Why Dave Smith sees the Iran war as a costly choice

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 20:04

   bottom line here is that donald trump launched a war of choice everybody kind of knows this was a war of choice even you guys i i don't even think you guys really argue with me on the 12-day war being a war of choice you just kind of would think it's a it's a higher stakes choice where there is a potential threat but you're not arguing like we absolutely had to go to war we did not have an option in the way that say like if canada bombed hawaii you'd say we have no choice but to respond to this or something like that right it's a little i'm putting making you an american well let me let me just say in my language and then you can carry on i would say that the 12 day war was the percentage play robert pape would disagree he would say you had no chance of taking the nuclear material i think that's a little certain yeah not being a military expert but

2. 20:51

   nonetheless you know i don't think these things are as predictable as people claim so to have a go at getting rid of their nuclear program is no bad thing very little cost you know in terms of lives and and all well no right i don't think anyone got killed right uh i don't know that it's killed that no i don't know if it's if it's clear that no no i think some iranians died i think some israelis might have died in in counter-strikes but you know they're both both those regimes are very hard to get like real information from no americans died and there certainly was very low civilian and by the way look when you fight a war you know people dying is tragic but it was part of the calculus and sometimes as a country you might want to go to war i mean that's probably where we get into disagreements but you might want to go to war to protect things that really matter to you

3. 21:35

   and sometimes, tragically, that means some of your people would die. But that didn't happen with the 12-dives. So to me, it was like, you roll the dice, you're not guaranteed to get a good result, but you haven't really lost a huge amount by doing it. So to me, it was the percentage play. So, okay, this is an interesting point. No, that's an interesting point. Let me say this, because I do think in the spirit of how we were saying about our last show and kind of the different camps in some ways that we tend to represent, I'll say this.

4. 22:01

   it's definitely true that there were some people who i admire very much um and and you know people like i think jeffrey sachs and john mearsheimer tucker carlson who i would say got a little bit out over their skis and kind of said with certainty in the 12-day war like if you do this iran will respond and they were kind of saying iran will respond more the way they did to this war and there was a clear very different calculation and a different response that iran had to the 12-day war and to this day now if you go back to 12-day war the big thing that people like me were arguing um is that that risk wasn't worth it like so so look it's kind of impossible to know on the 12-day war like if it's russian roulette and and i'm telling you don't put this bullet to your head and spin and you're going i like these odds i will concede you won

5. 22:52

   in the sense that you pulled it and it didn't blow your head off it didn't the the array The Iranians' calculation after the 12-day war was still to essentially go, we just really don't want it, man. And so they did this response where they gave advance notice, they hit an American base, nobody was hurt, so they could say, look, we did respond, we had to do something, we can save face with our own people, but enough, and Trump took the off-ramp.

6. 23:15

   Now, I even told you last year at the time, I gave Trump all the credit in the world for taking that off-ramp, but just to be clear, had the Iranians responded to the 12-day war, which every expert concedes they could have, way they did to this war we don't get out of the 12-day war easy it's it becomes this we get we get sucked into so so you're right in the sense that i will grant you now i would from my perspective i'd compare this more to like you had eight shots of whiskey and i told you not to get in your truck and drive home you didn't listen to me you did it but like you made it home in one piece there's a problem so you're right you could have stopped there you got away with it oh hold on hold on there's one thing that's worth i think saying is those both of those analogies that you're presenting

7. 23:54

   it as pure danger for no gain, right? So putting a gun to your head and playing Russian roulette, drinking eight shots of whiskey and driving home, the upside is very low on driving home. You could have taken a... Okay. There was an upside that you got rid of an imaginary nuclear weapon or whatever. Fine, fine. Listen, from my perspective, there isn't an upside. Okay, now you're being a little unfair, right? You're being caricaturist, which is fine.

8. 24:18

   And it's all fun and games. But let's just be real for a second. The potential upside, if you are concerned about Iran developing nuclear weapons, which a lot of people, I think, understandably are, is you had a chance to destroy their nuclear program, solving this giant problem with a very low risk, someone like me would argue, of escalation because you're not creating... I mean, the Robert Pate analysis of this, the reason they didn't react to that the way they have is it wasn't existential. Now you're making it existential. You are now at a point where they jane well clearly yes clearly the calculation was changed after the first strike of of this war where they took out the ayatollah and his family also new leadership was put in position so that changes things it's different people making you're killing the leaders which you weren't before sure

9. 25:04

   but also whoever right so the event of killing leaders and the emotional charge of attacking your country killing the family members of leaders i'd imagine that'd be a pretty emotional thing you know like if you killed even people who like are right now don't like obama and are saying like michelle obama has a dick on the internet or whatever even people like that if a foreign government murdered uh uh his girls you know who are adults now at this point but we knew them in america as these little girls if someone else murdered those girls that'd be a serious thing so that also just saying the person or the group of people making their own risk tolerance is different because they're different people and from everything i've read younger and seemingly more radical um but yes so the calculation changed there and they went hey if we don't give america

10. 25:46

    black eye this is existential whereas the calculation after the 12-day war was like if we give america a black eye that's existential like if we give him a black eye trump's going to respond in a crazy way therefore so that the 12-day war analysis is not russian roulette it's very high potential upside for relatively low risk the reason okay listen it's a separate argument i still agree that it's russian roulette but i i grant that making the example russian roulette presumes that i'm right about the fact that you didn't even get some very useful examples yes but but but the point i'm making is kind of separate and the point i'm making is that when you talk about this with with donald trump right when you when you launch this after you've already claimed that we get for we played russian roulette or a different example you come up with

11. 26:29

    where russian roulette shoots a tumor out of your brain there's a big upside to it but we play it we got away with it we've destroyed that but now we just want a little more like it's it's even presented as a choice from the beginning and in order to make it not a war of choice donald trump now has to tell again he gets a little cover because he's trump he's the most bombastic you know hyperbolic human has ever existed but donald trump has to tell the biggest whopper of a lie that absolutely no Nobody thinks is real. Literally, I've never seen a president lie us into war, and I've seen a lot of them, where no one believed the official story. No one believed. Right now, Donald Trump is saying, his latest, by the way, he just upped it the other day. It's not LA anymore. It's the world.

12. 27:22

    But Iran was two weeks away from a deliverable nuclear weapon, and they were about to destroy America. And that's why we had to go to war. Everyone knows it's a lie. No one believes it's true. You've launched this war that pretty much there was consensus in the country, we really don't want to fight any more of these stupid wars and he's actually admitted that yeah this is cost this has had costs it's driven costs up it's hurt the economy it's hurt our chances to win the midterms this is it's just such a remarkable moment where you have like he's literally telling you that for this thing that you don't really care about that you that we didn't need to do i'm sacrificing all the things that you put me in for which are to stop the democrats to get prices lower, to make America great again, drain the swamp, all this stuff.

13. 28:09

    We're sacrificing all of that. It's crazy to me. This is it. You guys are here in the United States of America