuclearize the country. Now, they haven't done, Kim hasn't done any of these things. Yes, he hasn't tested a nuke yet. He hasn't tested an ICBM yet, but he wants to increase the pressure. And Trump continues to pretend that everything is fine and that all can be overcome because they apparently have this relationship despite having a couple times. But as you and I have been

screaming for months, I mean, the results of the Singapore summit and this effort at diplomacy has been Kim getting 18 months to enrich nuclear materials, to make more nuclear weapons, to develop more missiles, and wait out the clock. I mean, he is fired. Kim has fired 27 short-range missiles since May of last year. That's amazing. That's extraordinary. And that freaks the shit out of the Japanese and the South Koreans. So Kim is baby stepping into, you know, this process of breaking fully from what was discussed at Singapore. But, you know, I also imagine he reads the news.

He knows about impeachment, sure, but he also knows that Trump, Kim. can't stomach a war with Iran and North Korea now. So I imagine he probably thinks he has even more leverage. He's got carte blanche. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, as we've repeated at infinitum, what on earth did that Singapore summit accomplish? I mean, they continue to build nuclear weapons, they continue to test missiles.

Literally, nothing changed other than the exchange of some beautiful letters that we know nothing about. And what does it mean in practice? You know, again, the fear was to go all the way back to the beginning, that North Korea could develop an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit the continental United States and the capacity to put a nuclear warhead on that missile. And that in order to develop that capacity, they, yes, we're going to keep building bombs, but they had to do some testing and perfect their technology.

And so when I hear Kim say things like we're going to have a new development, new strategic weapon, part of what I worry about is, is that what he's talking about? Is he talking about we're going to roll out an ICBM here? If it's something else, that's not exactly hardening either. If there's some other strategic weapon that they can develop that's worth our attention, that's not good either. At a minimum, what it shows is he's abiding by absolutely zero constraint based on the diplomacy with Trump.

And there seems to be no clear pathway to put this in some box. And as you say, you know, Kim now sees what happened to the country that signed a new deal with the United States. So in addition to seeing that Trump is distracted, can't take on more than one crisis at once, he's also seeing that like, okay, if I sign a nuclear deal and I abide by it, like the Iranians did, maybe two years or now, you'll be like killing my top general and, you know, threatening to destroy me, which is what Trump is, you know, involve my cultural side. So, you know, I think we should watch in the new year, like what Kim rolls out and whether it advances that objective of having an ICBM that can hit the United States.

Clearly, he's not going to denuclearize. Even if they can cobble together some form of half measure agreement, it's clearly not going to be what was promised in Singapore. Yeah. Okay. Last topic before we get to Brett McGirk. So there have been these really awful wildfires just raging in Australia for several months. They have burned an area larger than Switzerland.

Dozens of people are dead. I've seen estimates up to a half a billion animals killed, It's just tragic and horrific. The military has been deployed to try and get a handle on things most recently. But, I mean, the thing to know is that Australia's traditional fire season has barely started. A lot of this happened before the normal fire season. And these fires are unequivocally due to climate change. I mean, there have been weeks where the entire continent has averaged over 100 degrees per day with high winds.

You can imagine now that would spark a fire. And, you know, all the carbon that's being burned when these fires means that their yearly emissions will be doubled. what normally has for Australia. So that's going to further exacerbate climate change. So Australia's Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, initially handled this crisis by going on vacation to Hawaii, which is, yeah, no surprise since he got elected by campaigning against climate action. Ben, I can't help but think back to our conversation

with former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. We told us how much of Australia's media is controlled by Rupert Murdoch in mining interests and how they've combined forces to prevent action on climate change. maybe the scariest part of the whole thing, which was really well captured by Ben Wallace Wells in New York Magazine, is that an entire continent burning

and a crisis of this magnitude didn't shock the world that didn't motivate a response. It's just sort of status quo ante. So I just think, you know, the New York Times published a piece that lists organizations you can donate to to help out.

Folks could give it a look and then just remember to talk to your friends about climate change and vote on it. Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, obviously, you're really thinking about the people suffering through this in Australia. And, you know, I think the first thing is that like sometimes there'll be these massive weather events and we talk about them as if they're happening and then we say maybe that this is climate change.

Like this is and when the fires are out of control in California, that's climate change. Like we should be past the point where we're kind of getting to climate change in the second or third paragraph here. This is we're watching climate change. I think it shows that, frankly, a lot of times when there's a major threat out there of things like epidemic disease or even terrorism and stability, there's this kind of, you know, unspoken assumption probably that guides the actions of a lot of governments in the West that, well, this happens in, you know, other places. Well, no, like nobody is immune from climate change. It's happening in Australia, a highly advanced developed country. they can't stop these fires. And they're going to keep coming back.

I mean, and so I think we have to recognize that the climate change is not some future event that we're going to have to be managing. Like, it's happening right now and it's going to get worse. And frankly, the things we are seeing happening, like in Australia, are worse than the projections that people would have made a few years ago. The problem is growing faster than people thought. And because of what Trump has done and pulled out of Paris, if you look at the chart of global missions, they were finally reversed. It's a straight line up. And then after the Paris Agreement,

we finally saw a dip at the beginning of the Trump administration, right, before he could really have an impact on it. Now they're ticked back up, right? So we're moving in the wrong direction on this thing. Yeah, keeping the planet livable seems like a good policy. Yeah. And when we should be able to agree on, somehow it's harder to gain agreement on that than it is to go into wars in the Middle East, which is, again, not divorced from what Kevin Rudd said, right? There's a lot of media, a lot of money spent to make it that way. Yeah, that's right. Okay, when we come back, we'll have our interview with Brett McGirk.

On the line is Brett McGirk. He is served in senior positions under President Bush, Obama, and Trump. And he's dealt with various issues and crises in the Middle East, most recently serving as a special envoy to deal with a fight against ISIS. Brett, thank you so much for doing the show. Hey, thanks, Tommy. Thanks for having me. So we've been talking a lot about Trump's strike against Qasem Soleimani today. In response, the Iraqi parliament voted 170 to zero to expel U.S. troops from Iraq.

That vote is a little misleading since I believe that only Shiite lawmakers voted while some of the Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers didn't show up. I'm curious what you think that vote means or if U.S. troops get expelled from Iraq, what that would mean for U.S. interests. And if this seems to have exacerbated sectarian divides that already exist in the country as evidenced by this vote. Yeah, thanks. You know, when I first heard this news about Soleimani as someone who spent so much time out there and my colleagues of mine killed by Iranian-backed militias about a decade ago, it's important to recognize they hadn't really been shooting at us from 2011 until just a few months ago. So that's the key point to ask, well, why did that start happening again? But I felt a sense of real justice, right? That was the first reaction, the kind of gut reaction. The second reaction was this is going to require a massive diplomatic effort now to mitigate, you know, boomerang risk and backfire risk. And then the third thought was the Trump administration probably is totally ill-equipped to do that and, but kind of hope for the best. I think what we've seen over the last four or five days just demonstrates, this was clearly not

particularly well-gamed out or thought through. And I think the situation in Iraq is kind of the first, the first example. So it's fairly predictable. that the one thing Soleimani has always wanted. He wants us out of Iraq. He wants us out of Syria. He wants us out of the Middle East. That's like his dream, right? But the Iraqis want us there. And they invited us back in 2014 to help them with ISIS. And we built a pretty sustainable, it was designed to be a very long-term presence. We have about 5,000 American troops. It's not like the old Iraq war. A lot of folks put this whole thing together from 2003 till now. That's wrong. We left in 2011, came back in 2014, a very different. way. We're not fighting. We're not taking casualties. We're not spending that much money. We built a huge coalition to share the burdens. We have almost 20 countries with us in Iraq. And it was a very sustainable proposition really designed to last years because we trained the Iraqi security forces, which, while full of problems, were increasingly capable, increasingly confident, and most importantly, increasingly popular amongst the population and much more popular than some of these she militia groups

that Soleimani was supporting. So out of his death, right outside the international airport, which obviously is going to cause a massive reaction amongst the Iraqis, you had this move in the parliament. And it just seems that the administration really wasn't ready for this in terms of the diplomatic just blocking and tackling it takes to try to, number one, shut something like that off, and number two, deal with the aftermath. So I really, my heart goes out to Matt Tuller, our ambassador. are out there because he's trying to deal with this in a deaf way. But I can just picture it,

because it's eight hours ahead of Washington. He's probably asleep. He's waking up yesterday morning for a critical meeting with the prime minister in Baghdad. And lo and behold, President Trump, while he was asleep, says, first we're going to, yeah, we're going to attack cultural sites in Iran, which obviously causes a big reaction with populations out there. And secondly, we might sanction in the Iraqis even greater than Iran sanctions. And the Iraqi population remembers sanctions under Saddam. It is a really visceral issue there. So it didn't really set the tone for that critical meeting with the Iraqi prime minister.

So it's difficult, but look, I think I negotiated the 2014 exchange of diplomatic letters that allowed us to come back in. And Ben and the whole team was obviously part of that process, but I was out there and did that. So I know a lot about this. I just think everybody needs to try to, but this is asking too much. But in a crisis, you want to try to calm down. You want to try to buy time. You need someone to be in a leadership role to come in and say,

everybody, stop. Okay, we're going to speak with one voice. I think it has to be the ambassador out there to speak in terms of what the United States is saying to manage this very, this crisis point. And that's why yesterday with this letter and everything, which I'm sure we'll talk about, It has just been a total cell phone in terms of lack of coordination, lack of forethought, and a lack of process. Yeah, Brett, I don't know what you're talking about. I think it's a good idea to send a letter to a sovereign nation saying we're going to pull troops out of Iraq when we're actually not going to do that.

I think that was perfectly well thought through. But so before Ben, I talked to you about the ISIS effort. I mean, you're one of the few people I know. The other one would be Nick Razmussen, who served in senior national security roles under the Obama administration and other previous administrations and then stayed on with the Trump administration, you know, out of a sense of patriotic duty to try to, you know, complete the job. Can you just give us a little bit of a sense of what it's like in some of those meetings or in the room? Because, you know, when I think back to NSC meetings with President Obama or even at the lower level, the deputies level or the principal's

committee level when it was chaired by Tom Donnellin, there were lots of folks literally at the table every, you know, I think people accused Obama of actually thinking through policy options for too long and too much and dithering at times with some of the critiques you heard. And then you read about a decision made to take out Qasem Soleimani at the Mar-a-Lago pool side or wherever the hell they were. I mean, I'm just trying to understand how the railroad is getting run under this administration. So I was in there for the first two years, and I've been out for a year. So I resigned at the end of 2018. And it's kind of like every turn of the crank, it seems to get worse. So look at the transition point, on my set of issues, we had a pretty good transition, actually. And that's because we

had a good plan in place. We had a good strategy in place. And we had a lot of continuity. So I stayed in place, the entire military chain of command stayed in place. Mattis came in, who obviously, we all knew. Tillerson, when he got to state, is a pretty serious guy. Joe Dunford was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So we had a kind of a group that could continue to prosecute this very difficult military campaign through the transition. We did a strategic review for the first couple months that was coordinated through my office and through the intelligence community and everything. President Trump signed that out and we made some changes to the plan and kind of just executed. And the first year, I mean, we made an awful lot of progress.

We were executing the plan that was in place under Obama, carried forward under Trump with some adjustments. And it, you know, worked pretty well. I think we had some good personnel in place and things were moving. Now, that said, because we had a good plan in place, there wasn't that much need for process and coming back to the White House and things because we were moving out and executing. Things get complicated when Trump kind of weighs into things. So because you don't have a process, and this is what's dangerous. And I teach here at Stanford, you know, wartime decision making from Truman to Trump. And every administration gets things wrong.

It was like extremely difficult stuff. But in the best case, you have a process that connects to the president because he is the commander-in-chief. And what happens in the Trump administration is that Trump doesn't really pay attention to this stuff. So he tends to wade into it when it's in the news or he has to speak to a foreign leader. and what I've been experienced very up close over really the second half of 2018, is that despite a process that led to strategies and very maximalist strategies. I mean, I was always struck in the Trump administration, the national security process would produce incredibly maximalist goals, right?

In Syria, we are going to get all Iranians out of Syria. If you study Syria, you know, that's a pretty maximalist objective. We are also basically going to continue to try to get Assad out of power through the Geneva process. That's been going on for now almost a decade. And we're going to continue to pursue the enduring defeat of ISIS. Those are maximalist objectives. At the same time, the president is not giving us any more resources. He cut all of our, for example, stabilization funding, civilian funding for post-military operations in Raqa,

which is a major city in Syria, made very clear we're not getting any more military resources. So you have this massive gap between the stated objectives and the resources. And when you have a gap between your ends, ways, and means, as a kind of a first principle, a strategy, you're likely going to fail. And this is the case across the board. And so it ends up happening in Syria as a paradigm when a problem comes to Trump's desk. He says, well, why are we still in Syria? You know, he pulls everybody out. Iran is the same issue because in Iran, and there was a problem.

a debate in the administration about the wisdom of getting out of the JCPOA, right? Kind of consensus amongst the Trump cabinet that the JCPA wasn't the greatest agreement in the world, but a big debate about the consequences of just leaving it. And there are really two views. And one camp, a little more cautious, said, look, you know, as we know the Iranians, as we know they're likely to react, if we do this, we get out of the deal, cut off all of our diplomatic channels and do what they call maximum pressure, meaning throwing every sanction, trying to suffocate Iran's economy in the kitchen sink, Iran will fight back. And by their fighting back, we will be then sucked back into the Middle East, which is irreconcilable with the broad national security

strategy of President Trump, which he signed out, which says we want to reduce commitment to the Middle East and focus on great power competition against China and Russia. Right. So one camp was saying the benefits of getting out of the JCPOA do not outweigh the risks of our getting sucked deeper into the Middle East. There was another camp more optimistic that said, no, no, no. When the Iranians are under pressure, they're going to be forced to come to the table. They're going to be forced to basically draw back their so-called malign activity throughout the region, and we'll get an even better deal than Obama got. And for the first year, it looked like that more optimistic camp,

Maybe they were right, right? Iran really didn't react. But beginning of May of last year, I think it's been demonstrated now that the more cautious camp was right in terms of the reading of Iran. And so you basically have been pursuing this maximalist objective on Iran. I mean, Bolton says regime change. That kind of is what it is, because nobody can articulate what the Iranians are supposed to do to get out of this economic straitjacket. And so it's kind of a regime change type policy. That's about as maximalist as you can get with a president who is not fully committed to getting sucked into a major Middle East war. But since last May, we've now sent, it's now almost 20,000 additional American military personnel into the region. And then since just the last week, since the death of Soleimani, obviously this is now massively escalating.

And I know that nobody said to Trump when this policy began in the first quarter of 2018, Mr. President, here's where this might lead. Okay. This might lead two years from now. You might have 20,000 additional military forces and be on the cusp of a major war. So the assumptions were wrong. And now here we are. And they're trying to deal with this crisis. And I think the world is seeing that they really don't know what they're doing.

Brett, Ms. Ben, we obviously worked together as you were putting together that coalition in ISIS. And, you know, we're at this kind of precarious moment with respect to the fight against ISIS, where they've lost their territory. But as we've essentially left our positions in Syria, and we saw some ISIS fighters escape there, as there are huge kind of reconstruction challenges in places like Mosul and Iraq, you know, this is the kind of environment where we saw, we saw some ISIS fighters escape there. as there are huge kind of reconstruction challenges in places like Mosul and Iraq, you know, this is the kind of environment where you might see an ISIS seek to reemerge. And now we've seen since the strike against Qasem Soleimani, you know, an announcement that essentially counter-IS efforts are going to be paused inside of Iraq because we're focused more in protecting ourselves. NATO similarly pausing the training mission for the Iraqi security forces. I mean, what is the

risk of, you know, of that type of suspension of activities, you know, particularly if it becomes more permanent, if it becomes harder to operate inside of Iraq and Syria because of the fallout from the strike. In terms of U.S. national security and the threat from ISIS, what's the risk if we do lose the capacity to have a presence in that part of the world to go after ISIS, and we lose the cooperation of coalition partners who may not want their forces to be put at risk in a U.S. Iran conflict? Well, it would be quite disastrous. And this is where I have been encouraging, although not with any success, everybody,

someone has to, in the administration, say, we're going to calm down. And we're going to let Ambassador Tuler work through this. Because, and I negotiated the 2014 arrangements, I know there's not an easy, just automatic severance clause. I mean, there's a way to, there's waste of by time here. In the event, we are kicked out and we leave, and it's not just us. I mean, Ben, you remember, we specifically designed this to address the concerns about forever wars and ever. So this is not Iraq war. It's not Afghanistan war. It's a very limited objective, limited deployment with a massive coalition.

We have almost 20 countries with us in Iraq. Everything from Finland to New Zealand, Australia, UK, France, you name it. Denmark, Netherlands, all doing specific tasks and critical tasks and NATO. So let me just paint out if we leave. Okay, if we leave entirely, ISIS will reconstitute and it will reconstitute quite significantly. It wasn't very long ago when ISIS was launching, you know, 50 car bombs and suicide bombs a month in Baghdad, which is what just tears the society apart. Those networks can easily reconstitute, but right now there's almost none of that because we are keeping pressure on those networks together with the Iraqi security forces, which we've done a great job with. So if you take all that out, ISIS just has a vacuum that it will fill.

Secondly, Iran, our presence in Iraq, we're there for ISIS. That's our legal basis. That's what gives us a coalition. That's what gives us legality and legitimacy. but the fact of our being there also helps balance the tremendous influence and pernicious influence coming from Iran, particularly over the long term. So if you just leave, Iran also fills the vacuum in a major way. And then watch the Russians because I know the Russians well enough. They have been dying to get into Iraq. And Putin today, the Russians are offering to sell S-400 missile systems to the Iraqis. And if we leave, the Russians will fill in behind us immediately. So you're talking about if out of this crisis we are forced out or we decide to leave, it would be an irretrievable strategic moment in the Middle East that we'd be living with for a generation.

So it'd be a real disaster on multiple levels. So I hope that they can get beyond this period of heightened passions and intensity to try to get past the point in which we're we are being asked to depart because I think most Iraqis don't want us to depart, but it's incredibly tense right now. And those are the consequences if we go. We also wouldn't be able really to stay in Syria effectively, although at this point, Syria, given the Trump overnight a few months ago, gave up basically all of our position in Syria. It's hard to see us remaining there for the foreseeable future anyway. So it would unravel very fast. It's been amazing to see how quickly our position in Iraq and Syria, which was pretty strong. And it's not perfect. This is the Middle East.

You know, on a good day, it's a 60-40 proposition. But it was pretty good. It gave us a lot of access. It gave us a lot of influence. It gave us a lot of bargaining power at the diplomacy table if we chose to use it. And just over the last 13 months now, it is all at risk. And for those who say, well, our priority should not be ISIS, our priority should be Iran. Look, anyone who's worked in this part of the world for a long time has very strong feelings against the Iranians. But the ISIS mission is based upon congressional authorization from the 2001 AMF, which I know is a controversial thing. But ISIS is an al-Qaeda. There's no question of that. We have a big coalition, 80 countries, international legitimacy. We have a strong basis for being in the country with the consent of the host government.

It allows us to be there. If you shift your focus entirely to Iran and you do it in a clumsy way, you end up losing all that. And so then you have nothing. And I fear that that's where we're heading now. So one more question for me is, you know, listening to you talk. I remember when, you know, we would have sideline conversations sometimes after like a situation, room meeting or something. You know, you would talk about essentially, you know, having been through your experience in the Middle East, like at least being able to identify the absolute

core objective of protecting American lives, right? There's some limitations on what can be achieved in the Middle East, even if we certainly want to help move countries like Iraq in a positive direction, but something like counter ISIS is pretty clear cut. Now here we are. We're in this situation where you see drawdowns and troops in places where those troops are on the front line, trying to deal with that type of threat, you know, to American lives. And we saw it in Syria. We may be seeing in Iraq. We've heard that there may be redeployments out of Africa where there's some counterterrorism missions. But at the same time, as you point out, that's not exactly ending the wars or winding in our presence of the Middle East because there have been 20,000,

nearly 20,000 troops deployed to the Gulf region to deal with the increased intentions of Iran. But I'm wondering in that context, stepping back. As somebody who's spent a lot of time and effort and emotion in Iraq since 2004 in this region generally, you know, what is it like to see this kind of lurch towards a conflict with Iran and away from that kind of more narrowly targeted focus on counterterrorism? I mean, what does it say about where we are, you know, 17 years after the Iraq war started, that we're at this point where we appear to be, you know, essentially recalibrating American foreign policy from this focus on terrorists to this conflict with Iran that we have contributed to, like, an escalatory path on? Yeah, so I've, I mean, I first went to Iraq.

I got Tourag in January 2004, and I spent a year there. And what I found on the ground was totally different than what I had read about it coming in. So that was kind of a formative experience for me. I also realized that we really didn't have a strategy for dealing with the country that actually existed rather than the country that we would have hoped that existed before we went in. And it wasn't, in my view, until we did the surge, and I was a part of that in the Bush White House, that we kind of aligned our ends and means, although just to be at that point was a terrible. thing just given what the search took in terms of resources and casualties. So I am very focused in terms of realistic, clear, achievable objectives. And I tend to fight against a little bit, very grandiose end states, because my first question is, how are we going to achieve that? I think there's a

risk when President State, very ambitious end states that were really not prepared to deliver on. You and I have a talk about Assad-Muscoe, I think, is one of those. So that's just kind of a core view of mine. So when I was just doing a TV hit and I had Esper in my ear because Secretary of Defense Esper was given a press conference and he said, you know, we don't want a war with Iran, but we're prepared to finish one. And what does that mean? Iran is four times the size of Iraq, that's population three times as large.

That is the kind of time, I know Iran quite well, I know the war plans, I've seen the whole thing, so I know probably, you know, a lot. What are you talking about? And to finish a war with Iran, I really, that kind of loose talk is really worrisome. And like it or not, there is no congressional authorization for something like that against Iran. So it's amazing to see this. And since the Soleimani strike, it's just you can see the administration flailing for justifications. I mean, I think they should just keep it to self-defense. Self-defense, I think they can justify it under an Article 2 thing.

But Pompeo today is talking about Iran support for the Taliban as justification, even as, which makes no sense, because the Taliban, even, And even just last week or last month is taking credit for killing Americans. And Trump is inviting the Taliban to Camp David. And Zal, I think, is meeting the Taliban as we speak. So that doesn't make any sense. You have the vice president talking about ties between Soleimani and 9-11, which is ridiculous. So you just see the drum beats going and we're on an escalatory ladder.

And when you're on an escalatory ladder in a foreign policy crisis, one of the first rules is that we don't control this, right? I mean, other actors have the lever here, first and foremost, being Iran and decisions that will be made in Tehran. But secondly, you know, Soleimani had discipline over these proxy groups in the region and removing him the risk of these groups acting on their own, I think, is also quite high. So we are really in a major national security crisis and nobody knows where it's headed. and when the talk coming out of Secretary of Defense is that we're prepared to finish a war with Iran, I really, I don't know what that means. Sobering, but an important reminder of the stakes here. Brett, thank you so much for doing the show.

Yeah, thanks, Brett. It's a pleasure talking with you, and thanks for all you've done to build the CISISIS Coalition to date. Sure, guys. Happy to be on. Thank you. Pots of the World is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer.

thanks to our digital team Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.