'This War Is Already Lost': Spencer Talks to "Democracy Now!"
Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh invited me on for an Iran discussion with Beyrooz Ghamari
Edited by Sam Thielman
REAL QUICK: I was on Democracy Now! this morning to discuss President Trump's shambles of a speech last night. Since it's necessarily a perishable set of points, I thought I'd send it out to FOREVER WARS subscribers. I never think I do well on television, but this time I did, and that's in no small part because Amy and Nermeen booked me alongside Beyrooz Ghamari, whose book The Long War on Iran taught me a lot.
Anyway, it's a lot of this type of thing:
SPENCER ACKERMAN: This war is already lost. I don’t know how long it will go on, but Iran has so thoroughly outfoxed the United States that you heard Trump say he is willing to walk away from a conflict he began without reopening the Strait of Hormuz. That is not how winners operate, just to be really frank about it. If the United States leaves the Strait of Hormuz closed or basically throttled in the possession of the Iranians, the Iranians will have reset the terms of the Middle East, and quite possibly with spillage effects on the entire global economy. That is a recipe for returning to war, not ending it.
See you next week. Hang in there.
Buy my friend Colin Asher's book The Midnight Special! I recently finished reading this in galleys, and you're just not ready. No spoilers, but it ends with an incandescent chapter about Afeni and Tupac Shakur.
Buy my friend Laura Hudson's comic book Exploit!
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