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From the MSNBC television program The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, 2020-02-02:
| Jonathan Alter: | Y'know, when [Trump] said it wouldn't last very long... |
| Lawrence O'Donnell: | War with Iran wouldn't last very long. |
| Jonathan Alter: | ... you know what that reminded me of, Lawrence? In 1914 both the Germans and the French thought that this little fight between them was going to last for a couple of weeks. It was kicked off by an assasination -- of the archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo -- it was called World War I. People don't know how wars end; it's much easier to start a war than to end one. And this was an act of war. Maybe the predicate made it necessary -- we don't know all the details yet -- but the only comparison to this in all of American history was after Perarl Harbor, President Roosevelt ordered the assassination of general Yamamoto, who was the architect of Pearl Harbor, in retaliation for that. But that was in 1942; that was in the middle of the war. |