War itself is something to be avoided. And that may seem like a, you know, an obvious point, but it’s not like we — I mean, to be a little, you know, provocative on this, too. I think that post-9/11, because we’ve normalized so much use of military action. Because I could argue Ezra is completely insane that we’re sitting here and having a conversation about, like, that. If we don’t bomb a regime that we’re there for keeping it in power. Where does it report to us? You know, and I think what Americans kind of intuitively get better than their political leaders, their national security elites, and even some of the kind of media conversation this is, they get this they get that war is a terrible war, has risks that it even if it’s well intentioned on paper, it leads to bad outcomes for both the Americans who have to fight it, the American taxpayer has to pay for it. And pretty much the people on the other end of the world, the U.S., are trying to help. We’re trying to help the Iraqis. We’re trying to help the Afghans. We’re trying to help the Libyans now. We’re trying to help the Iranians. And I guess the provocative thing I want to say, too, is that this seems to happen when the countries in question are not brown. But I think there is a a dehumanization since 9/11 where it’s like, look at this Middle Eastern, the next Middle Eastern country up, the regime does something we don’t like. We’re going to just bomb them. I mean, we killed — if the reports are accurate, some, either the U.S. or Israel, over 100 girls at a school, like, and it’s not really a big story in the United States. And I actually think to, you know, to tie this back home, I don’t think that that mentality, that othering of of people who are on the other side of the world after 9/11, I think that othering has come home. I think that the capacity to have the mass deportation campaign that is generally targeting brown and Black people is kind of tied to this, you know, dehumanization and desensitization of violence that we see in our foreign policy. Like, post-9/11, we othered a lot of populations. And if you watch — I mean, I know we’re going far afield, but I think this is really relevant. I notice an Obama ministration like the other thing on Fox, you know, that was once just about Middle Eastern terrorists, but then it’s about the people crossing the southern border and then it comes one big other, you know. And so I think we — I think it’s a pretty, it should be seen as a pretty extremist proposition that if the United States doesn’t go to war with some government in the Middle East, we’re somehow condoning everything. And I was really mad about the Jamal Khashoggi thing. At no point did I think we should bomb, you know, Mohammed bin Salman for that. I agree with a lot of that. And I want to offer maybe one other thing that I think has been threaded through our conversation, and it’s sort of my answer to this question, which is war is inherently uncontrollable. Yeah. That the the fantasy that we were always offered at the beginning is that we can choose what it is we are going to do, that we can control the situation we are going to create. And as we have developed even more precision weapons and more air power and more drones and more ability to wage war at a distance, the seduction of that control for leaders and for others has become all the more potent. But that the history of this is we do not control it. And as you mentioned, with Libya, with Afghanistan, with Iraq, we might think we are helping the people. But if we still have a civil war, you could easily have 70,000, 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people die in that war. And we have shown no interest in, No. 1, saying we will occupy the country to make sure that doesn’t happen. And nor, as we learned in Iraq, even if we do decide to occupy the country, can we keep that from happening? We — I mean, Donald Trump was one of the people who started trying to withdraw from Afghanistan, but then completed in the Biden administration. Again, the inability over a very long time to control the outcome of something like this, even when we were willing to put much more of our blood and treasure into controlling it. And so to me, one of the, like, the great lie of war is that you will get what you want out of it. Yeah. Among the many things that scares me so much about Trump is how blithe he is with that. Yeah, you don’t feel like this has cost him any sleep at all. And if it goes badly, I think he will walk away and say: Well, I gave you Iranians your chance. You didn’t take it, or you didn’t succeed in taking it. Yeah, well, yes, I think you’re exactly right. I mean, one thing I, became very aware of over eight years in the White House, but also in this whole post-9/11 period, is that the U.S. military can destroy anything. Right? It can take out any target set that it has, but it cannot engineer the politics for other countries or build what comes after the thing that is destroyed. We had 150,000 troops in Iraq and we couldn’t stop violence. And look, you know, who knows that? The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps colonel, who’s a total hard-liner right now, knows that Americans are going to lose interest in this. You know, knows that if we weather this, you know, on the back end, we can potentially do what we want. And there is a callousness in the way that Trump has done this. And precisely because I think war is so uncertain and the cost of war is paid so overwhelmingly by ordinary people. One of the reasons I would like to see Democrats — or anybody, frankly, concerned about Trump — be more outspoken now is I think sometimes they are reticent to speak out because what if it goes well? It’s not just that the Iranian regime is bad. It’s if it goes well and they’ll say, you know, you were against this thing, I’m sorry, I’m against this, even if it has the better-case scenario, because we need to be if you can take a position on something as fundamental as whether going to war when you don’t have to is a good thing, then what’s the point of all this? Right. We could have achieved our objectives on the nuclear issue and through negotiations. We choose to bomb this country instead. So I think that precisely because war can lead to such terrible outcomes, you have to be willing to take a stance against war itself unless it is absolutely necessary. And this certainly didn’t meet that test.
